Equally complicit are the Western powers believing, despite all evidence to the contrary including a lack of sustainable or functioning institutions in , that the new state would somehow function without the required homework on nation-building. Recent history is filled with such examples — think East Timor after its independence vote in , the subsequent violence from Indonesian militias followed by years of internal political squabbles — when outsiders pledge support only to find themselves embroiled in situations over which they have little understanding or patience.
The viability of South Sudan as a sovereign entity is in doubt. One local journalist told me in the capital Juba that it is hard to call yourself an independent nation when the UN and NGOs are trying to help 75 percent of your population avoid starvation. The African Union will protect its own — see its recent backing of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir in South Africa against moves to extradite him to the International Criminal Court — highlighting the challenges of expecting African help for South Sudanese troubles.
Antony Loewenstein is a freelance journalist based in South Sudan and best-selling author of many books, including the upcoming Disaster Capitalism Verso. From the Pacific to Africa, the fate of nations is too often decided in the boardrooms of London or New York. Antony Loewenstein. Antony Loewenstein is a freelance journalist based in South Sudan and author of several books.
The government has committed to a hybrid i. The pressure point here should be the African Union. Both must be addressed now. In so many places, we avoid long-term development commitments in favour of short-term Band-Aids food out of planes. South Sudan demonstrates the folly of this approach. A progressive and fair means of moving ahead now would be a revised Compact: the Juba government matches our dollars, and we together implement programmes we all agree are a priority, with verifiable benchmarks.
It will be rightly said that ultimately there is only so much that we, as outsiders, can and should do here. If South Sudan is to succeed, it will not be as a neo-colonial project; it will depend above all on the South Sudanese demanding better things of their current feckless leadership.
But even here history says there is a challenge we must take up. Lokichogio was the spiritual home of the white saviour. We thought we were doing the right thing, even when there were unintended negative consequences. But delivery of western aid today needs to be not just for but by South Sudanese. As host to one of the larger South Sudanese diasporas, Canada perhaps holds a largely untapped reserve of expertise here. Is a renewed international effort of this kind doable? South Sudan is not a Syria-like cockpit for rivalry between the great powers.
There is no nefarious hidden hand of Iran, as there is in Yemen. And unlike Afghanistan, this is not a breeding-ground for terrorists. There are natural resources sufficient to sustain the country, but not so great as to merit covetousness from abroad.
The South Sudanese are by and large liberally minded and pro-western. A re-boot should be entirely feasible. It may require U. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, U. So there is some hope. If the signal comes to re-engage, Canada should be as receptive as we were the first time around. But we need to learn from the mistakes we made then and do better.
Journalism in Canada has suffered a devastating decline over the last two decades. Dozens of newspapers and outlets have shuttered. Remaining newsrooms are smaller. R2P has exploded the literature on international law.
Critics observe, however, that it remains a bit vaguely defined — a broad framework without clear, actionable policies. In a sense, it is an effort at norm creating, with good ideas and rhetoric, but thin on concrete requirements and structures. Moreover, R2P remains anchored in the idea of sovereign nations and lacks an organizing mechanism to deal with failed states.
A related but distinct modality is the idea of Trusteeship. Powerful colonial legacies and economic interests often undermined this vision. Navy during WWII. By virtue of its strategic interest and power, the United States was granted trusteeship by the UN for what became Micronesia. During its administration from , the United States helped Micronesia develop democratic political structures and functioning independent courts.
Modern trusteeships, often termed neo-trusteeships, involve UN or other multilateral-sponsored transitional authority for post-conflict societies. These include:. Following a peace accord signed in Paris in to end factional conflict, the UN Security Council established a transitional authority with the responsibility of shepherding a new constitution and unified government.
In the wake of mass violence following the independence of East Timor from Indonesia, the UN authorized transitional governance, law, social services, and peacekeeping forces for the fledgling country. In the wake of the Balkan wars, the UN Security Council authorized an international security authority for Kosovo, which was so weakened by war that it could not perform basic governing tasks. The mission involved both a large UN budget for civilian administration and peacekeeping forces.
Beyond these UN transitional authorities, de facto trusteeships were created by coalitions of nations, as in Bosnia and Herzegovina after the Dayton Peace Agreement, or by occupying powers, as in Iraq and Afghanistan in the s.
Another interesting example occurred in Liberia, where widespread corruption provoked donors from the European Union and the United States to employ their leverage to force the transitional government to submit to financial oversight, which was backed by the African Union. In this case the trust relationship was limited to financial auditing and oversight.
Given the systematic corruption in South Sudan, such oversight would be welcomed by many in the country. As Lake and Fariss document, modern trusteeships tend to fall short of their aims, or frequently fail.
In part because state-building is so difficult, requiring years of commitment and development. Another reason is clashing interests. Trustee authorities may not always have the interests of the average citizens of the territory at heart, nor may local leaders who are often motivated by political survival or greed.
An endemic problem of multilateral administrations involves the behavior of foreign soldiers brought in to provide security for extremely vulnerable populations rent by recent violence and depredation. In Cambodia, Kosovo, and elsewhere such troops fueled a sex trafficking industry. Because no current mechanism is adequate for the challenges of state failure in the 21 st Century, scholars and policy makers are groping for new international norms and mechanisms.
Richard Haass, as president of the U. As that system is breaking down, he views such frameworks as R2P as insufficient in a globalized world of transnational problems — climate crisis, resource depletion, infectious diseases, global crime syndicates, cyber threats, massive migrations, weapons proliferation, international terrorist networks, civil wars, and failed states. The challenge is rooted in the disjunction between a Westphalian assumption of states with sovereign rights and the wide global fallout from state misconduct, weakness, and failure.
What happens inside states ripples far beyond their borders. In a way, we see intimations of this normative understanding in the considerable international response to the fracture of South Sudan. The Intergovernmental Authority on Development IGAD, a cooperative program of the six countries on the Horn of Africa hosted numerous rounds of peace talks between the parties and applied additional diplomatic pressure.
Under threat of government and rebel troops, this unheralded program represents a tremendous and heroic act by the UN, [25] though thousands of other refugees have been sheltered in church compounds. Finally, international NGOs work through local church networks to provide desperately needed services to traumatized and hungry people. In another way, however, the international response also reflects the enduring assumption of state sovereignty, in this case treating the major antagonists in South Sudan as legitimate potential leaders of a functioning state, when they operate more as ethnic militia commanders or warlords.
This illuminates the need to instantiate the idea of Sovereign Obligations in concrete mechanisms. Such instantiation requires forward-looking international leadership, which, with American retrenchment, seems increasingly absent on the global stage.
South Sudan represents the stunning case of a new nation born out of transnational advocacy. Through a provision of the CPA, leaders in the South pushed for a referendum of independence. International NGOs invested heavily in the new nation, and local Christian leaders engaged in heroic efforts to consolidate and weave the nation together.
But the country — afflicted by decades of devastation, bereft of infrastructure, beset by tribal and ethnic divisions, and sapped by poor governing capacity — proved too fragile to hold. Tragically, in December of a power struggle in the capital city of Juba between President Salva Kiir and former Vice-President and opposition leader Riek Machar erupted into ethnic conflict and civil war, sparking a round of massive displacement, disease, and looming famine.
A Hobbesian nightmare of warlords leading ethnic militias in atrocities and reprisals haunts the once hopeful land. The current crisis in South Sudan owes its origin to a wider historic division in Sudan. For centuries uneasy relations festered between the dominant Arabic-speaking people of northern Sudan and the ethnically-distinct and often marginalized Africans of the South. This legacy of exploitation endured into the 20 th Century and propelled marginalization of the African south.
Simmering tensions between the Arabic North and the African South have erupted into two civil wars since Sudanese independence, and The latter intensified after a coup by Omar al-Bashir brought a militant Islamist regime to power in Khartoum. That regime — the same one that gave refuge to Osama Bin Laden — launched a campaign of forced Islamization of the African populations of the South.
Guided by an ideology of racial and religious superiority, the regime waged its self-declared jihad in scorched earth fashion, burning villages and crops, slaughtering livestock, indiscriminately killing civilians, and abducting women and children into chattel slavery, which often involved concubinage and forced conversions.
This conflict claimed the lives of some two million Africans, displaced another five million, and enslaved thousands more. Because Christianity provided the cultural glue for the peoples of the South — just as churches form the core institutions of civil society today and were the means by which South Sudanese were educated and prepared for leadership [35] — the Khartoum regime sought to eradicate its presence by destroying churches, religious schools, and clinics.
Courageous local pastors and bishops in southern Sudan long championed the cause of their communities — providing succor, documenting atrocities, and even mediating ethnic clashes and violence between factions of the SPLA. With unique on-the-ground access to the remotest regions of this sprawling land, indigenous Christian leaders conveyed vital information on the crisis to a growing international human rights and Christian solidarity network.
Because of their global denominational linkages, southern Sudanese Catholic and Anglican bishops became especially influential voices for their besieged flocks. They traveled abroad, testified before policy makers, and were feted at congregations and advocacy gatherings in the United States and Europe. Churches and aid agencies in the United States and Europe also provided haven for Sudanese refugees and escaped slaves, who became powerful voices for the cause. Here we note the crucial role of the United States in bringing an end to the civil war.
The remarkable coalition of Christian churches, African American leaders, Jewish activists, and human rights champions moved members of Congress to pass the Sudan Peace Act in , which propelled high level diplomatic engagement to broker a peace agreement between the Khartoum regime and the SPLA. The Bush Administration put its weight behind a peace deal by appointing former senator John Danforth as special envoy to Sudan. More significantly, an American diplomat with extensive African expertise, Susan Page, was detailed by the State Department to serve as full time UN representative for the peace negotiations.
In hindsight, Western advocates for the besieged people of southern Sudan operated with some naivety about the nature of the SPLA and its capacity to govern an independent functioning state. John Garang was born in into the Dinka ethnic community in southern Sudan. In , at the age of 17, he attempted to join the rebel resistance in the first civil war but was urged to complete his secondary education in Tanzania away from the fighting.
When the first Sudanese civil war ended in , Garang, like other rebels, was absorbed into the Sudanese military. Over the next decade, he became a colonel and even took advanced military training at Fort Benning, Georgia. He continued to serve in high levels in the Sudanese military, but like other Africans from the South increasingly chafed at Arab and Islamist dominance.
Sent to quell an uprising, he instead led a mutiny of his unit and combined it with other rebels to create the SPLA in , which sparked the second civil war. Garang, who led the SPLA from until his death in , was a complex figure. He spoke of transcending Arab-ness or African-ness, of building bonds between Christianity and Islam — a bold if unrealistic vision of unity and transformation.
Seeking greater autonomy for South Sudan but not full independence, he viewed the struggle by the southern Sudanese people as the catalyst for a transformation of Sudan itself. Neither supported an independent southern Sudan, and Garang ruthlessly suppressed rivals in the SPLA who supported secession. Like Garang, Machar was highly educated.
There is no default position that says Salva Kiir needs to stay. I am going to argue that perhaps he needs to go. The important thing is to move forward with a process that will enable real political dialogue rather than simply cementing someone in place. Pham: I am a little more optimistic of the negotiating process now than I was several months ago because the international community has finally come to the realization that the IGAD-led process was fatally flawed.
So one of the parties to the conflict, Salva Kiir as President of South Sudan, participated in meetings of the group that was supposed to be mediating the conflict. Needless to say that was a no starter and IGAD was unable to overcome that obstacle.
The reinvigorated process, which brings in the international community, the African Union, and other actors, potentially helps bridge that impasse. Another party to the conflict, Uganda, which has sent troops to prop up Salva Kiir, was part of IGAD, as was Kenya, which had turned a blind eye to the comings and goings of people on both sides of the conflict.
Another problem was sanctions. The United States and the United Nations have tried to be evenhanded and sanctioned three relatively minor leaders on both sides of the conflict. That is not going to get anything moving if the only people punished are lower-ranked leaders who are unlikely to have assets to freeze or international travel plans. First one has to have real sanctions against people who really are in power. Then we have to buy-in of the countries in the region to enforce the sanctions.
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