Happy One Year Anniversary of the CPA/Referendum!

Credit: Pete Muller

To celebrate this momentous occassion that signified the end to a longstanding violent conflict with the North, the US thought the most appropriate gift was to give South Sudan a load of new weapons......

After adding South Sudan to the list of countries which the US can transfer weapons to, Barack Obama said this in his memorandom:


 “the furnishing of defense articles and defense services to the Republic of South Sudan will strengthen the security of the United States and promote world peace”. (ST)

Emphasis on South Sudan now being the US' guard dog in East Africa...... congratulations?

As happy as I am on this day, I can't help but think that there are some little cynical weasels out there who are rubbing their hand together as their idea of a pre-failed state (also here and here) may have come true with today's line up of news.......

- Murle revenge attack on Lou Nuer kills 23

- South Sudan's rebels elect new leader

- Gun fight between an SS MP's family and their in laws injure four

- Cattle Herders richer than govt. officials

- Lake state MP to be investigated over child abduction

I'm probably being irrational in my beliefs, and I can't really argue against their points, but I can't help but still hold a lot of hope for South Sudan. Being there, with the spirit of the people, one can't help but think that these are merely short-term problems that will be overshadowed by the long path of success in South Sudan's future. 

South Sudan Oyeee!

Referendum Party

Once the voting is complete, everyone's gonna be pretty ready to party.....here are your instructions:

Click on people's faces in the photo to tag them. Reggaeragga will be asked to approve all tags before others can see them.

☆ ★ ☆ ★ ☆ ★ REFERENDUM PARTY ★ ☆ ★ ☆ ★
COME AND CELEBRATE SOUTHERN SUDAN’S
FINAL WALK TO FREEDOM ON 14TH JAN 2011@ MILLENNIUM
☆ ★ JUBA, SOUTHERN SUDAN ☆ ★

p.s. How clever is that picture?

Referendum OYEEEEE!!!!!

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

that is all......

Khartoum Bombing *IN* The South...

Roving Bandit is having a panic attack over Northern Antonov Bombers flying and dropping bombs in the South.......Chill out brother....it's cool.
He asks, "What on earth is going on?! Is this real? How on earth is this not a huge fucking issue? This can’t be true can it?"

Well.... SPLA (South military) is fully aware of SAF's (northern military) recent operations against Darfuri rebels (JEM, specifically), therefore, Khartoum is not bombing the South, but rather is bombing IN the south. And while usually this may have led to retaliatory attacks, I believe that the Southern Government is trying to not involve itself in any Darfur related matters to prevent any further friction with the North at this critical stage of CPA discussions, especially following recent accusations that the South has been aiding JEM rebels.
So fear not.....it isn't necessarily a Northern strategy to scare communities away from registering for the referendum (its just the indiscriminate bombing of Darfuris...).
As the Gurtong article Roving Bandit refers to says;
"A member of the Southern Sudan Referendum Committee at Gok Machar Angelo Ker confirmed the incident and said registration has been going on from yesterday without any setbacks."
All this is happening in Northern Bahr el Ghazal where at the same time;
"Authorities from the southern state of Northern Bahr el Ghazal on Monday said the high turnout for voter registration in Aweil East County has overwhelmed polling centers."

Now, if your life is boring and you do want something to worry about, allow me to refer you to interruptions of the registration process in Tonj East County due to cattle raiding by youths from Mayandit. As well as the prevention of voter registration in Koch County because the referendum commission is unable to access the area due to its 'No-Go' classification by the UN following attacks by General Gatluak Gai's insurgency.

Ma'alesh Roving Bandit. Kulu Tamam......well, sort of.

War porn or just stupid?

I received a document today of IKV Pax Christi's latest publication on Sudan entitled:
CPA Alert: The State of Sudan's Comprehensive Peace Agreement - Alert No. 2!!!! (you have to say it with a dramatic-action-movie-trailer voice).
I didn't manage to get past the cover without being shocked and disgusted by the recklessness of this publication. Have a look:



Notice anything wrong? No? Well allow me to explain......
Viewing an image of plumes of smoke rising up from tukuls (huts) in a post-conflict country tends to invoke thoughts of violence and conflict as though marauding evil-doers are running around setting fire to entire communities, probably raping and pillaging in the process. This is especially true when the word ALERT is written (massively) twice just above the image. It acts to instill the idea that this carnage will happen if the issues surrounding the CPA (and what ever Pax Christi says about it) are not addressed.......like, RIGHT NOW!
However, this photo is actually just of a demolition project that took place in Juba a year or so ago. Talk about terrorism.... it is truly a sad day to see a peacebuilding NGO try to persuade their readers by adopting scare tactics and only using pathos as their mode of argument. I say ONLY using pathos because the paper is....well, pretty shit. Mind you, I have only skimmed it, but it seems like a repetition of many other papers that talk about the same thing and speculate only of horror scenarios (good breakdown of the referendum law though). The writing just feels lazy, and the recommendations are just unimaginative and consistently just state the obvious.
But, Im probably just being extra dick-ish about it because of their (ab)use of that photo and am therefore trapped in a cognitive bias.
Nonetheless, John Ashworth.......I thought you were cool man...

Photo credit: Petterik Wiggers (wanker.....well, only if you were the one that decided to be a whore)


NB: I am pretty damn convinced and have confirmed with colleagues that this photo is in fact a Juba demolition project and not actually a conflict. Otherwise, well, I'll shamefully delete this post and go into hiding.

Edit: I got caught up in the moment and may have been excessively critical yesterday. That photo and all this constant fear mongering by so many of these publications is starting to get to me. Have some faith you miserable bastards

Referendum options

"the hopes and expectations of the people of south Sudan are so pinned on that date that it would be dangerous to postpone it because the level of frustration and disappointment would be so high for anybody to manage."

That is Pagan Amum, the Minister of Peace, on why the referendum can’t be delayed. For the past couple of weeks, there has been a growing fear amongst the government and population of South Sudan over the potential delay of the referendum. What began as a statement, that was apparently misattributed to Pagan Amum, on the possibility of delays have begun to become more of a reality as disagreements over the selection of a secretary general for the referendum commission seeks to stall the entire process.

Tarek Osman Al-Tahir, a member of the referendum commission at the headquarters in Khartoum suggests:

“We have only two choices left: skip some of the procedures, which would be unacceptable because it could affect the endorsement of the referendum result or resort to the other choice of a limited delay to the referendum timetable to complete these procedures.” source

The first choice would probably work out favourably for Khartoum as a lack of registered voters will result in insufficient votes for secession. The second choice would be, as Amum puts it, “dangerous...because the level of frustration and disappointment would be so high for anybody to manage” and we will probably start to see an increase in violence from the civilian population if not from the military itself.

On the other hand, Pagan Amum also suggests 2 possibilities:

"One of them could be that the parliament of southern Sudan takes over the process of organising the referendum fully without the north if the obstruction is coming from the north,"

"Another one would be carrying out a vote in parliament which is not necessarily a universal declaration of independence," Source

These two possibilities have been the hot topic under the mango tree recently. Well, maybe just the latter. Khartoum would never stand for the parliament of South Sudan to simply take over the process of organising the referendum, as the CPA states that the process shall be conducted by both parties. So if they were going to go against the CPA, then there really isn’t much point in even completing the referendum process, which leads us to the second option...

Amum says that carrying out a vote in parliament is not necessarily a universal declaration of independence. Now, this can be interpreted in 2 ways. Firstly, it could mean that if the commission simply skipped a few processes by doing away with voter registration and doing away with the voters all together, parliament could vote as representatives of the population on the 9^th of January. This seems somewhat feasible, but as the CPA has established deadlines for these processes, it may be rather difficult to argue against the necessity of including public voters in the referendum.

The second interpretation is a bit trickier because he says that a vote in parliament would not be interpreted as a unilateral (he says universal, but I’m sure he meant unilateral) declaration of independence. So we have to assume that either he really does not know what he is talking about, or he has some diabolical legal magic trick up his sleeve that will dazzle the world into not realising that South Sudan has in fact just unilaterally declared independence.

The thing is, the CPA and the subsequent Referendum Act doesn’t really provide sufficient information to deal with contingencies such as this. It gave a lot of power to the Referendum Commission to deal with the various issues that were bound to come up, such as the delaying of the referendum, but it seems that it didn’t really plan on the Commission having such difficulties in establishing itself. All that is left now is for renegotiations to take place. But this would only lead to a delay in the referendum, an idea that Pagan Amum has hinted to being very unlikely. Therefore, all it takes is for GoSS to come up with a good reason to decide that Khartoum is sabotaging the process and to declare the CPA null and void. This will subsequently open the doors to a unilateral declaration of independence, a decision that leaves the fate of South Sudan’s independence to the international community. But I’m sure they will work out, 22 years of war is still a 22 year relationship right?......

Sudan embassy in Washington agrees....

....with me. Not sure how I should feel, but:

"In response [to the op-ed] the Sudanese Embassy in Washington said that the suggestion that the United States offer one-year suspensions of International Criminal Court arrest warrants, "simply proves Sudan’s point: that this court is a perversion of justice and a mere political tool to accomplish political ends. For how else could the United States exert any influence on a court that it doesn’t even recognize?""

Sudan Tribune

Also in the news today,

"The ruling National Congress Party (NCP) today blamed the Sudan People Liberation Movement (SPLM) for the delay in completing the border demarcation process, a crucial step in the run-up to the South Sudan referendum scheduled for January 2011."

It would be really interesting if the NCP had only come out with this statement after reading the NY Times Op-Ed piece, claiming that:

"The ruling National Congress Party has stalled on virtually every pertinent part of the peace agreement, and the national and local elections in April — which most international observers agree were stained by fraud — are a foreboding precedent," Sudan Tribune

"Err, we're not stalling, your the one whose totally stalling. We can't wait for the referendum" - NCP