Cat fight among the S. Sudan experts and the failure of peace-making
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By John Young
The recent two part Al-Jazeera series on the establishment of South
Sudan has re-ignited a cat fight among the ‘experts’ about what went
wrong in the country, why the peace process is failing, and who is
responsible. Alex de Waal’s criticisms of the self-named ‘Friends of
South Sudan’ - Eric Reeves, John Prendergast, Ted Dagne, Roger
Winters, and Brian D’Silva – has led to Reeve’s response, ‘Alex de
Waal and Sudan: A brief history of one man’s destructive
misrepresentations’ in the Sudan Tribune. There is a danger, however,
that the differences between these and other experts is understood as
the expression of two highly divergent camps and approaches to
peace-making when in fact they have more in common philosophically and
ideologically than they care to acknowledge. As a result, the various
debates underway among peace-makers do not help to understand why
decades of peace-making in Sudan and South Sudan have failed. The
starting point to appreciating why there is no peace in Sudan and
South Sudan is to critically examine the model that all the various
organizations and actors have employed.
Much of the focus of the conflict between de Waal and the Friends
relates to their differing perceptions of the SPLA, and not the peace
process, with de Waal arguing that the SPLA leadership was deeply
flawed and not the liberators they claimed to be. Meanwhile, Reeves
and his crowd lionized SPLA leader John Garang and want to ensure
their hero is not tarnished by the corruption and mal-administration
of the SPLA in government and the recent war, and that the Friends are
absolved of guilt because they warned Salva Kiir about the destructive
path his government was on.
But Reeves’ argument doesn’t wash: the SPLA did not suddenly go off
the rails after Garang died; under him the party was militarist,
murderous, confused, and had no program to mobilize the people. Garang
was, however, remarkably skilled at charming naïve Westerners. If the
SPLA had met the needs of the people instead of terrorizing many of
them it would have defeated the Khartoum government and not needed the
boosterism of the Friends and other Western lobby groups to achieve
their ends. Indeed, within the region Eritrean, Ethiopian, and Ugandan
revolutionaries overthrew their regimes without international
assistance.
The Sudanese Armed Forces did terrible things in South Sudan as Reeves
argues in his article, but many South Sudanese looked upon the SPLA as
an army of occupation and preferred SAF – a terrible indictment of the
movement. The formation of militias in Equatoria and even among the
Dinka, as well as the Nuer led South Sudan Defence Forces, in response
to SPLA encroachments in their areas makes clear that many southern
Sudanese did not shared the Friends’ simplistic views of the movement.
The systematic misrepresentations over many years by the Friends about
John Garang and the SPLA cannot be air-brushed away and are part of
the well-known legacy of this group. Unfortunately the US Government
and its Western allies believed the distortions of the Friends and
their fellow travellers in the Enough Project, based a peace process
on them, and turned over South Sudan to the SPLA. The results have
been disastrous.
De Waal did not get taken in by Garang and his colleagues and his
research contributions to the region are second to none, unlike Reeves
who specializes in mud-slinging, feigned moral outrage, and believes
the US Government can solve all the conflicts of Sudan and South Sudan
– as long as it follows the advice of the Friends. But de Waal was a
guarded supporter of the Navaisha peace process, the inspiration for
the failed Darfur peace process in which he was also a key negotiator,
and an advisor to Thabo Mbeki’s AU mediation. As a result, he is part
of the mainstream peace movement and not the rebel critic that AJ made
him out to be.
The quarrel between de Waal and the Friends bears comparison with the
less public quarrels between General Lazrous Sumbeiywo, another
‘African hero’ for his role in the flawed Naivasha peace process and
his co-chair of the IGAD South Sudan process, former Ethiopian foreign
minister, Seyoum Mesfin. There are also on-going quarrels between
Ethiopia and Kenya over which country should lead the peace process, a
dispute that has become more intense in the wake of the failures of
the process. Meanwhile, the AU has added more countries to the IGAD
mediation, but not changed the approach utilized. The Friends, Enough,
and disgruntled diplomats are now arguing for sanctions in South
Sudan, as if sanctions have proven to be a great success in Sudan. As
frustration grows there are debates in both Sudan and South Sudan
about whether the AU, IGAD, or the UN should conduct the various peace
processes. All these disputes are about quests for power and finger
pointing, but do not help us understand why peace-making has failed
because all these parties share the same fundamental assumptions.
What links the peace-making efforts of all these countries,
institutions, and individuals is acceptance of the precepts of liberal
peace making. Liberal peace-making took form in the wake of the
collapse of the Soviet bloc in the 1990s and reflects Western
triumphalism. Like the arrogance of earlier modernization theories it
favours Western economic and political processes, institutions,
outcomes, and values, and their transfer to frequently radically
different environments than from which they originally developed.
Typically liberal peace making professes to be concerned about the
‘root causes’ of conflicts, although there was no sign of that in IGAD
I (Naivasha) and it was quickly dispensed with in IGAD II (Addis
Ababa). This term, however, is highly contentious because the West
rejects the notion that capitalism or economic or political dependency
could be root causes of conflicts. While ruling out economic democracy
the West insists that free enterprise – which in practice means
opening underdeveloped economies to powerful multinational
corporations and accepting the dictates of the International Monetary
Fund – is integral to the definition of democracy.
Adherents of liberal peace-making further compromise any genuine
commitment to democracy by contending that if there is conflict
between participatory politics and the threat of armed conflict, the
latter must be given priority. This contradiction was evident in the
2010 Sudan national elections which were known to be deeply
compromised, but given a pass to ensure that the peace process was not
disrupted. Support for democracy is restricted to the rhetorical
level, human rights are given short-shrift, and liberal peace-making
is primarily concerned with stopping the fighting, returning to the
pre-war status quo – a less than desirable outcome in either South
Sudan or Sudan – and integrating the combatants into a Western
dominated international state system.
The Nicaraguan critic, Alejandro Bendana, who analyzed many failed
peace-building efforts in Central America similar to those in Sudan
and South Sudan concluded that liberal peace-making is ‘top down,
externally and supply driven, elitist and interventionist,’ (Bendana,
2002). Indeed, liberal peace making negotiations are led by Western
officials, or ideally their trusted agents to give an appearance of
authenticity and local ownership, but Western string pulling is always
present. In the case of the Naivasha peace process the West operated
through its own creation – IGAD - and a favoured dictator in the
region, Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi. Moi then turned over the
IGAD Peace Secretariat to General Sumbeiywo who was trusted by Moi
because he had kept him in power against the wishes of the Kenyan
people for many years as his chief of defense staff and by the US
which had worked closely with him on security matters.
Liberal peace making negotiations usually takes place in the seclusion
of five star hotels because the elites must be pampered and secrecy is
a major concern. There may be token efforts to ‘consult’ selected
groups, although this is viewed with suspicion because these groups
may become ‘spoilers’. It will be recalled that IGAD rejected demands
that the people of Sudan get to vote on the CPA and contended that the
elections would serve to gain their assent. But the elections were
fraudulent and assemblies in Khartoum and Juba passed legislation
precluding any parties from participating in the elections unless they
endorsed the CPA. It is elite accommodation, and not popular
consultation or democratization that is at the core of liberal peace
making and as a result it is a deeply conservative exercise.
The highlight of the Naivasha peace process in the minds of the
international peace brigade was when John Garang and Vice-President
Ali Osman Taha cooked up a deal on their own in total secrecy. But the
joy of the internationals was tempered when Garang died and Ali Osman
was marginalized by Bashir who - contrary to the assessment of the
diplomats - was the real power wielder in Khartoum. Nonetheless, the
peace process went forward, southerners voted for a jalaba, Yassir
Arman, for national president even after he had withdrawn from the
election, and then voted for secession in the 2011 referendum. But
ignored was the fact that the CPA failed to achieve any of its stated
objectives of a united Sudan, democratic transformation, and
sustainable peace, or the later addition of Thabo Mbeki’s AU
mediation, of viable successor states after South Sudanese opted for
independence.
Meanwhile, the US wanted to have it both ways - claiming that the
peace process and the secession of South Sudan represented a major
foreign policy success, something it was still doing only months
before the outbreak of the December 2013 civil war, and at the same
time praising the local institutions, actors, and the peace process
that it endorsed. But Sudanese and South Sudanese understand that the
creation of an independent South Sudan was dependent on the US since
the SPLA never controlled more than a fraction of the country and the
US opposed self-determination for other groups internationally just or
more worthy than the southern Sudanese.
The official post-CPA narrative claimed that the SPLA had always
fought for the independence of the south and Reeves apparently
subscribes to that view, despite its name which suggested otherwise,
successive party programs, and northern party membership which opposed
secession. Meanwhile, the Salva-led SPLA did an about face with the
support of the internationals who believed that secession would bring
peace to Sudan and South Sudan and set the stage for the resolution of
the other conflicts afflicting Sudan. But in this too the
international peace brigade was mistaken. Under the guidance of the
internationals the SPLA constructed a state in the image of the West,
but it was only about appearances and virtually nothing functioned
except the systemic looting of state coffers by its leaders.
While the Friends were singing the praises of the new country and
congratulating themselves on their success in achieving it, many long
term observers of the SPLA were expecting an implosion and they did
not have long to wait. When the war began in December 2013 after the
killing of Nuer in Juba by Salva’s Presidential Guard the response of
the international peace brigade was to dreg up IGAD, the Troika, and
General Sumbeiywo, and employ the same failed model of peace-building.
After failing miserably the first time around the peace makers went on
to reward themselves with new roles. In March 2015 the IGAD peace
process had collapsed and the AU announced ‘IGAD Plus’, using the same
stale actors as IGAD, plus the AU, EU, China, and the IGAD Partners
Forum, but maintaining the same approach. Can it surprise any right
thinking person that a model based on the failures and personnel of
the past is again not working?
After twenty-six years of failed international peace-making in S/Sudan
– that is, since the NIF carried out a coup on 30 June 1989 to stop
the National Assembly approving the internally generated Koka Dam
Agreement - there is a need to analyze the fundamental flaws of the
model utilized. In these twenty-six years Sudanese and South Sudanese
have witnessed peace-making efforts by President Jimmy Carter, Egypt,
Libya, Nigeria, Eritrea, the AU, IGAD I and II, and the recent Addis
Ababa IGAD efforts, and they have all failed. These processes did not
fail because of technical inadequacies, but because they were
conceptually flawed, utilized a broken model of peace-making, and
deliberately focused on the elites and marginalized the people.
Despite this record of failure, the peace makers have never
demonstrated any humility for their role in the on-going tragedy, much
less conducted a critical audit of the many failed peace processes, or
seriously considered alternative approaches. The leaked draft
submission of Professor Mahmood Mamdani to the AU Commission of
Inquiry on South Sudan called the CPA a failure, held that IGAD
members should not play any role in the provision of security for
South Sudan, and that the country’s administration be turned over to
the AU and UN. It can be assumed that Mahmood did not reach these
conclusions easily, but as a result of exasperation at the failures of
peace-making by IGAD I which were then repeated by IGAD II.
To paraphrase Shakespeare, despite the sound and fury the quarrels
between the various peace-makers and would-be peace-makers is
essentially an in-house affair among people that share the same
commitment to liberal peace-making and thus they are largely much ado
about nothing. What is desperately needed is a critique and rejection
of the liberal peace-making model and for efforts to be directed at
constructing an alternative approach. Such an approach would embrace
the people instead of fearing and marginalizing them, place democratic
and state transformation at the forefront, and not reward failures.
Short of such a fundamental change in approach, or the kind of
conclusive military victories that occurred in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and
Uganda, there is reason to fear that in another twenty-six years we
may still be witnessing endemic wars and continuing ineffectual peace
processes.
John Young, is author of ‘The Fate of Sudan: Origins and Consequences
of a Flawed Peace Process’ which now available in Arabic.
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