Nikki Haley and the awful dilemma posed by South Sudan

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JUBA, South Sudan — The Trump administration has dispatched one of its top diplomatic officials to Africa this week, as it grapples with a brutal civil war in South Sudan that has unleashed the continent’s biggest refugee crisis since the 1994 ......

Nikki Haley, right, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and Minata Samate Cessouma, commissioner for political affairs of the African Union, at the African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on Monday. (Meklit Mersha/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images)

Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, began her three-nation swing Monday in Ethiopia, but much of the focus of the trip will be South Sudan.

Six years ago, with the help ^[1] of the United States, South Sudan became the world’s newest nation, declaring independence from Sudan in a peaceful vote. But since the war erupted in late 2013, a third of South Sudan’s 12 million citizens have either fled the country or have been displaced internally. The fighting has left at least 50,000 dead and thousands targeted by sexual violence, and created a hunger crisis that has tipped into famine in some places. The United Nations has reported ^[2] that ethnic cleansing has taken place in some areas.

Despite the horrors, little progress has been made toward bringing President Salva Kiir, opposition leader Riek Machar and other rebel commanders to the negotiating table.

“We have to see peace in South Sudan. We have to see that women are being taken care of. We can’t see any more deaths. We can’t see any more famine,” Haley said Monday following meetings at the African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

The Trump administration has signaled ^[3] that it might attempt to increase pressure on Kiir by withdrawing some of its $730 million in annual humanitarian assistance. Last month, it imposed sanctions ^[4] on three associates of Kiir, announcing that it was “targeting those who abuse human rights [and] seek to derail the peace process.”

So far, those actions have not yielded much. In an interview with The Washington Post this month, Kiir shrugged off responsibility for the conflict, saying, “I did not do anything that can make me regret.” The government has denied reports of ethnic cleansing.

[South Sudan is a disaster. Its president says: Not my fault.^[5]]

Haley, the most senior Trump administration official to visit sub-Saharan Africa, acknowledged Monday that Kiir might not be influenced by a reduction in American aid.

“When you look at South Sudan, you have to really think hard before you pull U.S. aid, because President Kiir doesn’t care if we pull U.S. aid. He doesn’t care if his people suffer, and that’s the concern we have,” she said.

For years, beginning in the 1990s, American politicians, activists and evangelical Christians championed the idea of an independent country for southern Sudanese, who are mostly Christian and complained of repression by the predominantly Muslim north.

President George W. Bush invited Kiir to the Oval Office in 2006 and gave him the cowboy hat that has become his trademark. After South Sudan gained independence in 2011, President Barack Obama said ^[6], “Today is a reminder that after the darkness of war, the light of a new dawn is possible.”

But in late 2013, a clash between Kiir, a member of the Dinka tribe, and Machar, a Nuer who was first vice president, devolved into a civil war that took on ethnic overtones.

A precarious peace deal was reached in August 2015 ^[7], thanks in part to American diplomatic pressure, but it collapsed less than a year later.

Last November, officials at the U.S. Embassy in Juba saw satellite images of Yei, a city in the country’s southwest, that showed destruction they concluded was perpetrated by Kiir’s military. At that point, the United States began to pursue an arms embargo ^[8] against the government of South Sudan. It has so far not passed a U.N. Security Council vote.

The United States has encouraged a coalition of African nations, known as Intergovernmental Authority on Development, to revitalize peace negotiations. But little progress has been made.

Many humanitarian groups, as well as the United Nations, say Kiir’s government is one of the major impediments to distributing assistance to hungry villagers.

In an op-ed ^[9] for CNN last week, Haley wrote that she would tell South Sudanese leaders “to stop making the work of aid workers and peacekeepers more difficult.”

“The goodwill and generosity of the American people are well-known, and we will continue to help the most vulnerable,” she wrote. “But we will not do that if our assistance is continuously blocked from reaching people in need.”

[South Sudan’s people are starving, and fighters are blocking aid ^[10]]

South Sudanese officials have disagreed with her assessment.

“We are disappointed that we are receiving this criticism from a friend like America,” said Ezekial Gatkuoth, the minister of petroleum and mining.

Other officials brushed off the impact of any reduction in American assistance.

“Maybe Russia will come in, or China will come in. Someone will fill their space,” said Martin Lomuro, the cabinet affairs minister.

Haley has also suggested that the United Nations shoulders some of the responsibility for the lack of progress in South Sudan, as well as in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), another war-torn nation that she will visit on her trip.

“The U.N.’s track record of long-term success is not good. Neither South Sudan nor the DRC has shown any real progress toward political solutions that would stop the violence,” she wrote in the CNN op-ed.

The U.N. mission in South Sudan, which includes 11,000 peacekeepers, costs more than $1 billion a year. Haley has made clear her interest in cutting the global U.N. peacekeeping budget.

The United Nations has come under criticism in South Sudan for not doing more to protect civilians. In several cases, when civilians came under attack in the presence of peacekeepers, those troops fled.

Still, more than 200,000 South Sudanese live in “protection-of-civilians” sites manned by peacekeepers and managed by the United Nations. Some analysts worry that a reduction in U.S. funding here — even if it is used as leverage with Kiir — would lead to more civilian suffering.

The Trump administration has not filled the position of special envoy to Sudan and South Sudan, which many believe ^[11] has left the United States with a weakened voice in the country’s affairs. There has not been a U.S. ambassador in Juba, either, since Molly Phee, a career civil servant, left in August.

“You need to have someone who can go full time to this,” said Princeton Lyman, a former U.S. special envoy to the region.

Meanwhile, the war has grown increasingly fragmented, particularly on the opposition side. In the early days of the war, it appeared that Machar and Kiir’s commitments would be enough to make a cease-fire stick.

Now, a good number of commanders — many with localized or ethnic demands — would need to be included in a negotiation.

On this trip, however, Haley appears focused on Kiir’s role.

“I think the pressure is only going to continue until President Kiir makes a difference in that area,” she said on Monday, referring to the humanitarian situation.

South Sudanese civilians fear the U.N. can’t protect them from a massacre ^[13]

In South Sudan, mothers are so hungry many can no longer breast-feed ^[14]

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