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Writing a wrong: What the referendum in Sudan will not accomplish
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Christiaan Kroner, secretary general of the international
arbitration panel, and Pierre-Marie Dupuy,
chairman of the panel, before the ruling at the
Hague (AP Photo/ Ermindo Armino)
South Sudan, the semi-autonomous region of Sudan, Africa’s largest country, has accused the central government, based in the North, of threatening to sabotage a peace accord signed by the two sides in 2005 , reports the BBC. Secretary General of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), Pagan Amum, warned the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) that if it doesn’t give southerners a fair chance at self-determination, they will have to take the matter of independence into their own hands. The NCP, in preparation for a 2011 referendum that could afford South Sudan complete devolution, is supposedly hinting that only a 75% vote in favour of the measure will guarantee independence. “We are warning the National Congress - we are also alerting the people of southern Sudan - that we have a serious problem,” Amum said in an interview with the BBC. He believes that a simple majority is all that is needed to determine whether his people wish to govern themselves, and that the NCP is encouraging mistrust by suggesting otherwise. “The National Congress is poised to betray the people of southern Sudan again," he added.
In the early 1900s, British colonizers allied with neighbouring Egypt, forced out French and Belgian occupiers and drew a clear boundary between North and South Sudan (described by Dr. Riek Teny in a paper for the University of Pennsylvania’s African Studies Center). Since then, Southerners have had very little say in how they’ve been governed. The British resorted to extreme measures in order to administer the two regions separately, explains Dr. Teny, himself a member of the secessionist SPLM party. Colonial policies, such as the Closed Districts Ordinances, required passports and permits, among other things, for travel and trade between North and South. Another policy imposed English as an official language in the South, although permitting Dinka, Latuko and other dialects for local use. Arabic, spoken in the North, was blatantly denied a similar status. But after enduring a long nationalist struggle, and before handing South Sudan to the North and granting the latter independence in 1956, the British carelessly left a few regions in limbo. Notable among these is Abyei, which lies on the North-South border. It played a pivotal role in the civil war, a conflict that ran for nearly fifty years after Sudan became autonomous.
Abyei’s significance weighs heavily on the tenuous peace agreement of 2005. As described in the Economist magazine, it is originally home to the Ngok Dinka, who fought alongside their relatives, South Sudan’s Dinkas, during the protracted civil war. But, as reported by the Economist, “since 1905 the nine Ngok Dinka chiefdoms have been administered within the "Northern" region of Kordofan, as a result of a redrawing of provincial borders during the Anglo-Egyptian colonial period.”
Disputed boundaries and disquiet in relations between the Ngok Dinka and the nomadic Messeriya, a tribe traditionally loyal to the North, caused Abyei town to erupt in violence last year, forcing over 50,000 people to flee their homes. Attempting to correct a mistake made while outlining the peace accord that delimited Abyei’s borders in 2005, a court in the Hague, charged with resolving Abyei’s most recent conflict, has handed down a verdict which redraws the region’s contentious boundary. The panel of judges at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague, comprised of two Europeans, two Americans, and one Arab, may also have been symbolically making amends for a centuries-old mistake; The Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) was, after all, founded in 1899, soon after the Berlin Conference of 1884, during which the African continent was famously divided up among European imperialists, yet has, until now, done relatively little to clean up the ensuing mess.
Then, as now, tribalism will ultimately determine whether or not European-imposed boundaries will bring Africans together. In a report by IRIN, a project of the UN’s humanitarian affairs office, Abyei and the surrounding vicinity is said to have been in a fragile state ever since the PCA ruling. The implications of a new boundary, including the fact that a couple of major oil fields will now be controlled by the North instead of the South, are beginning to sink in, and Southerners are calling for the entire North-South boundary to be clearly defined and agreed upon before the 2011 referendum. An Abyei native, John Biong, is quoted by IRIN as saying "This land is ours, because it is the land of the Dinka people, and they are of the south…Abyei is the south.” Residents of Abyei will also be given the opportunity to vote on who they want to be governed by, North or South, at the upcoming referendum. Unfortunately, tribalism will heavily influence their decision, and in a newly independent South Sudan, inhabited by more than just one tribe, nothing could be more damaging.
South Sudan threatens to secede
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