The Way Forward for a Split Sudan

Alex Gatundu

28 May 2011

analysis

Nairobi — As Southern Sudan prepares to mark its formal independence on July 9 from Sudan and become the world’s 197th state the greatest immediate challenge it faces will be the fate of the border with its northern neighbour.

The Technical Border Committee formed after the signing of Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005 to demarcate the border was supposed to complete its work within six months, but five years later the job has yet to be completed.

Whereas substantial sections of the common border have been mutually agreed upon, 20 per cent still remains to be demarcated. Both Khartoum and Juba claim the central oilfield of Heglig.

The central region of Abyei, with an area of 10,460 square kilometres and mainly inhabited by sedentary Ngok Dinka, a sub-tribe of the southern Dinka tribe, is bound to create tension between the two states if not handled carefully and may turn into the Kashmir of the Sudan.

Sudanese army troops took over the region last week in what Southern Sudan has declared as an act of war. The region is supposed to hold its own referendum to decide whether to join the South or the North.

The SPLM has proposed including the region within its territorial confines in exchange for granting citizenship to the dessert nomads (Misseriya) who traverse the region from April to October in search of grazing grounds for their approximately 10 million cattle and offering the North a financial settlement.

“Abyei will remain a northern town until the population decides on their situation by themselves,” the Khartoum defence minister Abdulrahim Mohammed was reported to have said on May 24, 2011.

The following day President Omar al Bashir is reported to have declared “Abyei is north Sudanese land. Our armed forces will not withdraw from this land.”

These two statements ostensibly meant to justify Khartoum’s forceful takeover of Abyei town will flay the groundwork for the predication of the Sudanese Kashmir.

Daggers drawn

Already the administration of Abyei has warned that they won’t allow the Arabic Misseriya to traverse their region this year. And now the daggers are drawn!

The Abyei region is rich in oil, has significant gold deposits, River Nile water for irrigation and a huge expanse of fertile land.

The greater Nile oil pipeline runs through Abyei on its way to Port Sudan on the Red Sea in the North. The oil-rich Darfur region, which also borders the South, experienced violence over its oil with vested interests of foreigners quite manifest and indeed playing a key role in the escalation of the dispute.

How the two sides resolve their protracted border dispute will greatly impact the resolution of other disputes.

The South has neither the capacity nor the capability to market its own oil, and before it lays down basic infrastructure, ostensibly through Kenya, it will have to rely on the oil pipelines, refineries and ports of the North.

The other bone of contention is the citizenship of hundreds of thousands of the Southerners living in the North. In the past, the North’s ruling National Congress Party had threatened to cancel their citizenship if the secession referendum passed.

Indeed tens of thousands of the resident Southerners trooped back to the South before the January referendum, putting a lot of strain on already scarce resources and leading to simmering tension.

Related to this problem is the fate of the citizenship of the Northerners in the South and also how handle about six million Misseriya desert nomads from the North who traverse the South, the North and Abyei in search of pasture.

The resolution of all the common challenges facing the South and North will greatly depend on how they resolve the twin issues of their unresolved 20 per cent of their common border and the fate of Abyei District, both related to oil.

The two sides must be sensitive to the needs of both the Misseriya nomads and the sedentary Ngok Dinka tribes and must involve local leaders and try as much as possible to soften the eventual border dispute and retain the traditional coexistence between the two in order to come up with an amicable and mutual delineation of their common border.

They may want to resolve the issue of their shared natural resources by entering into delineation deals like Cyprus is doing.

Hot issue

Both Southerner Sudan President Salva Kiir and President al Bashir, while resolving the issue of Abyei, must avoid the reckless indecisiveness of Kashmir’s Maharaja Hari Singh in 1947 and the crass insensitiveness of Otto Von Bismarck and his colleagues at the 1884-85 Berlin conference as they recklessly divided Africa up without regard to the social, religious, ethnic and cultural configuration of different communities in Africa. The other option is to go war with each other yet again.

From the foregoing it is obvious that as much as the North and the South may love to hate and hate to love each other they will have to come to terms with each other for a long, long time.

The successful outcome of the secession referendum only served to set new rules of engagement and disengagement between the two predicated upon mutual respect for each other.

Alex Gatundu is an advocate of the High Court of Kenya

AllAfrica – All the Time