Sudan on the eve of divorce, velvet or not
The Middle East Institute and the Fondation pour la Recherche Strategique are cosponsoring a conference today on “Protracted Displacement Challenges Facing Sudan: What Scope for EU-US Cooperation.” They wisely ignored their title for the first session and focused instead on the broader political and military dimensions of the situation a few months before Southern Sudan becomes a separate state on July 9. I’ll try to give a quick summary of a rich set of presentations.
Jan Pronk, former Dutch Minister for International Assistance and former UN Envoy to Sudan, offered 10 lessons from his experience:
- Humanitarian assistance and military intervention are not sufficient; a political strategy is needed to prevent conflict.
- The political strategy needs to be timely, early enough in the game to avoid escalation and establishment of facts on the ground that will be impossible to reverse.
- The international community needs the political capacity to intervene early based on a UN Security Council mandate, but without having to go through UNSC procedures each time–this would mean a committee mandated by the UNSC but under the authority of the Secretary General.
- Nothing works unless there is a common approach based on consensus that allows joint action, avoids sending conflicting signals and eliminates the possibility of divisive tactics used by the host country.
- Such a comprehensive approach may have to be implemented step by step, but within an overall political framework.
- We may have to occasionally step back and reevaluate, as we should have done after the Darfur Peace Agreeement, in order to avoid building our approach on a basis that is the wrong one.
- Each UN organization has its own board, with even the same governments saying different things in different organizations; we need to unify the UN approach under a single person who provides common transport, communications, intelligence and security.
- This requires that UN organizations delegate coordination to the field, where it is done best.
- The referendum decision in Sudan needs to be implemented peacefully, but we cannot allow Khartoum to sell Southern Sudan independence as a substitute for Darfur cooperation.
- The military efforts in Ivory Coast and Libya are important because they mean force is being used to protect civilians, but we need to think ahead, avoid collateral damage and put forward a political strategy that opens a back door for the “villains” to depart.
Former US Sudan Envoy Andrew Natsios offered 5:
- Southern Sudan will be able to gain independence because it has armed itself well, but the North will continue to try to destabilize the South. Darfur fighting has been fed by Libya, which is supporting the JEM.
- Two new states will emerge July 9: the North will be majority Arab, the South will be a state with a big army 150,000 strong.
- The government in Khartoum is weak and nervous, for good reasons. Turabi is still dangerous and the North faces continuing problems in Blue Nile, Southern Kordofan, Beja and Darfur. President Bashir is frightened even of his own army, which is largely kept out of Khartoum to prevent a coup (there are only 5000 soldiers in the capital). The secret police, not the army, sustains the regime.
- A unified approach among donors is obviously desirable, but difficult because of legal differences among the Europeans, Canadians and Americans.
- There is still a need for a political settlement concerning the 500,000-1,000,000 Southerners still in the North, but large-scale conflict is unlikely in July because both North and South know it would disrupt the oil flow and bankrupt both their governments, something neither can afford to see.
Rosalind Marsden, EU Representative for Sudan:
- The EU is trying to develop a comprehensive approach to Southern Sudan and is also looking at the North.
- EU assistance to the referendum commission, and monitoring of the referendum, was successful.
- There is a need to make arrangements still for the Southerners in the North and the Northerners in the South.
- President Mbeki’s African Union effort is looking at these issues and others, but the time is short before July 9.
- The positions on Abyei have hardened, agreements have not been implemented, half the population of Abyei town has left, and everyone is waiting for Mbeki’s proposals.
- There are also delays and difficulties with the popular consultations in Blue Nile and Southern Kordofan, which are not likely to be completed before July 9.
- For Darfur, the main game is the Doha negotiations, where the stakeholders conference is the next important step, but Khartoum’s intention of holding a Darfur referendum has complicated matters.
- Insecurity is rising in Darfur, with the government conducting military operations and JEM under pressure from developments in Libya.
- The US and EU need to speak with one voice, as they did on the referendum. For this, a common assessment and agreement on benchmarks would help. The Southern Sudan 3-year development plan, now being worked in Juba, will be an enormous step forward.
Nancy Lindborg, Assistant Administrator at AID, suggested:
- Good donor coordination and contingency planning helped avoid problems at the time of the referendum, with UN DPKO helping to focus international efforts as well as cooperation with both North and South.
- The big issues are still out there: oil revenue, citizenship, currency, borders are unsettled.
- The South is absorbing 320,000 returnees, many of whom are urbanized, into a society that is mostly rural, largely illiterate , lacking in infrastructure and with a high rate of infant mortality.
- AID is focused on mitigating conflict, combating corruption, promoting economic growth (mainly via agriculture) and building the capacity of the Southern Sudan government to provide essential services.
- The effort is shifting from relief to development, including urban planning, land distribution, small business and youth.
- The next big issues will come from governance.
It would be hard to be optimistic based on this event, but at least officials are thinking hard and ahead about the requirements. And it is comforting to know that there are such capable people still engaged.
But what they need in Juba is a stronger architecture for the international assistance effort, and stronger links to the host country’s own plans. As things stand, conditionalities are never met because the Southern Sudanese can always donor shop elsewhere. Nothing like the pillar structure in Kosovo or even the High Representative in Bosnia exists in Southern Sudan. Even the UN effort is fragmented. Donors need to get together on a common approach shared by the Southern Sudanese.
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Riyadh and Washington try to get it together
With King Abdullah back in the saddle throne since late February, after months abroad for medical treatment, it seems to me that Saudi diplomacy has gone into relative overdrive. Their biggest move was troops into Bahrain, to free up the Bahraini security forces to beat up demonstrators, but now they appear to be taking an active role in arranging for the departure of President Ali Abdullah Saleh from his post, if not from the country. I imagine they’ve decided now he is more liability than asset, something most Yemenis seem to have concluded weeks ago.
The Americans are also in overdrive, with Defense Secretary Gates and National Security Adviser Donilon wearing out the flying carpet to Riyadh. This is likely in part damage limitation–the Saudis aren’t happy to see the Americans plumping for transition in the democratic direction in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Bahrain. It must be difficult to convince them that somehow we’ll manage to stop the process before it gets to the Kingdom, which has largely pacified its own population and cracks down hard when soft power fails to do the job.
But it looks as if there may be more on the agenda: the Iranian challenge looms large for both Washington and Riyadh, and both have taken to implying that the Iranians are up to no good in Bahrain, though there is little evidence that the protests were fueled by Tehran. This I suppose is where the Saudis would like the Americans to draw the line: democracy is good, but not if it threatens to bring a Shia majority into power (as it did of course in Iraq, and the Saudis were not pleased).
This leaves Libya and Syria. I see no real unhappiness coming from the Saudis about what is going on in Libya, and it is difficult to imagine that the United Arab Emirates would lend its air force to the cause if the Saudis were not prepared to go along. Gaddafi is not a Saudi kind of guy, and of course there is no Shia threat there. Syria is harder to read: are the Saudis backing Bashar al Assad, who runs an Alawi (sort of Shia) regime, or not? Riyadh and Damascus have in the past competed with him for influence in Lebanon. Would the Saudis prefer a Sunni regime in Damascus? Or does the preference for stability prevail? So far, the latter.
Saudi influence is likely one of the reasons the Americans haven’t been as welcoming of the protesters in Syria as might have been expected. Both Washington and Riyadh are worried about chaos in Syria, and how that might affect Iraq and Jordan. This is odd, of course, since Damascus is allied with Tehran and Bashar al Assad has not hesitated to make trouble for the Americans in both Iraq and Lebanon. I wonder if things started really coming apart in Damascus whether the Saudis would reconsider.
Now if you’ve got a headache from all this diplomatic mumbo jumbo, I’m not surprised. But the world really is complicated, the Middle East more than most other regions. And if something happens in Saudi Arabia to disrupt its giant oil production and exports, that $4 gasoline is going to start looking cheap.
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Counterrevolution, again
With the U.S. Government immobilized by its own self-generated problems–a kind of self-licking ice cream cone phenomenon–dictators are resurgent in the Middle East again. They are doing what they know to do best: killing their own citizens, hoping that will make the popular protests against their interminable rule go away.
In Syria, the demonstrations were once again widespread yesterday, if not gigantic. The killing seems to have focused on the southern town of Deraa, where Bashar al Assad seems to be wanting to demonstrate how really dangerous it is to protest persistently. In Yemen, yesterday’s killing focused on Taiz, a southern town that President Ali Saleh sees as the leading edge of separatism. In Egypt, Tahrir square was cleared in the early morning hours by an army riot. In Libya, Gaddafi continues to make mincemeat of rebel forces, which have also been bombed unintentionally by NATO. Negotiations with the Gaddafi family are ongoing, but Washington seems to be holding a hard line on getting them all out of Libya. In Bahrain, the monarchy continues with a hard line on the demonstrations, which it increasingly paints with a sectarian brush.
It is surprising to me that the dictators think this will work, but they know their own people better than I do. Alistair Crooke published yesterday on foreignpolicy.com a piece on “Syrian exceptionalism” that essentially says Bashar knows best and will win his bet. There will surely be people in the U.S. administration who are also hoping now to stem the tide and save a few really important autocratic regimes (Bahrain and Saudi Arabia foremost) for future use, while arranging soft landings for others (Yemen in particular). Secretary of Defense Gates has been running up his frequent flyer miles with visits to key stalwarts and Gulf states worried about the situation.
That said, President Obama has issued strong statements on Syria and Yemen in recent days. He seems much more inclined to emphasize the legitimate aspirations of the people than to help preserve Bashar and Bashir.
It is nowhere written that counterrevolution will fail, and in fact it has often succeeded. Regime principals and their oligarchs are clever about using their remaining power and money to divide the opposition, crack down on the weaker but more militant portion, and preserve at least some vestige of their own privilege and control. We should expect no less from them.
Those who want to complete their revolutions and emerge as free societies with more or less representative governments will somehow need to keep the pressure on. But they will also have to stay united, and plan carefully for where and when to confront their respective regimes nonviolently. The consequences of violent rebellion should by now be obvious to everyone who follows events in Libya–it isn’t pretty, and it may not end well.
PS: Just to complete the picture, in Ivory Coast Laurent Gbagbo’s forces are reportedly today attacking the hotel where Alassane is headquartered, as well as the French Embassy. You have to wonder when Paris will see fit to take decisive action.
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Zimbabwe between fear and worse
I don’t pretend to be an expert on all things, but I do like to try to keep myself well-informed (if not always up to date). Inspired by hearing Michael Bratton of Michigan State (he is in DC at USIP this year) speak the other day, I decided to poke around a bit and found two things worth recommending on Zimbabwe: his paper with Eldred Masunungure on “The Anatomy of Political Predation” and this interview with Peter Godwin, author of The Fear.
Bottom line: Zimbabwe may well get worse before it gets better. The powersharing government it is suffering under now is doing little to extract it from its misery. Finding ways of ameliorating the situation without helping bad people will be difficult, but Bratton and Masunungure offer some interesting ideas as well as caveats:
• Insist on evidence of good faith by all parties to implement the terms of the Global Political Agreement as the main precondition for fulsome donor reengagement with the Government of Zimbabwe.
• In the meantime, continue to offer “humanitarian plus” aid programs that help improve the conditions of life of the Zimbabwean people. For the moment, international agencies (such as the African Development Bank, which manages a Zimbabwe Multi-Donor Trust Fund) or non-governmental agencies should be charged with implementing these programs.
• While acknowledging that Morgan Tsvangirai is the most popular politician in Zimbabwe, resist the temptation to back particular leaders or leadership coalitions. Instead of trying to pick winners, international actors should instead encourage the construction of durable rules, procedures and institutions. In particular, they should offer support to those civil society organizations, independent media, and democratic political parties that can help ensure that the next national elections are administered freely and fairly. Such assistance may require helping to build the organizational, professional, analytical, diplomatic and advocacy skills and potentials of non-governmental entities.
• Recognize that the immediate goal of international assistance is to facilitate a legal transfer of political power. The mere convocation of yet one more flawed election or the second-best compromise of another power-sharing arrangement is not enough. Instead, international actors should stand firm in insisting that Zimbabwe’s next government reflects the electoral will of the people.
• The present political settlement lacks economic and military dimensions. Another round of elite pact-making will therefore be necessary, perhaps by including token moderates from the old regime in any future democratic government. A successful transfer of power must also provide assurances to potential political spoilers: that is, those who have committed abuses under ZANU-PF rule or who have benefited from the ill-gotten gains of state patronage. Distasteful as it may seem, offers of future financial and physical security may have to be made selectively to key members of the ruling party and security apparatus in order to ease them out of power.
• This having been said, the West should not be party to any final transition settlement that rules out the prosecution of leaders who have ordered gross abuses of human rights. Responsibility for the culture of impunity in Zimbabwe is broadly shared. It can be traced to blanket amnesties granted over the years by the Rhodesian regime, the British governor at independence, and by the president of Zimbabwe. This cycle must now be broken.
• Despite the ambiguity of its stance as an honest broker, SADC remains key to a resolution of the Zimbabwe crisis. The international community should support and encourage the new SADC contact group – South Africa, Mozambique and Zambia – to engage the ZANU-PF elite and to move them towards peaceful acceptance of the results of a free and fair election. But the precise terms of any permanent settlement are best determined by domestic leadership coalitions rather than by outsiders.
• Western agencies should strategically and skillfully deploy their only real instruments of leverage – policies on international sanctions and promises of future assistance – in support of the above results. Any fruitful approach must involve considering carefully the appropriate time to relax, suspend, or remove sanctions once the Zimbabwe government has sufficiently complied with the SADC roadmap for political progress toward a genuinely democratic settlement.
I would only add the possibility of supporting the MDC-controlled municipal governments. This may be inconsistent with not picking winners, but it seems to me important if MDC politicians are to gain both experience of governing and support among citizens. I know of only one such effort–in Serbia during the Milosevic regime the Europeans provided “energy for democracy” to opposition-controlled municipalities. While I haven’t seen a serious study of the impact, at the time it was regarded as a useful enterprise, one that gave the opposition some valuable experience in governing as well as strong ties to helpful people in the international community.
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What is Afghanistan good for?
Americans, weary of the war in Afghanistan, are doubting that anything good can come of it, and wondering if it will ever be over. Two recent reports reminded me of what Afghanistan is good for.
The first is “Afghanistan’s Drug Career: Evolution from a War Economy to a Drug Economy” from the Afghanistan Analysts’ Network (AAN). The second, “Afghanistan Beyond the Fog of Nation Building” from the Silk Road Studies Program here at Johns Hopkins/SAIS, is about the importance of transit routes across Afghanistan and their potential to contribute to building peace there.
Like it or not, Afghanistan is remarkably good for the production of opium poppy. The AAN report is interesting on the political economy of the drug trade, which implicates President Karzai and other “political upperworld” figures in protecting and profiting from it. But it is remarkably tame in its recommendations. Twenty or thirty years will be required, it says, for its “holistic” approach to work. The initial steps recommended are modest adjustments of current policies: eradication should be applied to all poppy fields in a given district, interdiction should target bigger traders, and alternative livelihoods should encompass rural development in general and not just crop substitution. I suppose any long journey starts with just a few steps, but it is hard for me to picture that these recommendations will really carry us through several decades.
More interesting is S. Frederick Starr’s enthusiastic endorsement of transportation as the key to economic development in Afghanistan:
The reopening [of] all these age-old transit routes across Afghanistan is the single greatest achievement of U.S. foreign policy in the new millenium. It was unintended, unrecognized, and, by most Americans, unacknowledged, even thought they paid for it with the lives of loved ones and with hard-earned tax money. Nonetheless, this development offers the most promising solution to the U.S.’ present strategic dilemma and the key to possible success in Afghanistan and the region….Whatever its larger geopolitical significance, the reopening of continental transport and trade to, from, and across Afghanistan is the single most important determinant of the future of Afghanistan itself….This is not a scheme devised by GS-12 bureaucrats in Foggy Bottom for some generic distant land. It is the logic of Afghanistan itself and has been validated by the experience of 3000 years.
So who stands in opposition to 3000 years of experience? According to Starr,
At a series of meetings held throughout the autumn of 2010 representatives of the State Department were, to say the least, reserved about a strategy based on the opening of transport corridors, presumably out of concern that it might be taken as an alternative to the development of agriculture or the exploitation of mineral resources rather than the essential and unavoidable measure for achieving them.
Starr goes on to suggest that resistance is softening, and there is enthusiasm in military and some other circles. But the high-level support he sought has not yet emerged. That is what is needed to drive what Starr suggests: a regional Coordinating Council on Continental Transport and Trade to pursue the strategy of reopening the corridors of transport and trade that war has done much to clog in recent decades.
Of course when it comes to cross-border trade, nothing moves more expeditiously than drugs. That is the trick here: helping the Afghans to create a border regime that will allow legitimate trade and block the illegitimate version. It will not be easy–in fact, it requires just the kind of state Afghanistan lacks, and that the AAN report suggests will be difficult to construct because of the interaction of the drug economy with top levels of the Karzai government. We’d all like to avoid the daunting task of state-building in Afghanistan, but few good things can happen if we don’t embrace the requirement.
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Damage limitation won’t work, so fix it
Here is the final installment of a several day exchange on Bosnia issues, in which Kurt Bassuener responds again to Matthew Parish (to get the full exchange on peacefare.net, just click on the “Balkans” category over on the right:
Most of Matthew Parish’s response questions the very idea of enforceable peace implementation and then goes to posit the myriad flaws he sees with its execution over the past 15 years. The underlying argument that the European Stability Initiative has long been making, now with the International Crisis Group in tow: if the international actors – particularly the OHR – got out of the way, Bosnian politicians would find their own equilibrium, and Bosnia would self-propel into the Euro-Atlantic mainstream.
This is no longer a theoretical exercise, since it’s effectively been tested since 2006. It has failed. Nobody can credibly claim that a tyrannical OHR has stomped like Godzilla over domestic political actors crippling their ability to be responsible since then. If that ever were the case – and this is myth, in my view – it certainly isn’t now.
What’s since become clear is the incentives in the Dayton system make the default setting, absent external guardrails, a drift toward partition. On that Mr. Parish and I agree. I am just far more convinced than he that this will lead to major violence if left unchecked.
Yet I posit that the international community’s failing wasn’t that it went too far. Rather, it’s that it didn’t go far enough toward changing the incentive structure. This is a constitutional and structural problem. The problem isn’t that political actors are “immature” – they operate rationally within a system designed to cater to their needs as warlords and signatories to a peace agreement, not designed to promote democratic accountability. So they inhabit a happy hunting ground of unaccountability unrivalled in Europe; no “carrots” are more appealing than the perquisites of power they already have.
The prevailing idea of the two High Representatives who actively engaged in state-building (albeit with different styles), Wolfgang Petritsch and Paddy Ashdown, can be summed up as “if you build it, they will come.” The country’s politicians were encouraged, and in some cases compelled, to create the institutions and mechanisms to enable the country to move toward the EU and NATO. It was assumed that “the pull of Brussels” would be strong enough for the political leaders who resisted or unenthusiastically accepted these to ultimately embrace them for the greater good.
If they actually cared for the popular good, that would be the case. But they have little incentive to, able to turn to the political comfort food of patronage and fear to get them through repeated election cycles despite popular frustration at their protracted lack of delivery. While there is undeniably a background level of nationalism in Bosnia – there is in every country – it is impossible to get a baseline reading, since the system acts as an amplifier.
I’m actually quite confident that a modus vivendi could be found among BiH’s citizens, if the country’s politicians were disarmed by taking their ability to leverage fear away. But the international community always hamstrung itself on this, the biggest value added it could have, by constantly telegraphing its lack of staying power.
But so much for our respective opinions on how we got here. As I wrote in my original reply to Matthew Parish’s article in Balkan Insight (which launched this exchange), his proposal is for international management of state dissolution, which is what I assume he means by “damage limitation.”
Practically speaking, that’s just not feasible, for the reasons I wrote about in my article. The split would not – and cannot – be consensual between the entities. It would engender violent resistance. The correlation of forces that prevailed in the war does not hold now – the RS is in a much weaker position. Any attempt to create a third entity in the Federation would also be fraught. The idea that an international community that doesn’t have the stamina to keep the EUFOR mission of 2000 troops fully staffed (it’s at about 1500 now) would summon the fortitude to contend with the inherent dangers of managing partition – which would mean overseeing ethnic re-cleansing of numerous locales – beggars belief.
What is so dangerous about what Mr. Parish counsels is that the likely impact that promoting the idea of inevitability of state failure will find willing ears in the EU and beyond, since it is the bureaucratic path of least resistance. That is clearly the intent. There is already pronounced desire on the part of most continental European PIC members (Germany, France, Italy and the EU institutions), plus Russia to dispense with the executive mandates of the High Representative, a Chapter 7-mandated EUFOR, and a Brcko Supervisor. For Russia, the incentive is clear. For the EU, it seems simply driven by bureaucratic inertia, wishful thinking, and actuarial policymaking. This is myopia bordering on blindness, since it would be left to deal with the results without any ability to respond – at least not with “soft power” or with the imprimatur of the UN Security Council. With these mandates, there is a legal platform to at least react, given the bathetic lack of will to deter (which would be far more effective). The prevailing policy direction in the EU is to irreversibly limit its own options.
Those who have counted on the international community to preserve the state’s integrity will draw the logical conclusion that they will have to do this themselves. Some already have made this deduction. I don’t think this is the kind of “ownership” the EU has in mind…
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