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Will the Past Engulf South Sudan?

Amanuel Nayr - 2/11/2011

The situation in the Horn of Africa reminds me of the Tigrigna saying, ‘may your mother die if you dare to speak out, and your father if you dare to remain silent’. This saying captures the dilemma in maintaining, forming and dividing states in the region. States have been maintained, formed and disintegrated for good causes: to avoid conflicts, civil wars and violations of human rights. Although peoples in the region still anxiously await for the best days to come, the results of these processes have been discouraging.
Attempts to preserve the integrity of states in the Horn of Africa have been futile and destructive. For example, international and regional interventions and internal attempts for preserving the integrity of Somalia have been unsuccessful. The first external interventions, US Operation Restore Hope of 1992, and UN peace keeping efforts of the time dissipated hope from the region. They provoked further militarization of Somali society. Ethiopian intervention of 2006 and subsequent deployment of peace keepers from the African Union countries further complicated the political situation. By polarizing the society, these interventions aggravated violence and resulted in humanitarian crisis. Many Somalis were forced to flee to neighbouring states and, Europe and the Middle East for their lives. The Somalis in the diaspora are the ‘lucky ones’. They are at least safe from the direct experience of violence. Those who are at home experience hardships and violence almost daily. Yet their efforts for national integration, although undertaken as early as the collapse of Mohamed Siad Barre regime in 1991, only result in the creation of additional opposition groups and increased bloodshed in the society. To date majority of Somalis yearn to see a peaceful united Somalia, and a few, disintegrated one with small states formed on clan bases. Wherever they are and whatever their dreams and aspirations they all continue to bear the humiliation of being stateless.
Struggles for statehood have had similar results. Africa’s longest revolution, the Eritrean struggle for independence, is a classic example of people’s struggle in the last decade of the 20th century. The struggle was bitter. And the result, independence of Eritrea, was dearly-won. It claimed hundreds of thousands of lives from both sides—Ethiopia and Eritrea. The carnage in battle fields was accompanied by heinous crimes committed against innocent Eritrean civilians with the overt approval and involvement of supper powers. All these costs were paid to avoid future conflicts and abuses, or at least under the guise of these ends. Ethiopian leaders, fought against the aspiration of the people of Eritrea under the pretext of maintaining peace in their country by avoiding the creation of a new sovereign state. Eritreans wanted to live in peace and dignity by creating a state of their own, a state they were denied mainly because of US intervention in the immediate post-World War Two era. While at war peoples in both sides dreamt of spending their time improving their lives rather than burning the lives and property of each other. The independence of Eritrea seemed to realise the dreams of the two peoples and peoples of the region as a whole. Unfortunately, hostile responses from old neighbouring states like the Sudan, Yemen, Ethiopia and very recently Djibouti dashed people’s hopes. The countries were reluctant to see a peaceful, prosperous and strong Eritrea, an anomaly in the region. Consequently, border wars have been fought, diplomats dismissed and civilians deported inhumanely across boundaries.
War clouds over border issue have not completely dissipated from Eritrea and Ethiopia. Young people are still in uniforms, ready to fight wars while yearning to put uniforms in factories and shops in times of peace. One day! Many of the civilians at home are engaged in a different struggle; the struggle for survival. A descent life for them is a concocted story told to children by parents and grand parents in evenings, the ‘dessert’ of many poor children in the Horn of Africa.
The region’s largest country, the Sudan, has had its share of the evils. Its history is awash with civil wars fought for equality and integrity of the country. The greatest of these, the North-South civil war, was fought for twenty one years and claimed about 1.5 million lives, that is, about one third of the Eritrean population. The civil war which officially ended in 2005 with the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement at Naivasha, Kenya, has now culminated in the formation of an independent state. Southern Sudanese are to officially declare a state of their own in few months.
The division of Sudan into two states is hoped to solve the political turmoil of the last three decades; to avoid conflicts—domestic and regional—and hence destruction of lives. Will the division of Sudan bring about peace in the two Sudans and the region? And will the states in the region and the international community welcome South Sudan to the community of states or wake up late and question its existence? History is against the new state. But time will precisely tell how the old states will respond to the birth of an oil-rich South Sudan.