Tentatively, Good News

Today, amazingly, the north and south in Sudan signed a peace accord, ending (in theory) a civil war that has been going on since 1983, and has killed something like 2 million people, and displaced twice that many. (The total population of the Sudan is estimated to be between 35 and 40 million; since most of the casualties and refugees have been in the south, which has considerably less than half the population, those numbers are huge.) It has caused unimaginable misery, and has in addition spilled over into other countries -- for instance the hateful Lord's Resistance Army which terrorized northern Uganda was based in southern Sudan.

A summary of the main treaty provisions from the New York Times:

"Southerners will be given some autonomy in the coming years and must create a functioning government from scratch. Armies must be merged. Mines must be removed. Decisions must be made by compromise instead of issued by fiat from Khartoum, the capital.

The agreement calls for a referendum in six years among southerners to determine whether they wish to remain part of a unified Sudan. Few expect Sudan's government to allow a split to occur, but the vote is considered a major incentive for inclusive rule in the years ahead.

There are many symbolic elements in the agreement aimed at unifying the country. Both English, which is widely spoken in the south, and Arabic, the predominant language of the north, will become the official languages. New paper money will be issued with a design reflecting the country's diversity. A dual banking system is to be set up.

The agreement calls for Islamic law to apply only in the north. Its application to Christian and animist southerners helped set off the fighting.

Revenue from Sudan's oil deposits in the south, which has also given impetus to the fighting, will be divided evenly between north and south. Communities in areas of oil production, which are mostly found in the south, will have a say in oil contracts.

Disarming the armies will be a major challenge. More than 100,000 government and rebel forces will redeploy, respecting a north-south boundary drawn in 1956. Three forces - government troops, rebel forces and integrated units made up of soldiers from both sides - will exist during the initial years of the agreement.

Implementing the treaty will be difficult. For starters, there's the integration of the armed forces, having people who were until recently trying to kill one another in the same government, and the task of writing a new constitution. They will have international help:

"About 10,000 U.N. peacekeepers and monitors are expected to come to the region, and Powell told Sudanese reporters Saturday that the United States was committed to helping rebuild the south's devastated infrastructure. According to one estimate, 5 million people in the south are served by 86 doctors, 600 nurses and 23 judges.

While the period before the referendum "allows considerable time for political and economic reforms, it will be a tense period during which myriad events could tempt the parties to renege on their commitments," said an advisory report last year for the State Department by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "The possibility that this six-year experiment will end in a chaotic, failed state scenario or the creation of two autocratic, one-party states cannot be ruled out." (cite)

Of course, there's still the unfolding catastrophe in Darfur to be dealt with. Still, if this agreement holds, it would be a truly wonderful thing; and one for which both the Bush administration and the evangelicals who have kept this issue on his front burner deserve real credit.

Comments

[Jesurgislac]

Hilzoy: and one for which both the Bush administration and the evangelicals who have kept this issue on his front burner deserve real credit.

Do they? Why?

I'm not being sarcastic: I really have no idea, and that is naturally my fault for being ill-informed.

[hilzoy]

Jes: the Bush administration pushed hard for this, and succeeded where no one had before. I'm not completely up to speed on the ins and outs of it all, but my understanding is that this is in large part because the evangelical community made it a priority. While most of the population of southern Sudan is animist, there are a number of Christians there. (The north, and the Sudanese government, are Muslim.) So there's a fair amount of Christian aid work in the South, and thus also serious interest from the evangelical community. Moreover, since they have people on the ground there, they are probably in a reasonable position to tell which ideas are just nuts, unlike Iraq, where we had no good intelligence at all, and were thus in a position to project our fantasies onto a nearly blank screen.

Add to this the following factors: (a) John Danforth, the Bush administration's point person on this, is by all accounts a reasonable guy; (b) this was under the purview of the State Department, not Defense, and thus Colin Powell, not Rumsfeld et al; (c) all the major agendas that might distort Sudan policy line up on the right side (which, according to me, is the side of pushing hard for a peace treaty that does not shaft the South.) Specifically, the Christians about whom the evangelicals are most concerned are in fact getting screwed; the government is not just 'the real bad guys' but also Muslim and a side player in terrorism; the oil is in the South (so if one were to be concerned about oil, the prospect of having it fall under the control of a more friendly government would seem like a good thing); and Sudan is peripheral to the neocons' main agenda, and thus less likely to draw their (counterproductive) involvement.

But for whatever reason, they did a good thing.