South Sudan is reportedly edging closer to another conflict. “After less than a decade and a half in existence, the world’s newest country, South Sudan, appears to be sliding towards a second civil war,” The Guardian reported on April 1. Since its inception, South Sudan has been plagued by conflicts.
South Sudan’s first vice president and main opposition leader, Dr. Riek Machar, was recently detained and charged on circumstantial evidence of attempting to incite a rebellion.
His arrest has put the 2018 power-sharing agreement between Dr. Machar, who has a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, and President Salva Kiir, on questionable footing.
The agreement ended a five-year civil war that had killed an estimated 400,000 mostly civilians. In 2018, a peace agreement ended the fighting and established a unity government.
According to a recent article on the website of Foreign Policy (www.foreignpolicy.com), Machar’s party, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-In Opposition (SPLM-IO), issued a statement saying that his arrest “effectively” voided the agreement and that the “prospect for peace and stability in South Sudan has now been put into serious jeopardy.”
UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric has warned that the move by the Kiir regime takes the country “one step closer” to the return of civil war. Tensions between the pair have escalated since early March, when a militia that is said to be loyal to Machar, 72, overran a military base in the northeastern town of Nasir.
In a 2012 Africa Watch column published in The Final Call titled, “South Sudan plagued by corruption and economic crises,” I wrote about and addressed the challenges facing the African country. “South Sudan’s ‘failed state’ status goes back to its inception,” I wrote.
In the column, I referenced an article from the 2010-2011 edition of Sudan Vision which noted: “The high expectations of socio-economic development, education, healthcare facilities, schools and agro-industry … have produced zero results, wrote Professor David de Chand.”
According to Professor de Chand, this happened at the time due to alleged mismanagement, disorganization, corruption and other factors that plagued the country’s government since the 2005 peace deal that ended its civil war with Sudan.
However, before 2011 when South Sudan became the world’s newest nation-state, it was a part of Sudan, then Africa’s largest country. The two regions clashed.
But, with reconciliation, the relationship could have worked with landlocked Southern Sudan—home of oil and mineral wealth—utilizing the North’s infrastructure, pipeline, and ports to ship oil to market.
Upon gaining its independence, South Sudan had no oil industry infrastructure and no ability to build it on its own. In effect, it was doomed from the beginning. U.S. government officials, who largely engineered the separation of Sudan and South Sudan.
Were false prophets with their so-called Comprehensive Peace Agreement promising development aid and a peaceful transition only to deceive. The 2011 separation resulted in northern Sudan losing over 50 percent of its revenue from oil and it left South Sudan without infrastructure and with conflict bubbling up between its tribes and ethnic groups.
Southern Sudan’s first U.S. ambassador, Susan Page, was instrumental in negotiating and drafting key provisions of the CPA and noted in previous interviews that the South had been neglected for years. Several analysts, political scientists and observers noted that South Sudan was unprepared for its independence.
Analysts fear the current conflict once between North and South Sudan, has metastasized into a regional conflict. Sudan is already engaged in its own bloody civil war. The fear, according to Foreign Policy, is that “Sudan’s and South Sudan’s conflicts are converging.”
In an April 1 article, “Vice President’s arrest sparks fears of civil war in South Sudan,” it states, “Since April 2023, Sudan has been mired in another civil war amid a power struggle between rival generals.
In February, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) formed a rival Sudanese government with the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North, an offshoot of South Sudan’s SPLM, which spearheaded the country’s independence push and now runs the government under Kiir.”
The two sides are led by the RSF headed by Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemedti, and General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of Sudan’s Armed Forces (SAF).
According to reports, South Sudan President Kiir has tried to maintain a relationship with both sides in the Sudan war because the conflict interferes with developments needed in the South. He has been holding talks with both sides.
According to the war prevention organization, The Crises Group, “These talks and South Sudan’s fiscal crisis appear to have brought Kiir closer to the RSF, as well as the United Arab Emirates (UAE), widely understood to be the rebels’ main patron.
In turn, relations between Juba (the capital of South Sudan) and Burhan’s Port Sudan authorities deteriorated sharply. They are now at a low point, especially following a new political alliance between the RSF and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-North), a Juba-aligned Sudanese rebel group active in Sudan’s South.”
The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan cautioned years ago that many conflicts happening abroad are fomented by America’s errant foreign policy. He warned in an April 8, 2007, message, “The War of Armageddon:
How Strong Is The Foundation, Can We Survive?” that America wanted “to set up a secular government in the Sudan and overthrow the Islamist regime.”
“The Sudan is so rich, potentially, that this area—if cultivated—could feed the whole of Africa. Sudan has oil in the South, oil in the West, and an Islamist regime in the North in the capital of Khartoum. America does not want an Islamist regime in Khartoum.
So it is a matter of foreign policy to foster, seed, supply and support anyone who has a disagreement with the Islamist regime in Khartoum,” Minister Farrakhan stated in part.
“America has created trouble for the government of the Sudan by using Sudan’s neighbors to the South and East: Eritrea, Ethiopia and Uganda. The minute the conflict in the South was resolved and a peace agreement was reached, the western part of Sudan inflamed. This is where Darfur is—and that is where oil is,” he said.
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