New York — Last Friday the South Sudan Referendum Commission extended by one week the time which southerners, both inside Sudan and abroad, have to register for the poll. It is scheduled to take place over several days beginning next January 9, whereby voters will decide whether to remain part of Sudan or secede to form their own independent state.
The vote is arguably the keystone of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) between the government of Sudan and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), which ended decades of civil war that left at least two million people, mostly southerners, dead and millions more displaced. Earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton affirmed at the United Nations that "it is critical to peace and stability, not only for Sudan but also for its neighbors and the rest of Africa…that the referendum for Southern Sudan be held peacefully and on time."
The poll is considered as the most unambiguous means for the people of the South to express their will, and as the first step along the path leading to the independence and recognition of Africa's newest state. It is altogether understandable why international mediators have been devoting most of their time and efforts recently to ensuring that the referendum takes place not only on time, but in a manner least likely to leave its all-but-foregone result of a landslide vote for secession open to challenge. Mediators range from the U.S. team of Special Envoy J. Scott Gration and Negotiation Support Unit head Ambassador Princeton N. Lyman to former South African president Thabo Mbeki, head of the African Union High-Level Implementation Panel, and Haile Menkerios, special representative of the U.N. secretary-general.
I just returned from two weeks in both Juba and Khartoum with a delegation assembled by the Brenthurst Foundation of South Africa and led by former Mozambican prime minister Luísa Días Diogo and former African Union Commission deputy chairperson Patrick Mazimhaka (see our study report, "Everything is at Zero": Beyond the Referendum—Drivers and Choices for Development in Southern Sudan). I fully concur that the plebiscite must take place on schedule if a return to violence is to be averted. Such is the level of anticipation that any delay in the vote, no matter how justified from the technical and logistical point of view, would result in massive public protests whose participants could easily be incited to violence.
The most optimistic scenario for the referendum is that it is held peacefully and on time, and the regime in Khartoum accepts the results, paving the way for the uncomplicated recognition by it and other African governments as well as the rest of the international community of the new southern Sudanese state. But even the most optimistic outcome leaves plenty of room for obstacles to the security and stability of any emergent geopolitical dispensation. The failure of the two sides to reach agreement on even basic premises at the sub-regional Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) summit in Addis Ababa last week underscored this.
First, there is the still unresolved question of Abyei, the border district whose final status was supposed to be determined by a referendum held at the same time as the southern Sudan vote. With no consensus on whom should even have the right to vote there, a referendum commission has yet to be formed to organize the poll. Thus the chances are slim that one will be held there in little over a month.
What makes the situation even more combustible is the political significance which both the North and South have invested in the tiny territory – reduced since a 2009 Permanent Court of Arbitration ruling to just 10,459 square kilometers – beyond its well-known importance as a center of oil production. A number of southern leaders are ethnic Ngok Dinka with roots in Abyei, including Presidential Affairs Minister Luka Biong Deng and Regional Cooperation Minister Deng Alor Kuol, while others have staked considerable political capital on its retrocession to the South. In the North, President Omar Hassan al-Bashir and other National Congress Party (NCP) leaders have likewise exploited the cause of the nomadic Misseriya tribesmen who pass through Abyei to rally up their northern Arab constituency. No wonder an unresolved Abyei is already being described as the "Kashmir" of Sudan – and will likely prove just as noxious to peace there as the disputed Himalayan territory has been for South Asia.
Second, the division of the oil revenues, which are Sudan's largest source of foreign exchange, will be critical. While the CPA split revenue equally between the national government in Khartoum and the government of southern Sudan (GoSS) in Juba, the South's secession will leave it with approximately 80 percent of Sudan's current proved reserves, while the North will retain control of almost the entirety of the pipeline that is currently the only commercially viable outlet to the outside world. While it might seem readily apparent to the two sides to enter into some sort of deal to continue sharing revenue, this view underestimates both the political passions which make such an arrangement difficult in the South, especially if it is open-ended, as well as the dramatic impact that any diminishment of revenue would have on the budget and, ultimately, the stability of the regime in the North.
Third, aside from Abyei and the two other areas whose final status the CPA left to be determined by "popular consultations" (Blue Nile and Southern Kordofan), the world's newest prospective international boundary, the border between the North and South, remains to be demarcated despite the peace accord's provision to do so within six months of its signing in January 2005. If Eritrea's 1993 secession from Ethiopia taught any lessons, it is the danger latent in the birth of a new state whose frontiers are ill defined: the war the two countries fought between 1998 and 2000 after Eritrea tried to seize control of a disputed village left about 100,000 people dead and many more displaced. With increasingly aggressive military postures along the border – last week a Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) helicopter gunship was reported to have attacked an SPLA position in Northern Bahr el-Ghazal – even an unintentional spark can ignite a conflagration.
Fourth, the lack of certainty on the citizenship status of southerners living in the North, estimated to number more than two million, as well as the small number of northerners living in the South is an inauspicious augury of a potential flash point. I was struck by the somewhat contradictory assertions made by senior officials and other interlocutors I met during my recent sojourn in Khartoum. While they affirmed almost unanimously that Sudanese were virtually indistinguishable and well integrated, many also encouraged southerners resident in the North to register to vote in the referendum, an act which, when pressed, they acknowledged would self-identify the registrants as non-northerners. Moreover, many of those with whom I spoke, including a rather well-connected NCP leader, also argued that those eligible to vote in the referendum should become citizens of the new southern Sudanese state. Thus there is the possibility of the southerner in Khartoum who registers to vote in the referendum and maybe even casts his ballot for unity, only to subsequently find himself deprived of Sudanese nationality after his kinsmen in the South vote overwhelmingly to secede. Thus such a southerner would be forced to become a refugee in a land where his prospects would be meager indeed (see my analysis of the difficulties likely to be faced by southern Sudan, "Beyond Secession"). From cases like this any number of nightmare scenarios of violence, mass migration and humanitarian crisis might be drawn – and the seeds for future conflict sown.
The southern Sudan referendum is indeed an important milestone. However, things need to be kept in perspective: the vote is only the first of many challenges which will not only confront the Sudanese people, but also sorely test the commitment of the international community to remain engaged in helping the two sides over what is likely to be a series of seemingly intractable hurdles. Those who wish to avoid a slide back to the horrors of Sudan's two long civil wars would do well to husband their resources, political and material, accordingly.
J. Peter Pham is senior vice president of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, a think tank based in New York City.