Why is there a crisis in South Sudan now?

You might well wonder how likely it was that a country which had been wracked by civil war for some 40 years, with the death (millions), the destruction, and the disorder this implies, would suddenly turn into a stable, happy place with the signing of a peace deal. In the event, this troubled past, combined with ethnic conflict, led to continuing difficulties post-independence.

In South Sudan’s initial government, the post of President was held by Salva Kiir, a member of the Dinka, the country’s largest ethnic group (36%), while First Vice President fell to Reik Machar, a member of the second-largest group (16%), the Nuer. Anyone who can remember back to Zimbabwe’s independence, or to the Rwanda crisis (or, hey, even to the US-installed Iraqi government) might have wondered if this arrangement would last. It did not. In mid-2013, Kiir dismissed Machar from the government, and in December of that year, fighting broke out in the SPLA barracks in the capital, Juba. (For one journalist’s very well written account of this conflict and of the civil war that followed, see Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan, https://smile.amazon.com/Next-Time-They%C2%92ll-Come-Count/dp/1608466485/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1466602319&sr=8-3&keywords=south+sudan+books.)

The initial fighting among army factions almost immediately spilled out of the barracks and onto the streets . Over the next days, weeks, and months, ethnic Dinka combatants in Juba and other locations slaughtered ethnic Nuers – soldiers, civilians, men, women, children, the elderly; it seems not to have mattered. Meanwhile, in predominantly Nuer regions, including the city of Bor, ethnic Nuer did the same to ethnic Dinka. Streets were periodically lined with bodies; bands of fighters with shifting allegiances took and lost and re-took towns; atrocities of every kind were committed; and terrorized civilians tried, often unsuccessfully, to stay out of harm’s way, eventually turning various UN compounds in the country into vast refugee encampments of 100,000 or more. Estimates of deaths during the conflict range from 50,000 to 300,000, and upwards of 2,300,000 people – perhaps 20% of the country’s population – are refugees or internally displaced. Although peace talks in Kenya were ongoing almost from the beginning of the conflict, they remained fruitless for a long time. A series of ceasefires were signed and then broken, sometimes only hours later. Finally, however, in August of 2015, an agreement was signed that, up till now at least, has held.

The end result? In the new unity government, Kiir is President, Machar is First Vice President. One might well ask what all that fighting was for….

(I should note that other intra-community tensions, often described in ethnic terms, have been common at many times in South Sudanese history – for example, Nuer/Merle conflict in Jonglei State (see https://smile.amazon.com/South-Sudan-Liberation-Edward-Thomas-ebook/dp/B00RVXT62W/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1467318680&sr=8-2&keywords=south+sudan#nav-subnav). These conflicts didn’t all begin in 2013, and not all of them have been ended by the peace agreement.)

What problems has all this left South Sudan with today? I’ll try to summarize some of them in my next post.

Some History

To get a handle on South Sudan today, we have to look at some history. First, however, a disclaimer: Almost everything about South Sudan is contested. For example, its problems are usually described in ethnic terms – yet ethnic, racial, and “tribal” groupings are not necessarily fixed, and have a long history of being used by colonial (and post-colonial) powers to define, control, and often divide subject peoples. This reasonably calls into question their contemporary use as explanatory categories. Similarly, while a division you will frequently see in writings about Sudan - “North/Muslim/Arab” vs. “South/Christian and Animist/African” - may have some historical and cultural basis, it is also true that, for a very long time, power and money have been centered in the north while the south has been subjugated and left undeveloped. So perhaps it is these differences, more than any religious or cultural ones, that have led to the tensions between the two regions.

I do not have the time, and I most certainly do not have the expertise, to sort through all of these questions. In what follows, I will do my best to give you a narrative that makes sense to me. I am not claiming, however, to give you the last word on any of it. I am always open to correction, and to learning more, from anyone who knows the country better than I do.

That said, let’s start at the beginning – or a beginning. Back in the early part of the 20^th century, Sudan, like so much of Africa, was ruled and administered by outsiders. On paper, in Sudan’s case, it was Egypt and Britain that jointly controlled the country; in practice, Britain had the upper hand. (Remember learning, maybe in some college class years ago, about “Kitchener,” “Khartoum,” and a dauntless campaign to defeat “the Mahdi”? That was the Brits in Sudan in the late 19^th century.)

The histories of the southern and northern parts of Sudan had diverged widely during the colonial period. Southern Sudan (culturally more a part of sub-Saharan Africa, with religion typically described as “Christian and animist”) had, for an extended period in the 19^th century, been seen largely as a reserve of captive labor to be exploited by northern slave traders. Even in the 20^th century, the region received significantly less investment – and was less integrated into the “modern” money economy – than the north. Thus, at the time of independence in 1956, northern Sudan (culturally more a part of the Arab world, and Muslim) was economically and politically dominant, and no workable approach had been found for bringing the two regions into greater parity. The result was that, from independence onward, the north and south fell into a civil war.

In 1969, a communist/socialist coup brought Colonel Gaafar Muhammad Nimeiri to power in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital. He quickly found himself isolated, having alienated both the traditional, “right-wing,” Islamist elite and the communists, whom he purged after a failed coup. To shore up his own power, he turned both to Sudan’s neighbors (peace deals with Ethiopia and Uganda) and to the south, ending the civil war and attempting to assure southern loyalty via a 1972 peace agreement granting regional autonomy. And for a decade or so, it worked. During this time, however, two things happened: Nimeiri concluded that he needed support from northern groups more than from the south, and – in 1979 – oil was discovered in southern Sudan, making the region more attractive to hold on to. The end result was that in 1983, Nimeiri (the former secular socialist!) unilaterally abrogated the peace treaty, eliminated regional autonomy, made Arabic the official national language, and started an Islamicization campaign. In the south, the civil war resumed.

Over the next 20 years, Sudan endured coups leading to increasingly radical Islamicization and increasing alienation of neighboring countries and of non-Muslim groups and regions within Sudan itself. Support for the southern cause deepened, and, despite attempts from Khartoum to set southerners against one another along ethnic lines, a united southern front – the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) – emerged. 1993 saw the launching of a multilateral regional effort at reconciliation and, although the war continued, and Khartoum was somewhat successful at concluding separate peace deals with various factions, in July 2002 Khartoum and the SPLM/A came to an initial agreement. The final Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), ending the second phase of the civil war, came into force in early 2005.

Along with provisions to do with power sharing, elections, economic matters, etc., the CPA called for a referendum in which southern Sudanese could decide whether to remain in Sudan proper or secede to form a separate country. The referendum was held, on schedule, in January 2011. According to official resuts, 98% of elegible voters participated, and 99% of them voted for independence. And so, on July 9, 2011, the new nation of South Sudan was born.

Which all sounds relatively hopeful. Next time: Why there is still a crisis in the country, 5 years later.

Hello and welcome to my blog about doing medical work in the South Sudan! I promised many of you I would write one, as I did during my time as an Ebola doctor in Sierra Leone in 2015. I hope it will be informative, eye-opening, thought-provoking, useful.

Everything about this assignment differs from the one in Sierra Leone. To begin with, I don’t expect to be dealing with a severe, usually fatal, relatively easily transmitted disease – although, oddly enough, there actually is a new hemorrhagic fever that has emerged in exactly the part of South Sudan where I will be working (http://www.who.int/csr/don/19-may-2016-hf-south-sudan/en/). Happily, this one appears to be both very uncommon and very mild, easily treated with supportive measures. If that changes – well, at least I know how to put on PPE!

This time I will be working in my actual medical specialty – anesthesiology – in a government hospital in a large regional city, Aweil (in the northwest on the map). In principle, I will mostly be doing obstetrical cases (essentially, emergency C-sections). However, it appears that in practice I will also be called upon to provide procedural sedation for the large number of children they have at the hospital – primarily burns (from cooking fires), abscesses (from microbial infections), and injuries.

This time, too, I am not going with Partners in Health, but with Doctors Without Borders (or Medecins Sans Frontieres – MSF, from now on).

If you know anything at all about South Sudan, you may have vague memories of celebrations and congratulatory statements a few years ago, welcoming its independence from Sudan proper and its emergence as “the world’s newest nation.” All that happened in 2011. The country is rich in natural resources (especially oil), fertile, and well-watered; it is no longer at war with Sudan, as it was for most of the previous 60 years. 

But MSF only works in crisis zones, and MSF is still there. Why? What’s the crisis? I’ll get into that in my next post.