By Daniel Howden/The Observer
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George Clooney
visting a refugee camp in North Darfur, Sudan, in 2008. Photograph: Sherren
Zorba/AP/PA
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Film
stars have been speaking from a flawed script about the newest nation. Daniel
Howden points a finger at those who have failed to grasp the awful reality.
When violence erupted two weeks ago in the world's
youngest country, one of the first voices to speak out, before the US president
or the head of the United Nations, was that of the Hollywood actor George
Clooney.
There was nothing particularly objectionable about his counsel, which
in any case was more likely authored by the American activist John Prendergast,
with whom he shared a byline. It spoke of the need for a robust UN response
and, even as tens of thousands of civilians fled ethnically motivated death
squads, of the "opportunities" present in South Sudan.
This is a country, not yet two and a half years
old, whose birth has been soaked in celebrity like no other. As well as
Clooney, Matt Dillon and Don Cheadle have been occasional visitors who have
tried to use their star power to place the international public firmly in the
corner of this plucky upstart nation.
Unsurprisingly, the actors were highly effective at
communicating a narrative about the new country that borrowed from a simple
script. The south had fought a bloody two-decade battle for its independence
against an Islamic and chauvinist north led by an indicted war criminal. The
cost of that war, regularly touted as two million lives, meant that the south
would need huge development support to lift it from the impoverished floor of
every quality of life index published.
The great threat in this narrative was the vile
regime in Khartoum, the capital of rump Sudan, which would seek to undermine
its southern breakaway, or march back to war to reclaim some of its lost
oilfields.
It was a seductive story that could be well told by
handsome movie stars against the lavish backdrop supplied by South Sudan's
superheated swamps and deserts and often beautiful people. But the narrative –
part truth, part wilful misunderstanding – was deeply flawed. This would have
mattered less if it had only informed public opinion, but instead it found its
way into the building of a state.
Sudan, the former British colony that became
Africa's largest state, has been in a condition of slow-burning internal
conflict almost since independence in the 1950s. The second instalment of civil
war was ended by the comprehensive peace agreement signed in 2005. The deal
provided for a cooling-off period of six years before a loosely geographically
defined south would be given the chance to vote on secession from the north.
The war had been brought to life in the US by
broadcast evangelicals such as Billy Graham, who cast it as a heroic battle by
Christian and African underdogs against a more powerful Muslim and Arab foe.
The fact that religious and geographical lines were never remotely this clear
and clean-cut was routinely ignored.
The Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA),
under the leadership of the charismatic John Garang, was not fighting for an
independent south but a democratic "new Sudan". Its forces were drawn
from areas far beyond what are now the borders of South Sudan.
And its battles
were, for the most part, not against the national army, the Sudan Armed Forces
(SAF) but against rival militia groups, often drawn from the same great
southern tribes, such as the Dinka and Nuer, that the SPLA leadership came
from.
Much of the fighting and dying took place in the
south, often with funding and encouragement from the north. This meant that a
new country would have to be built in what had been the main theatre of the
war, with a nation drawn from opposing sides in much of that conflict.
No
serious effort was made by any side in the post-2005 cooling-off period to
reconcile the north and south. The US, Europe, the UN and the south's
near-neighbours, Ethiopia, Uganda and Kenya, all pushed for the country to be
broken up. This effort was formalised in a referendum in 2011.
The pursuit of separation at all costs made it
harder to admit certain truths such as ethnic divisions and created the need
for the "big lie", as one senior UN official calls it. "The big
lie is that there was no ethnic problem in South Sudan. There is a political
problem."
The midwife to the state-building was the UN
peacekeeping mission – now known as Unmiss – a sprawling operation costing
roughly $1bn a year. A further $1bn in development aid was pumped in annually
by donors such as the US and Britain.
As it was believed that there were no
entrenched ethnic issues to overcome, the mandate for Unmiss – when it was
drafted by the UN security council – framed the challenges for the new country
as purely developmental. The choice of Hilde Johnson, a former Norwegian
minister of international development, to head the mission reflected this.
While demobilisation and disarmament schemes were
announced, for much of the time between 2005 and the referendum governing
consisted of farming out oil and aid money to civil-war-era military commanders
in order to keep the peace. Little was done to break up old units and forge a
truly national army. The SPLA had become a big tent into which armed ethnic
militias with no uniform, training or shared identity had wandered in order to
get paid.
The complete dysfunction of South Sudan's
government since independence in 2011 was largely ignored. When the president,
Salva Kiir, accused his own government of looting $4bn in state assets and foreign
aid money, little was said.
When Kiir, who is from the south's biggest ethnic
group, the Dinka, began to entrench its power at the expense of other
communities, creating what people called a Dinkocracy, the UN said nothing. In
the meantime Johnson, who is criticised by her own staff in private for being
too close to the president, trumpeted the need for "service
delivery", even as a vicious power struggle raged in the ruling party.
While critics argue that the prime focus should
have been security instruments (the army) and executive instruments (the
government), all the talk was of democracy, human rights and development – even
though this was rarely matched by any action.
"You can't do that if the elites are arguing
and trying not to kill each other," said the senior UN official, on
condition of anonymity.
"A lot of people who knew about state
building in Africa were screaming bloody murder."
When Kiir sacked his entire government to pre-empt
a political power grab by his vice-president, Riek Machar, an ethnic Nuer, from
South Sudan's second most populous group, the international community chided
him half-heartedly. As both sides mobilised their supporters along ethnic lines
and prepared for a renewed conflict, the UN and diplomats continued to refer to
the increasingly autocratic president as "steadfast".
When fighting finally broke out on 15 December and
elements of the presidential guard went house to house in the fledgling
capital, Juba, murdering Nuer civilians, the talk was still of a political not
an ethnic conflict. When Nuer youths who mobilise under the banner of the
civil-war-era White Army overran a UN outpost, killing two peacekeepers and
murdering Dinka officials, it was blamed by some on media inciting tit-for-tat
attacks.
Jok Madut Jok, an academic and former culture
minister, who had been one of the most passionate exponents of South Sudan, was
among many intellectuals who railed against international reporting of the
ethnic slaughter as irresponsible and lacking in context.
After visiting Nuer colleagues among the 63,000
South Sudanese who had gone into hiding in UN bases around the country, he
described in an open letter how he had wept by the roadside: "My Nuer
friends are very scared and will not even fathom returning to their homes, given
what they saw during the fighting in Juba. But their present circumstance is
humiliating to them, big army officers, senior government officials and
university students who feel they cannot be safe in their own capital city in
which they have lived for many years."
Much trumpeted peace efforts remain just
"talks about talks", according to diplomats involved. Both sides are
dusting off veterans from the 1990s – the era of the most deadly fighting. A
battle looms for the oilfields of the ironically named Unity State, currently
held by rebels under the former vice-president.
After years of denial from the international
community, the only way out of a repeat of past wars will be another round of
payoffs to military commanders and a reluctant return to square one on the
state-building board, accompanied by an admission of past failures.
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