Journey with a New Map? Thoughts on the Sudan Agreement and Stability in Africa

J. Peter Pham

Three weeks after a grueling twenty-two months of difficult negotiations—prodded along behind the scenes by a host of special envoys from a number of countries, including the United States—in the Kenyan resort town of Naivasha, the government of Sudan and the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) finalized a peace accord that both sides hope will end some twenty-one years of fighting. The conflict, Africa’s longest-running civil war, pitted the Arab Muslims in the country’s north against blacks in its south, who are mainly Christians and followers of traditional African religions, leaving an estimated two million people dead and another four million displaced (an additional ten thousand have been killed and one million displaced since last year in the western Darfur region in a separate conflict that the United Nations has characterized as “the world’s worst humanitarian disaster” nowadays). The three protocols just signed pave the way for a final peace treaty to be signed in Washington, possibly as early as next month.

The agreement splits power and wealth between the government in Khartoum and the southern rebel movement. Sudan’s new oil revenues—presently 250,000 barrels are produced each day, a figure schedule to rise to 500,000 by next year—will be shared equally between north and south. Positions in the central government will be apportioned between adherents of the two sides along a 70 to 30 ratio in favor of the government, although the ratio in three contested border regions—oil-rich Abyei, Blue Nile state, and the Nuba mountains—will be 55 to 45. Islamic sharia law, which the Arab-dominated central government has been trying to impose on the entire country since 1983 will be limited to the north, with the situation of the capital to be determined by a future assembly. Most interestingly of all, the government has agreed on a formula that provides for a constitution to be drafted in the next six months granting the south considerable autonomy for six years, culminating in a referendum over complete independence for the south.

Although African peace agreements have a notoriously short shelf life and it still remains to be seen whether the two sides in the Sudanese conflict will honor their commitments, the Naivasha accord stands out among similar deals for just admitting the possibility that international borders might be altered and a new map of the continent ought to drawn up permitting the creation of a new state. One of the little (but not inconsequential) ironies of international politics is that while the continent is often portrayed as chaotic—a “frontier of anarchy” and the birthplace of “the coming chaos,” to recall Robert Kaplan’s memorable titles[i]—Africa is actually remarkable for having retained essentially unchanged the boundaries of the 1880s, a feat that Europe certainly has not accomplished. In fact, Africa’s newest internationally recognized sovereign state, Eritrea, which achieved its independence from Ethiopia following the victory of insurgents against the then Ethiopian regime and a plebiscite in 1993, is the restoration of a colonial era political unit that had been merged with Ethiopia in 1952, rather than an entirely new entity.

The challenge for African states since independence has been how to refashion what Bertrand Badie has called “l’état importé” into an arrangement that is not only stable, but will also be accepted by its citizens as legitimate, as well as sufficiently performing the basic functions of statehood: control over national territory; oversight of the natural resources; effective and rational collection of revenue; maintenance of adequate national infrastructure; and capacity to govern and maintain law and order, including respect for basic human rights. A cursory glance at any major newspaper, however, reveals that in Africa today the “imported state” is in trouble. Sierra Leone has barely emerged from a more than a decade of civil war that saw the near total collapse of its government as well as frightening scenes of violence. Until last year, Liberia was run as a personal fiefdom by a warlord-turned-president; now the country is a de facto United Nations protectorate supervised by a retired U.S. Air Force major general. The ironically-named Democratic Republic of Congo—which has never, in its history as an independent country, had so much as one free and democratic election (one is due next year if the peace accord ending its 1998-2003 civil war holds)—has been embroiled in a conflict that has been called “Africa’s first world war” and taken a immense toll of 3.3 million lives, giving the DRC the highest crude mortality rate in the world today. Somalia—or at least its southern half—still lacks a central government more than a decade after the ill-starred international intervention of “Operation Restore Hope.”

At the center of this crisis is the contrived and artificial nature of the African state, coupled with the surreal expectation that post-independence leaders should somehow wield nations out of heterogeneous groups of peoples and cultures. A thumbnail definition of a nation has been given as a “named human population sharing a historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass, public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties for all members.”[ii] If that is the case, then there is no such chimera as the “Sierra Leonean nation”—or any other sub-Saharan nation for that matter. Consequently, as African jurist Makau wa Mutua, has argued this point in moral and juridical terms:

The post-colonial state, the uncritical successor of the colonial state, is doomed because it lacks basic moral legitimacy. Its normative and territorial construction on the African colonial state, itself a legal and moral nullity, is the fundamental reason for its failure…At independence, the West decolonized the colonial state, not the African peoples subject to it. In other words, the right of self-determination was exercised not by victims of colonization but their victimizers, the elites who control the international state system.[iii]

While Africa has a rich social, cultural and political history, modern African states are not rooted in this past. The present-day borders and national compositions of African states are colonial legacies, emerging directly from the often arbitrary ways that the great powers delineated their respective spheres of influence during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Henry Kissinger has elaborated on the consequences of this colonial past:

In Africa, borders not only follow the demarcations between the spheres of influence of the European powers, as in Asia; they also reflect the administrative subdivisions within each colonial area. In East and West Africa, Britain and France governed colonies with long coastlines. Hence it proved efficient to divide these colonies into a multiplicity of administrative units, each with its own outlet to the sea, which later became independent states. On the other hand, in Central Africa, tiny Belgium governed a region nearly as large as the British and French possessions without, however, any significant coastline. Possessing only a very short outlet to the sea at the mouth of the Congo River, this vast territory was ruled by Belgium as a single unit, which later emerged as a single state with an explosive ethnic mixture.

Most importantly, the administrative borders in each colony were drawn without regard to ethnic or tribal identities; indeed, the colonial powers often found it useful to divide up ethnic or tribal groups in order to complicate the emergence of a unified opposition to imperial rule.[iv]

While the struggle, whether peaceful or violent, towards independence from colonial rule united disparate groups in a common cause, this were rarely sufficient to form a national identity. The challenge was even greater in some cases like that of Sierra Leone where the country was created by amalgamating two separate colonial-era political units, the Crown Colony of Freetown and the Protectorate of Sierra Leone, each of which came to independence with a distinct colonial experience grafted upon more ancient differences. The survival of these artifices has not been contingent so much on internal legitimacy—by and large, non-existent—but due to international recognition derived from the right of self-determination granted to the colonial state and reinforced by the logic of the Cold War. Absent the Cold War or neo-colonial guarantees to client states—witness the ongoing French military mission in Côte d’Ivoire where an estimated 12,000 people have been killed and anywhere between 700,000 and 1,000,000 displaced since September 2002—ethnic plurality and, in some cases, state duality, have finally caught up with sub-Saharan Africa. The consequences of the failure of post-colonial states (and their highly arbitrary borders) to forge national identities and forge loyalties have been devastating. Without any organic ties to a nation-state, rulers pillage it at will with their cronies—and, by extension, members of their ethnic group—and resort to massive human rights abuses to repress those excluded. The genocide in Rwanda ten years ago is just one example—albeit perhaps the most poignant one—of destructive potential in ethnic cleavages.

During the Cold War, the delicate worldwide balance between the U.S. and the Soviet Union required that the two superpowers prop up their African clients, guaranteeing the immutability of their colonial frontiers as the price of avoiding chaos at the international level if not necessarily within states. This necessity, however, has evaporated with the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Today, the status quo benefits few in the intermediate and long runs except for the continent’s sadly all-too-large club of tyrants, despots and other self-anointed rulers, who saw to it that the 1963 Charter of the Organization of African Unity (now the African Union) affirmed the colonial borders. In this self-interested and dogmatic adherence to the principle of uti possidetis iuris, all manner of inconsistency and abuse has been tolerated. In the international basket case of Somalia, for example, one part of the country is functional. In 1991 a congress drawn from the inhabitants of the former British protectorate of Somaliland declared withdrawal from the 1960 union with Somalia to form the Republic of Somaliland along the northern coast. Since that time, Somaliland has maintained a de facto separate status since that time, governed by a republican constitution, with an elected president (the current incumbent, Dahir Rayale Kahin, as vice president succeeded his elected predecessor, Mohamed Ibrahim Egal, on the latter’s death last May) and a bicameral legislature including a Chamber of Elders and a House of Representatives. According to Amnesty International, the judiciary is functioning independent, and various political parties exist and compete in multiparty elections. There are 163 public schools, enrolling some 33,000 students. The country even maintains an official website (www.somalilandgov.com). However lack of diplomatic recognition has meant that Somaliland is effectively cut off from most international aid and development programs. In contrast, the Transitional National Government, cobbled together last year after talks hosted by the African Union in Kenya and consisting of self-appointed warlords with ties to other African rulers, enjoys the perks of international recognition, including funding (most of which presumably never gets anywhere near Somalia) and the use of the collapsed state’s diplomatic missions, including a swank piece of real estate on East 61^st Street on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that purports to be the “Permanent Mission of the Somali Republic to the United Nations.”  

The ongoing U.S. involvement in resolving the conflict in southern Sudan—including the 2001 appointment by President George W. Bush of former Senator John Danforth as presidential envoy to mediate the conflict, Secretary of State Colin Powell’s meeting with the two sides in Kenya last October, and Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Charles R. Snyder’s presence at Naivasha last month—is grounded on both domestic and international interests. The administration faced pressure to act from both conservative Christian groups concerned with the persecution of their Sudanese co-religious by Islamists and human rights advocates worried about slavery and other abuses. Furthermore, having declared African oil a strategic national interest—oil revenues were the subject of the recent deal—America has every reason to seek an end to the war (most of the oil lies in the south and existing fields straddle the north-south divide). And, in the wake of September 11, it is in the interest of international security that al-Qa‘eda and other terrorist groups do not find refuge in a conflicted Sudan as did Osama bin Laden, who lived in Khartoum in the 1990s. The full measure of the importance of these interests—as well as of the success of his most recent diplomatic efforts to deal with them in Sudan—is perhaps hinted at by Danforth’s recent nomination to succeed the Baghdad-bound John Negroponte as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Realists, of course, approach “regime change” (which, ultimately, is what redrawing maps is about) of any type with the greatest caution. However, realism does not automatically preclude changes when they represent the most viable option for long-term stability. While redrawing political maps is always a messy business, one that should be approached with the greatest caution, over the long term, the interests of both the U.S. and the larger international community in global security, state stability, respect for human rights and the development of natural resources—as well as the self-evident interest of Africans in political freedom and economic development, both of which are predicated upon state legitimacy—will best be served by encouraging peaceful processes, like the Naivasha negotiations, that empower Africans to create new consensual political entities to replaced clearly failed “imported states.” As Kenyan scholar Ali A. Mazrui has argued,[v] with or without a peaceful means for true self-determination that redresses the wrongs of colonial cartographers, the break-up of the continent’s colonial era states and the realignment of their frontiers will occur sooner or later—the only question is whether that process requires the spilling of more blood or whether it can be managed by statesmen with the courage and vision to face reality and defy conventions.

Seventy years ago, in Journey Without Maps, his travelogue of a fact-finding mission through what is today Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, Graham Greene lamented that he could only find two maps for the route of the trek, one of which openly confessed its ignorance with large white spaces and a few dotted lines indicated conjectured courses while the other showed “vigorous imagination” by filling in the spaces with fantasies. One can only hope that the international community, imbued with both a sense of realism and the same boldness that characterized the recent Sudanese accord, can chart more a certain path forward to a more peaceful, stable and free Africa.    

Dr. J. Peter Pham, a former diplomat, is the author, most recently, of Liberia: Portrait of a Failed State (Reed Press).