By Dipankar De Sarkar
Khartoum, Nov 11 (IANS) With the world’s attention turned sharply toward the war-ravaged Darfur region, some key players – including the US, China and India – are making quiet overtures to Sudan’s oil-rich south in what could be a pointer to the shape of things to come in this vast African nation.
These moves have as much to do with a lingering sense of unhappiness with Khartoum’s policies toward its linguistic and religious minorities as with the need to secure domestic energy security.
Southern Sudan is a semi-autonomous region that has been empowered through a 2005 peace accord that ended Africa’s longest civil war that pitted southern rebels against Khartoum for 21 years.
Southern Sudan today has its own constitution as well as ministers in Khartoum under a power-sharing arrangement with the federal Government of National Unity.
There is also a Government of Southern Sudan (GoSS) in capital Juba, where India has just opened a consulate general – becoming the first Asian country to do so. In doing so, it follows the example set by the US, Egypt and Uganda – the town being physically closer to Uganda than northern Sudan. Britain too is reassessing its representation in Juba.
According to GoSS, 16 countries have already established consulates in Juba. But every one of them will be aware of the tensions that arise from some important differences between northern Sudan, which is home to national capital Khartoum, and its southern region.
Importantly, the constitution of Southern Sudan also authorises the region’s government to enter into direct relations with foreign governments and raise sovereign loans.
In a country where religious identities are all-important, Southern Sudan has more Christians and traditional animists than Muslims, who form the majority in the north. But northern rulers are accused of attempting to enforce the Arabic language and Islam in the south – something that is resented in the south and elsewhere in Sudan.
The north of Sudan is characterised by arid and barren deserts, whereas the south is lush and accounts for 85 percent of the country’s total oil production.
Clearly, for a powerful emerging economy such as India, which has had long-standing friendly relations with Africa – with both its governments and people – Sudan presents a diplomatic challenge that will need a deft balancing act between practical considerations and the ideals of south-south cooperation.
India is Sudan’s second largest trading partner after China and has $3 billion worth of investments in the country, $2 billion of it in energy alone.
India’s Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC) acquired a 25 percent stake in the Greater Nile Oil Project in the south in 2003. But Southern Sudan complains of a lack of transparency over the share of oil money with the north.
As a result, New Delhi – with its unique combination of an Africa-friendly profile and emerging economic clout – is seeking to offer the government of Southern Sudan a credit line of around $400 million, guaranteed against the region’s post-2011 oil production.
These days, with its economy on a sustained growth path, it is as important for New Delhi to be mindful of its growing future energy needs as it is to be watchful of current developments.
In Sudan, this has meant not taking sides in its domestic conflicts – chiefly Darfur in the west and in southern Sudan – while gently feeling the new waters in the south. Above all, the opening of the Juba consulate signals New Delhi’s intention to remain engaged in Sudan.
As elsewhere in the world, India’s role in Sudan too draws a natural comparison with that of China.
Beijing’s role has been controversial – it is widely perceived to have fuelled the Southern war by arming Khartoum in exchange for oil. It is also criticised for not exerting its influence with Khartoum – China is the largest buyer of Sudanese oil – to bring peace to Darfur.
The UN believes some 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million made homeless in the conflict in the vast and arid Darfur region of Sudan, where African Sudanese have taken up arms, accusing Arabs of decades of neglect. The government, in turn, has unleashed its own armed Arab militia – known as Janjaweed – on the rebels.
Some critics will not mince their words.
R. Scott Greathead, a New York-based human rights consultant, wrote in the New York Times Tuesday that China is Sudan’s biggest arms supplier.
Beijing’s similar role in the Southern Sudan conflict, in which an estimated 1.5 to 2 million people were killed, has long been attacked by rights groups such as Amnesty International.
Today, the same Southern Sudan has suddenly become key to the peace efforts in Darfur, after the ruling party in the south, the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), which is led by Southern Sudan President and federal Vice President Salva Kiir, suspended its participation in the federal government Oct 11.
The party accused the government of multiple breaches of the two-year-old peace deal, including not sharing the country’s oil wealth as agreed upon, not pulling its troops out of Southern Sudan, and remilitarising contested border zones where the main southern oil reserves are located.
It has also threatened to withdraw support to the federal government if a long-running border dispute over an oil-rich area known as Abyei is not resolved by January 2008.
The move could not have come at a worse time for Khartoum – under intense international pressure to move on the Darfur conflict. It has no option but to count on the support of the Southern Sudan politicians to negotiate a Darfur deal.
But Kiir, in Washington this week for talks with members of the Bush administration, is shrewdly talking about first saving the 2005 peace deal between the south and Khartoum, known as the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA).
“If you don’t implement the CPA, and possibly if the war erupts again in the south, you would not get peace in Darfur,” Kiir told reporters in Washington.
Even if the north and south manage to revive the CPA by January, there are other potential problems for Khartoum – and none looms larger than a referendum that is guaranteed by the constitution to the people of Southern Sudan to enable them to choose whether or not they want to remain part of Sudan in 2011.
The opinion on the street is that the region will secede in 2011 – on account of centuries of discrimination by northern Arabs and current suspicions. Decades of attempts by the north to Islamise other regions of the country – through religious conversion and enforcement of the Arabic language – have been resisted most stiffly in the south.
“It is a history of slavery that has damaged the southern soul,” said a seasoned observer in Khartoum.
(Dipankar De Sarkar can be contacted at [email protected])