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Sudan deal could open a Pandora’s box on borders |
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by CERRV via Canberra
Email: scottisimo (nospam) hotmail.com (verified) |
30 Jan 2005
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SUMMARY & COMMENT: One of the elements of the peace settlement in Sudan
is that the south has the right to secede after six years. If the south
chooses to become a separate country in 2010, the author argues, then
the rules in Africa would well and truly have changed, and a Pandora’s
box on national borders would be open at last. |
Sudan deal could open a Pandora’s box on borders
If the peace agreement signed in Kenya on January 10 really ends the
21-year-old Sudanese civil war, the killing will stop and millions of
refugees will be able to go home - but the deal carries a big risk for
Africa. As The Nation put it in Nairobi: "One of the elements of the
settlement is that the south has the right to secede after six years.
This is the first time in Africa that a peace settlement has recognised
the right to secession."
That’s not strictly true, since the almost equally long war in Ethiopia
ended in the early ’90s with independence for Eritrea. But Eritrea could
be treated as an exception because it had already been a separate entity
in colonial times; the Sudan deal is different.
The basic rule that Africa’s old colonial borders must never be changed,
adopted by the Organisation of African Unity (now the African Union) at
the dawn of independent Africa, is starting to break down. The OAU
declared Africa’s borders sacrosanct not because they made good sense,
but precisely because they didn’t. They were arbitrary lines on maps
that bundled peoples of different languages, cultures and religions
within the borders of a single state, and divided others between several
states.
If you let anybody get away with changing just one of those borders, you
would be opening Pandora’s box - because there’s hardly a border
anywhere in Africa that somebody couldn’t make a good argument for
changing. Fifty-one African countries (or 52, or 53 - it depends how you
feel about Somaliland and Western Sahara); about 200 separate
ethno-linguistic groups of more than half a million people each; no more
than five or six groups south of the Sahara that number more than 10
million: Africa is the last place in the world to start trying to draw
rational borders. Leave them alone!
That was the rule from the start, and it probably saved millions of
African lives over the decades, in wars that were not fought, because
even if you won them you couldn’t change the borders. Yet, the wiser men
among the OAU’s founders probably secretly knew that the rule couldn’t
last forever.
Never mind. It would keep big inter-African wars at bay for at least a
generation, and by that time surely economic growth and education would
have eroded the old ethnic divisions. With luck, African borders would
matter no more than Scandinavian borders by then. It seemed a plausible
hope at the time. Africa’s living standards and education levels were
much higher than Asia’s in the ’60s, and most people expected the kind
of rapid development in Africa that subsequently did happen in Asia. If
that had actually come to pass, African borders really wouldn’t matter
much by now.
But it didn’t happen, so they matter a lot. The Sudanese peace deal
makes good sense from the point of view of the Sudanese. Neither side
can win the war, which has killed two million people and displaced
another four million in the past two decades, and the country’s oil
reserves can only be developed if the two sides stop shooting and share
the profits.
So President Omar al-Bashir’s regime, which controls the
Arabic-speaking, mostly Muslim north of the country, has agreed to share
power with the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, which runs much of the
black African, mostly Christian and animist south. SPLA leader John
Garang will become First Vice-President to President Bashir, the two
armies will be integrated (in theory, though probably not in practice),
and oil revenues, mostly generated in the south, will be evenly shared
between north and south.
There is even hope that the new, integrated government in Khartoum will
take a saner approach to the rebellion in the western region of Darfur.
Khartoum’s current approach, which has been to unleash a brutal militia
called the Janjaweed, recruited from Arabic-speaking pastoral tribes in
the north of Darfur, to terrorise the more "African" farming communities
of southern Darfur from whom the rebels are drawn, has been as vicious
as it was ineffective.
It has cost 70,000 lives in the past year and made almost two million
people refugees, and still the rebels have not been defeated. The rebels
in Darfur are trying to emulate the success of the SPLA, but without
either oil or religion to strengthen their hand - everybody on both
sides in Darfur is Muslim - they stand little chance of success. A less
violent approach from Khartoum and some oil money to lubricate a peace
deal there could cut the ground right out from under them.
But the price of all this has been that the non-Muslim southerners
(about a third of Sudan’s 30 million people) will be able to secede
legally in six years’ time if they still want out. The hope is that a
share of the oil money will reconcile everybody to a more or less united
Sudan, but it’s unlikely that there will be enough money, fairly enough
distributed, to transform opinion in the south (which has been
separatist since before independence) in only six years.
If the south chooses to become a separate country in 2010, under an
agreement and procedures that have the official approval of the African
Union, then the rules in Africa would well and truly have changed, and
Pandora’s box would be open at last. This is a very big gamble. |
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