Debating Ideas reflects the values and editorial ethos of the African Arguments book series, publishing engaged, often radical, scholarship, original and activist writing from within the African continent and beyond. It offers debates and engagements, contexts and controversies, and reviews and responses flowing from the African Arguments books. It is edited and managed by the International African Institute, hosted at SOAS University of London, the owners of the book series of the same name.
African Arguments is publishing a three-part series on the unfolding situation in South Sudan. Part one, available here, looks at the dynamics of the current conflict. Part two, available here, considers whether the current conflict spells the end of the peace process, the role of the Ugandan forces, the consequences of the war in Sudan on South Sudan, and the politics of succession. Part three, available here, considers what is likely to happen next, and possible policy responses from the UN and the diplomatic community. All three parts are written as a series of questions and answers.
It is a measure of how dark the situation is in South Sudan that the prospect of the country being split apart by Sudan's warring factions is less grim than its likely fate, which is to be fractured beyond repair. Already, the RSF and the UPDF are carving up parts of the country as enclaves for business ventures. Rather than seeing a civil war between two parties with distinct regional backers, it is far more likely that South Sudan's long-term future is to be picked to pieces by more powerful regional actors (state and non-state), that can enter into agreements with whatever fractious military elite in Juba has cobbled together enough of a coalition to momentarily claim the state.
But that is the country's long-term prospect. In the short-term, there is no possibility of a return to 2013 or 2016--so the diplomats fearfully fleeing Juba can return now. The SPLM/A-IO is even weaker than it was in 2018, when it sued for peace after being comprehensively defeated. The forces actually responsive to its leadership are minimal. The next few months will see Kiir's regime continue a concerted military campaign against the Nuer people. It will be exceptionally violent and yet undertaken under the banner of the 'peace agreement.'
This campaign was undertaken to win hearts and minds over to Bol Mel, and crush whatever remains of the opposition in South Sudan. By 'opposition,' I do not mean the SPLM/A-IO, but the real militarized vernacular forces that constitute resistance to Kiir's regime, such as the White Army.
This military campaign is unlikely to be successful. Popular anger amongst the Nuer about the government violence has already led to defections from the SSPDF in Unity state. Bol Mel and his Ugandan proxies cannot wipe out the White Army: it is a popular mobilization in a country awash with guns. It cannot be disarmed. It could only be eliminated: but that would be analogous to the elimination of the Nuer people as such, and might, paradoxically, reconstitute a unified Nuer opposition in the country.
The situation in South Sudan is ripe for revolution. The population is deeply discontented. The government is an occupying army. The opposition, in Nairobi, Kampala, and Khartoum, is crying out for ammunition, to allow it to express, militarily, the population's anger. The problem for the opposition is that there is no regional or international support for a struggle against Kiir's regime. SAF might fund forces at the border, but that is to protect its own territory against the RSF and the SPLM/A-N, rather than to overthrow Kiir. (The Sudanese intelligence services look at the mess that is the opposition in South Sudan and concludes it is better the devil you know...)
The situation in Juba will likely only change when Kiir tries to arrange his succession, or becomes old or ill enough for his coalition to want to take preventative action, and depose him in a palace coup. Then, it is likely that South Sudan will fall into a real civil war, with the opposition enlivened by the split inside the Dinka forces arrayed around Kiir. Such a war would not be between two belligerents, but would be as shattered and fragmented as the country that R-ARCSS, and donor support, has produced.
How should the international community respond?
The so-called international community, by which people really mean the EU and the Troika - the US, the UK, and Norway - has spent the last seven years trying to resuscitate a corpse called R-ARCSS. The Troika still takes this to be its mission.
The first response the international community must make to the current situation is to recognize that the peace agreement is dead.
The country is more fragmented than the bipartisan assumptions hard-coded into the R-ARCSS. Even if, by some miracle, the EU could ensure that all the SPLM/A-IO figures that the government detained in Juba were released, this would not change the situation in South Sudan. Opposition forces on the ground are largely disconnected from the SPLM/A-IO leadership. A peace deal in Juba will not stop the government assault. And even if it did - heaping unlikely conjecture upon unlikely conjecture - it would not change the fact that this agreement is going nowhere: it was merely a vehicle for the dominance of Kiir's regime, and it can bring neither elections nor democracy to South Sudan.
There is a position taken by some analysts and diplomats, who must remain nameless, that even if the R-ARCSS didn't bring development to South Sudan, or enable democracy, at least it staved off catastrophe. These hardened realists pat themselves on the back for their role in avoiding calamity. 'We are the adults in the room', they tell themselves. Children like saying things like that. The reality, one must tell the realists, is that they have presided over a catastrophe. The R-ARCSS agreement itself has been an engine for contentions over political positions and land. It has eroded vernacular democratic institutions. Upholding the R-ARCSS has not staved off calamity but allowed it to take hold. South Sudan is poorer and more violent than it was in 2018. More of its population is dependent on humanitarian aid. Kiir's regime is more dictatorial; the opposition more fractured. Continuing to inhale the fantasy that R-ARCSS has brought stability to South Sudan is bad for all of us, especially the South Sudanese people.
In one conversation with a diplomat last week, I blurted out that his government should arm the White Army. They are a communitarian self-defence force. Over the last two decades, as a predatory state has emerged in Juba - facilitated by the oil revenues and donor funds that gave it substantive autonomy from the South Sudanese population - local self-defence forces have emerged around the country, to resist the violence encroachments of Kiir's regime. These forces include the Monyomiji of Eastern Equatoria, the Gelweng, Titweng, and Titbai of Bahr el Ghazal, and the Nuer self-defence forces of both Akobo and Nasir. No one expects the South Sudanese security services to defend them: for it is these forces, the SSPDF and the NSS, that have displaced and destroyed the communities of South Sudan. It is instead communitarian self-defence forces about which one might say: 'They are now community police.' To be sure, these forces are easily instrumentalized by politicians and turned against other communities, but they represent the only militarized forces in South Sudan that have a shred of popular legitimacy.
They are pockets of resistance to a despotic state.
The diplomat, of course, told me that I was mad, albeit in rather more diplomatic language. But which is more insane? To offer support to groups that elect leaders according to a rich vernacular democratic tradition, and that are fighting for their lives against a predatory regime, or to fund a government that is bombing its own people?
Khalas kifaya. That is what Michael Makuei, the South Sudanese Minister of Information, said when he was asked about the aerial bombardment of civilians in Nasir. Enough is enough. He was talking about the White Army, but the international community needs to take a deep breath, and say it about Kiir's regime.
Enough is enough. Khalas kifaya, Salva. We must recognize that it is the state-building enterprise itself that has destroyed South Sudan.
The international community, by which I mean the Troika and the EU - and perhaps the Germans if they ever get back to Juba - should do the following:
- Acknowledge that Kiir's regime has no political legitimacy and is killing South Sudanese civilians. The diplomats should have the strength to actually say this in public, rather than meekly calling for the implementation of Chapter II of R-ARCSS, as R-JMEC - the body that super-intends the peace agreement - recently did.
- Acknowledge that this peace agreement is going nowhere, and has been definitively abrogated by Kiir's regime.
- Systematically remove international support from Kiir's regime, which receives money from every conference or workshop the diplomats hold in hotels owned by its politicians; which gains capital from the properties it rents out to embassies; which takes money from trucking companies used by humanitarians; and which profits from the development projects of the World Bank and related institutions. All this support should be immediately removed from a dictatorial regime killing its own civilians. Why should the international community be financially supporting ethnic cleansing?
- The bulk of the humanitarian operations in the country should be removed from Juba, and put either in the field, or run from outside South Sudan, to minimize the amount of humanitarian money that is handed over to a dictatorial regime.
- Support, diplomatic and financial, should be given to political actors who genuinely want to engage in a discussion on federalism in South Sudan, and that represent actually rich vernacular cultures of democracy inside the country, including the Nuer prophets. Support should not be given to the astro-turfed Juba-based civil society fictions with which diplomats waste so much time.
- Serious diplomatic pressure should be put on the UN to force the mission in South Sudan to actually do its job (see below).
- Failing that, the international community should consider other ways of ensuring the protection of civilians in South Sudan, including the arming of local militia forces, including the White Army. Diplomats tell me that they can't deal with non-state actors, but that was never true of the militias that America funded in Iraq, Libya, and Syria.
This is what the international community should do--but won't.
Instead, on 20 March, just a few days after the government started bombing Nasir, the UNDP and UNICEF, with funding from the UN Peacebuilding Fund, launched a $4 million program with Kiir's regime entitled: 'Community Violence Reduction Partnerships with White Nile and Sobat River Communities.' One of the goals of the project - and you cannot make this up - is to assist 'with the peaceful and sustainable closure of the unauthorized checkpoints...[On the Sobat river].'
In the entire policy document setting out a project to reduce conflict on the Sobat, one cannot find a single mention of government violence.
What should UNMISS do?
UNMISS, the UN Mission in South Sudan, has the most robust protection of civilians mandate that a peacekeeping mission has ever received. As per Resolution 2729, UNMISS is authorized to 'use all necessary means to implement its mandate,' including:
Ensure effective, timely and dynamic protection of civilians under threat of physical violence, through a comprehensive and integrated approach, irrespective of the source and location of the violence. (My use of bold.)
At the beginning of the South Sudanese civil war, UNMISS unquestionably saved thousands of lives when it flung open the gates of its bases and created the Protection of Civilians (PoC) sites.
Since then, the paper on which the mission records the protection of civilians has been unsullied. In 2016, during a Padang Dinka militia assault on the Malakal PoC site, UNMISS peacekeepers failed to intervene to protect the Shilluk residents of the camp. Doctors Without Borders recorded a 'glaring failure' to protect civilians. UNMISS failed to intervene in violent attacks by government forces on Tonj East in Warrap in 2020, and during violent government campaigns in Unity and Upper Nile states in 2021 and 2022. In December 2022, some 20,000 Shilluk fled the advance of White Army forces along the west bank of the White Nile to the UN operating base in Kodok, Upper Nile. UNMISS denied them entry to the base, and refused to robustly reinforce its defences, as conditions were considered too dangerous for the peacekeepers. This is only a tiny fragment of the long litany of UNMISS failures. During the current conflicts in Western Equatoria, Western Bahr el Ghazal and Upper Nile, UNMISS decided to try to save one SSPDF general, but has not protected a single civilian. Hundreds have died.
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What UNMISS should do is make a decision.
Either it should implement its mandate in South Sudan, or it should leave the country. No one needs to spend a billion dollars to hear the sort of bromides the mission is currently spouting. Rather than commending Kiir for 'reassuring citizens that there shall be no return to war,' the regime must be called out for what it is doing: conducting violent military campaigns against civilian populations.
The UN mission must:
- Immediately reopen Protection of Civilian (PoC) sites in Juba and Bentiu with robust force protection.
- Hasten to open temporary operating bases (TOBs) in places experiencing aerial bombardment or ethnic cleansing, including Akobo, Tambura, Nagero, Nasir, Longochuk, and Ulang. These ToBs must be prepared to receive fleeing civilians and operate as PoC sites.
- If it would take too long to set up TOBs in areas of active conflict, peacekeepers must be immediately moved to areas in which civilians are actively under threat and offer dynamic protection to the people of Upper Nile, Western Equatoria, and Western Bahr el Ghazal, irrespective of the source and location of the violence. Just as it says in the UNMISS mandate. Peacekeepers should be moving, right now, to Nasir, ready to protect the population from the forthcoming government ground offensive. Such protection should not consist of useless patrols, but of hardened forces ready to actually fight to protect civilians.
This year, civilian populations across the country have been targeted by political violence. UNMISS has a mandate to 'prevent, deter, and stop violence against civilians' using 'all necessary means.' It simply has not done so. It has categorically and comprehensively failed. As the government burns villages and drop bombs, not a single peacekeeper has intervened to protect a civilian. Not a single peacekeeper has fired on a government soldier. Instead, UNMISS keeps trying to rescue them. All the peacekeepers' weapons, like the paper that records how many civilian lives the mission has saved, are curiously untouched.
Joshua Craze is a writer with more than a decade of experience conducting research in Sudan and South Sudan. His essays are published in the New York Review of Books and the New Left Review, among many other publications. He is finishing a book for Fitzcarraldo Editions on war and bureaucracy in South Sudan.
