The most immediate result of the arrest warrant issued for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir by the International Criminal Court last month was the expulsion of most aid agencies from the country. But this global focus on Sudan’s Darfur region, though justified, has overshadowed an even more vital issue: pursuing a broader peace in all of Sudan. What is most needed now is to build an international consensus on a strategy to fully implement the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) for Sudan.
The CPA ended Africa’s longest civil war, which had left behind more than 2 million dead. That agreement not only contains benchmarks that should lead to self-determination for Sudan’s South, it also spells out a democratization process in Sudan itself. After all, the oppressive nature of the regime in Khartoum is at the root of the many conflicts that have torn the country apart.
If the government in Khartoum persists in undermining the reform process and derailing the referendum on self-determination promised for the South in January 2011, a return to full-scale civil war, with calamitous consequences for the peoples of Sudan and the entire region, is a real possibility.
The commitment of Sudan’s government to the CPA has always been equivocal. Indeed, since the civil war’s end in 2005, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in the South has frequently had to confront militias that operate as government proxies. Moreover, Sudanese security forces continue to arm Arab tribes straddling the North-South border with the aim of destabilizing the mostly Christian South.
The arrest warrant for al-Bashir should not be allowed to spur further attempts by his government to sabotage the CPA and the fragile process leading to the 2011 referendum. Nor should the international neglect that has for too long allowed the Darfur genocide to go unpunished recur when it comes to sustaining the quest for peace in Sudan.
The South’s drive for independence has gained momentum because of the North’s failure to make unity attractive through reform and elections, as stipulated by the CPA. A second factor pushing secession forward is the SPLA’s lack of commitment to the New Sudan ideology of its founder, John Garang, who had negotiated the CPA and died in a plane crash in 2005.
Garang fought for a united, secular and democratic Sudan, a lofty dream that the Islamist regime in Khartoum admittedly has had no intention of implementing. Self-determination for the South has thus become the only practical way out of the country’s dilemma, and one fully consistent with the 2005 peace agreement.
Because the North possesses the capacity, but not the political will, to implement the CPA, and the South has the will but not the capacity, continued disengagement by the international community might doom the prospects for peace. The Government of Southern Sudan suffers from serious financial constraints, owing to unrealistic assumptions about its oil revenues. As a result, its ability to maintain services — and the military capacity to respond to any maneuver by the Khartoum government aimed against the peace agreement — is seriously compromised.
Only the US appears to be committed to creating the conditions needed to implement the CPA. Former US president George W. Bush, who twice received Southern Sudanese President Salva Kiir at the White House, approved a program in 2006 to transform the SPLA into a professional army. More recently, leading US congressmen have been impressing on US President Barack Obama the need for a muscular effort to implement the CPA. Recommendations presented recently to the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, suggested that security guarantees for Southern Sudan be given in order to deter a renewal of the civil war.
Financial assistance is of course vital, but the political commitment of the international community is just as important. For example, although the UN Mission in Sudan is supposed to monitor implementation of the CPA, Darfur has practically monopolized its attention. Moreover, whatever monitoring is taking place is rarely followed by action.
The secession of a Southern Sudanese Christian state from a Muslim country, a major member of the Arab League, would have far-reaching strategic implications. China, a close ally of the government in Khartoum, is now carefully weighing its oil interests and its strategic concerns in the South. A high-powered Russian delegation recently arrived in Juba, the South Sudanese capital, with the proclaimed aim of “playing a more active role on the African continent.” And Japan, a major consumer of Middle East oil, has recently invited Kiir to Tokyo.
Sadly missing in this diplomatic action is the EU. International law and the indictment of war criminals are important for a civilized world order, but they are no substitute for active financial and political engagement to support an internationally legitimate and urgently needed peace accord such as the CPA in Sudan.
Shlomo Ben Ami, a former Israeli foreign minister, is now vice president of the Toledo International Centre for Peace.
COPYRIGHT: PROJECT SYNDICATE
Donald Trump’s return to the White House has offered Taiwan a paradoxical mix of reassurance and risk. Trump’s visceral hostility toward China could reinforce deterrence in the Taiwan Strait. Yet his disdain for alliances and penchant for transactional bargaining threaten to erode what Taiwan needs most: a reliable US commitment. Taiwan’s security depends less on US power than on US reliability, but Trump is undermining the latter. Deterrence without credibility is a hollow shield. Trump’s China policy in his second term has oscillated wildly between confrontation and conciliation. One day, he threatens Beijing with “massive” tariffs and calls China America’s “greatest geopolitical
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) made the astonishing assertion during an interview with Germany’s Deutsche Welle, published on Friday last week, that Russian President Vladimir Putin is not a dictator. She also essentially absolved Putin of blame for initiating the war in Ukraine. Commentators have since listed the reasons that Cheng’s assertion was not only absurd, but bordered on dangerous. Her claim is certainly absurd to the extent that there is no need to discuss the substance of it: It would be far more useful to assess what drove her to make the point and stick so
The central bank has launched a redesign of the New Taiwan dollar banknotes, prompting questions from Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators — “Are we not promoting digital payments? Why spend NT$5 billion on a redesign?” Many assume that cash will disappear in the digital age, but they forget that it represents the ultimate trust in the system. Banknotes do not become obsolete, they do not crash, they cannot be frozen and they leave no record of transactions. They remain the cleanest means of exchange in a free society. In a fully digitized world, every purchase, donation and action leaves behind data.
Yesterday, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), once the dominant political party in Taiwan and the historic bearer of Chinese republicanism, officially crowned Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) as its chairwoman. A former advocate for Taiwanese independence turned Beijing-leaning firebrand, Cheng represents the KMT’s latest metamorphosis — not toward modernity, moderation or vision, but toward denial, distortion and decline. In an interview with Deutsche Welle that has now gone viral, Cheng declared with an unsettling confidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin is “not a dictator,” but rather a “democratically elected leader.” She went on to lecture the German journalist that Russia had been “democratized
RSS