South Sudan’s Grisly Civil War

Sometimes the saddest foreign-policy stories are when conditions go from bad to worse despite massive doses of good intentions.

In 2011, under international supervision, the 12 million largely Christian people of South Sudan voted to become independent of Arab-dominated Sudan, ending years of tribal and religious warfare. The new nation had oil wealth and an industrious people. But in December 2013, a new civil war broke out between President Salvir Kir and his former vice president, Riek Machar. Each side has foreign proxies helping them — Uganda backs Kir, and Sudan assists Machar behind the scenes.

The brutality of the conflict is hard to convey. The Economist^[1] reports on one recent battle:

Children were tied up in huts and burned alive, boys were castrated and women and girls publicly gang-raped. Civilians were shot at, hunted down and run over by tanks….. More than 2m of the country’s 12m people have fled their homes. More than a third face famine and 166,000-plus have sought safety in UN bases ringed with razor wire and defended by peacekeepers.

After 18 months of bloodshed, President Obama convened a group of East African leaders in Ethiopia last month. They agreed to warn both factions that if they didn’t agree to a negotiated peace agreement by August 17, they would face sanctions against both individuals and institutions involved in the fighting.

But sanctions now look like a feel-good approach for a country that needs the tough work of forging a common identity for the tribally divided south Sudanese.

For example, members of the U.N. Security Council want to sanction six generals, three from the government side and three from the rebel side. None of the six named generals are responsible for the failure to reach a peace pact. They are not key political players and have no real role in the current negotiations. Most support a negotiated settlement and their support will be crucial for successful implementation of any peace agreement that is achieved.

Sanctions may be seen as punishing wrongdoing, but they may also turn both factions against more cooperation with the international community in forging a peace agreement.

The big thing all factions in South Sudan did agree on before declaring independence in 2011 was that they opposed the Arab regime in Khartoum that ruled them. Post-independence, too little effort went into building trust and mutual respect between groups.

“Helping groups inside states move beyond . . . zero-sum thinking to accepting a shared national narrative is especially hard,” says U.N. Undersecretary-General for Political Affairs Jeffrey Feltman.

The short-term sanctions that President Obama and others are pushing right now don’t make clear to those being targeted what they need to do to avoid them or have them lifted. They also don’t provide clear timetables and benchmarks. They look jury-rigged and reactive rather than thoughtful.

Ending the horror of South Sudan’s civil war demands a sustained effort on the part of the U.S. and all the parties who helped push the country into independence in 2011. Having done too little to halt the new civil war raging there now, they should make sanctions only one part of a well-thought out strategy to actually get things right this time.

References

1. ^{^} The Economist (www.economist.com)