It wasn't so much a collective sigh of relief when
President Salva Kiir finally signed the peace deal this
week. It was more a sense of "let's see" as the US
issued a warning that it would "hold to account" any of
the leaders who might stray from their public
commitment.
President Salva Kiir finally signed the peace deal this
week. It was more a sense of "let's see" as the US
issued a warning that it would "hold to account" any of
the leaders who might stray from their public
commitment.
For the moment, the champagne is being kept on ice.
After more than a year and a half of hostilities and failed
peace efforts, threats of sanctions and possible war
crimes charges by the US followed.
President Obama has been left feeling deeply
unimpressed by the South Sudanese leadership. During
his recent East Africa visit there was talk of a "Plan B" if
the two parties failed to sign a deal.
A deadline was set and when Salva Kiir stalled and
called for more time, Washington deployed its National
Security Advisor Susan Rice for some straight talking.
She ditched the diplomatic niceties and singled out the
South Sudan president, declaring Washington "deeply
disappointed" that he had "squandered" the opportunity
to bring peace.
A week or so earlier she delivered another salvo,
warning that the leadership was putting its own selfish
interests ahead of the nation. Although the US has been
deeply frustrated at the impasse, it's clear that it had no
plans to simply walk away.
So why does the US care so deeply about South Sudan?
Key points of peace deal:
Fighting to stop immediately. Soldiers to be confined
to barracks in 30 days, foreign forces to leave within
45 days, and child soldiers and prisoners of war freed
All military forces to leave the capital, Juba, to be
replaced by unspecified "guard forces" and Joint
Integrated Police
Rebels get post of "first vice-president"
Transitional government of national unity to take
office in 90 days and govern for 30 months
Elections to be held 60 days before end of
transitional government's mandate
Commission for Truth, Reconciliation and Healing to
investigate human rights violations
to barracks in 30 days, foreign forces to leave within
45 days, and child soldiers and prisoners of war freed
All military forces to leave the capital, Juba, to be
replaced by unspecified "guard forces" and Joint
Integrated Police
Rebels get post of "first vice-president"
Transitional government of national unity to take
office in 90 days and govern for 30 months
Elections to be held 60 days before end of
transitional government's mandate
Commission for Truth, Reconciliation and Healing to
investigate human rights violations
History
The US in general and President Obama in particular,
have been looking for a "success story" in Africa. There
are of course millions of individual success stories but
collectively, like so many other global leaders, they
thought they had it when on 9 July 2011 South Sudan
became the world's newest state.
But secession from Sudan and the government in
Khartoum was not a magic bullet.
Former Congressman Tom Andrews recalled to me from
Washington how he had been in the town of Juba for the
birth of South Sudan "literally going to sleep in one
country and waking up in another without moving".
That sense of optimism was quickly replaced by a mood
of "despair" felt by many ordinary citizens. America had
a "special relationship" with the country and so felt a
"special responsibility" to help.
You don't have to dig too deep back in history to find
American footprints here. I remember a bitter cold night
in 2004 huddled from the wind on the shores of Lake
Naivasha in Kenya, covering my first ever story in East
Africa.
Peace talks were going on late into the night and the
towering figure centre stage was John Garang, the leader
of the Sudanese rebel movement, the SPLA. He was
quietly admired by the American diplomats, shivering
alongside us in the cold.
For years the armed militants had been fighting for
independence from the north. Garang stood proud
through a lengthy signing ceremony in the middle of the
night. The documents that bore his name would later
become part of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. It
was the deal which would seal South Sudan's
independence.
Turned on themselves
At the time the SPLA was considered a relatively
cohesive liberation movement, fighting to break away
from a country whose borders seemed to have been
drawn up on the back of an envelope by the colonial
administration forcing the largely Christian animist south
to live alongside the Muslim, largely Arabic speaking
north.
A year later John Garang would be dead, killed in a
mysterious helicopter crash. He would never see an
independent South Sudan.
A decade later the leaders who followed in his wake
have turned political animosities into an all-out
rebellion, where tens of thousands of civilians have
been killed and 2.2 million people have been forced to
flee their homes.
No longer facing a common enemy as they had done in
the fight for independence, they turned on themselves in
a conflict tinged with ethnic rivalries. Millions more are
hungry and the US has been largely left to pick up the
bill.
The north of the country was largely (although not
exclusively) Muslim and Arabic speaking, occupying
about two-thirds of the land mass. In contrast, the
South took its reference points for its race, culture and
religion from the rest of sub-Saharan Africa.
After independence in 1956, the "northern-dominated
government in Khartoum sought to Arabise and
Islamicise the South", explains Francis Deng, a Sudanese
academic.
The reaction was to trigger Christian evangelists, largely
from the US, to come to Sudan and spread throughout
the south to counter the Arab-Muslim model of the
north.
Fast forward to today and the the world's newest state
has been engaged in what the Royal Africa Society's
Richard Dowden says is "the worst war in Africa at the
moment". With its historical footprint, he argues,
America feels "responsible".
Strategic influence
The US spent $1.2bn (£780m) in South Sudan last year.
More than half of that was emergency relief.
Even before it seceded from the north, oil-rich Sudan
was a top priority for America. According to the US
official development assistance database, Sudan has
been the third largest recipient of its aid since 2005,
behind only Iraq and Afghanistan.
There's also a broad agreement among many who pay
attention to this part of the world that global leaders
underestimated the complex inter-relationship between
the conflict in Darfur in the west of Sudan and the wider
struggles between north and south.
As the spotlight was shone on Darfur - a Muslim-on-
Muslim war fuelled by competition for scarce resources
such as water - for which President Omar al-Bashir has
been indicted by the International Criminal Court, the
potential conflicts between north and south were
somewhat overshadowed.
News can only deal with one Sudan crisis at a time, a
news colleague joked at the time. He was right.
The reality is that some of the players from the Darfur
conflict have been implicated in South Sudan's more
recent war. Regional neighbours have used it to settle
old scores and the US, which heavily backed the
South's bid for independence, feels quite possibly let
down, almost embarrassed by it all.
Prof Calestous Juma, a Kenyan-born international
development specialist at Harvard University, makes a
further point. He says that South Sudan is "now at a new
geopolitical competition between the US and China, with
ethnicity fanning the flames of a political fire created by
the volatile mix of religion and oil".
If you agree with that then it's clear the US cannot afford
to ignore South Sudan.
Political lobbying
Three successive US presidents have been pushed to
make Sudan a foreign policy priority.
In the early 1990s the US granted military support to
neighbouring countries to stem the advance of the
Sudanese military. In 1993 Sudan was declared a state
sponsor of terrorism and faced the imposition of
sanctions.
And from the crisis in Darfur sprang a bi-partisan
movement - the Save Darfur campaign - which was
arguably a huge success in putting this patch of the
globe, thousands of miles away from the White House,
on to TV screens across the US, declaring it a modern
day "genocide" .
One of the movement's founding members was Senator
Barack Obama, so he has a very personal reason for
caring about South Sudan.
Since then influential figures including the former
Director for African Affairs at the National Security
Council, John Prendergast, has founded the Enough
Project to end genocide.
Driven by humanitarian concerns they have helped to
keep the issue alive. Not to mention popular stars such
as the actor George Clooney, and ex-Sudanese child
soldier Emmanuel Jal, who have acted as goodwill
ambassadors for a number of UN agencies working on
Sudan and South Sudan.
Tying up loose ends
In the same way that the US has recently moved to
"normalise" relations with Iran, much has been made of
a "rapprochement" with Khartoum in recent months.
A recent piece in the Sudan Tribune sheds some light on
the behind-the-scenes movements to try to rebuild
bilateral ties between Washington and Khartoum, as part
of a policy driven by intelligence concerns.
It is perhaps naive (though not inconceivable) to
imagine that the US will fully embrace a country whose
leader is the subject of an arrest warrant by the
International Criminal Court.
It is unlikely to happen in the remaining time Barack
Obama has as president.
But Washington's strong rhetoric against the leadership
of South Sudan, should it renege on its promises, sends
an important message to its northern neighbour. That
despite its history and the US backing for the South's
drive for independence, it is not beyond reproach.
have been looking for a "success story" in Africa. There
are of course millions of individual success stories but
collectively, like so many other global leaders, they
thought they had it when on 9 July 2011 South Sudan
became the world's newest state.
But secession from Sudan and the government in
Khartoum was not a magic bullet.
Former Congressman Tom Andrews recalled to me from
Washington how he had been in the town of Juba for the
birth of South Sudan "literally going to sleep in one
country and waking up in another without moving".
That sense of optimism was quickly replaced by a mood
of "despair" felt by many ordinary citizens. America had
a "special relationship" with the country and so felt a
"special responsibility" to help.
You don't have to dig too deep back in history to find
American footprints here. I remember a bitter cold night
in 2004 huddled from the wind on the shores of Lake
Naivasha in Kenya, covering my first ever story in East
Africa.
Peace talks were going on late into the night and the
towering figure centre stage was John Garang, the leader
of the Sudanese rebel movement, the SPLA. He was
quietly admired by the American diplomats, shivering
alongside us in the cold.
For years the armed militants had been fighting for
independence from the north. Garang stood proud
through a lengthy signing ceremony in the middle of the
night. The documents that bore his name would later
become part of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. It
was the deal which would seal South Sudan's
independence.
Turned on themselves
At the time the SPLA was considered a relatively
cohesive liberation movement, fighting to break away
from a country whose borders seemed to have been
drawn up on the back of an envelope by the colonial
administration forcing the largely Christian animist south
to live alongside the Muslim, largely Arabic speaking
north.
A year later John Garang would be dead, killed in a
mysterious helicopter crash. He would never see an
independent South Sudan.
A decade later the leaders who followed in his wake
have turned political animosities into an all-out
rebellion, where tens of thousands of civilians have
been killed and 2.2 million people have been forced to
flee their homes.
No longer facing a common enemy as they had done in
the fight for independence, they turned on themselves in
a conflict tinged with ethnic rivalries. Millions more are
hungry and the US has been largely left to pick up the
bill.
The north of the country was largely (although not
exclusively) Muslim and Arabic speaking, occupying
about two-thirds of the land mass. In contrast, the
South took its reference points for its race, culture and
religion from the rest of sub-Saharan Africa.
After independence in 1956, the "northern-dominated
government in Khartoum sought to Arabise and
Islamicise the South", explains Francis Deng, a Sudanese
academic.
The reaction was to trigger Christian evangelists, largely
from the US, to come to Sudan and spread throughout
the south to counter the Arab-Muslim model of the
north.
Fast forward to today and the the world's newest state
has been engaged in what the Royal Africa Society's
Richard Dowden says is "the worst war in Africa at the
moment". With its historical footprint, he argues,
America feels "responsible".
Strategic influence
The US spent $1.2bn (£780m) in South Sudan last year.
More than half of that was emergency relief.
Even before it seceded from the north, oil-rich Sudan
was a top priority for America. According to the US
official development assistance database, Sudan has
been the third largest recipient of its aid since 2005,
behind only Iraq and Afghanistan.
There's also a broad agreement among many who pay
attention to this part of the world that global leaders
underestimated the complex inter-relationship between
the conflict in Darfur in the west of Sudan and the wider
struggles between north and south.
As the spotlight was shone on Darfur - a Muslim-on-
Muslim war fuelled by competition for scarce resources
such as water - for which President Omar al-Bashir has
been indicted by the International Criminal Court, the
potential conflicts between north and south were
somewhat overshadowed.
News can only deal with one Sudan crisis at a time, a
news colleague joked at the time. He was right.
The reality is that some of the players from the Darfur
conflict have been implicated in South Sudan's more
recent war. Regional neighbours have used it to settle
old scores and the US, which heavily backed the
South's bid for independence, feels quite possibly let
down, almost embarrassed by it all.
Prof Calestous Juma, a Kenyan-born international
development specialist at Harvard University, makes a
further point. He says that South Sudan is "now at a new
geopolitical competition between the US and China, with
ethnicity fanning the flames of a political fire created by
the volatile mix of religion and oil".
If you agree with that then it's clear the US cannot afford
to ignore South Sudan.
Political lobbying
Three successive US presidents have been pushed to
make Sudan a foreign policy priority.
In the early 1990s the US granted military support to
neighbouring countries to stem the advance of the
Sudanese military. In 1993 Sudan was declared a state
sponsor of terrorism and faced the imposition of
sanctions.
And from the crisis in Darfur sprang a bi-partisan
movement - the Save Darfur campaign - which was
arguably a huge success in putting this patch of the
globe, thousands of miles away from the White House,
on to TV screens across the US, declaring it a modern
day "genocide" .
One of the movement's founding members was Senator
Barack Obama, so he has a very personal reason for
caring about South Sudan.
Since then influential figures including the former
Director for African Affairs at the National Security
Council, John Prendergast, has founded the Enough
Project to end genocide.
Driven by humanitarian concerns they have helped to
keep the issue alive. Not to mention popular stars such
as the actor George Clooney, and ex-Sudanese child
soldier Emmanuel Jal, who have acted as goodwill
ambassadors for a number of UN agencies working on
Sudan and South Sudan.
Tying up loose ends
In the same way that the US has recently moved to
"normalise" relations with Iran, much has been made of
a "rapprochement" with Khartoum in recent months.
A recent piece in the Sudan Tribune sheds some light on
the behind-the-scenes movements to try to rebuild
bilateral ties between Washington and Khartoum, as part
of a policy driven by intelligence concerns.
It is perhaps naive (though not inconceivable) to
imagine that the US will fully embrace a country whose
leader is the subject of an arrest warrant by the
International Criminal Court.
It is unlikely to happen in the remaining time Barack
Obama has as president.
But Washington's strong rhetoric against the leadership
of South Sudan, should it renege on its promises, sends
an important message to its northern neighbour. That
despite its history and the US backing for the South's
drive for independence, it is not beyond reproach.
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