*South Sudanese President, Salva Kiir Sudanese and President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan in Khartoum
The conflicts in Sudan and South Sudan
are increasingly merged. Halting drift toward a Uganda-Sudan proxy war on the
Sudan-South Sudan border
requires better coordination by regional organisations and more engagement by
influential outside powers, notably China
and the U.S. ,
including via the UN Security Council. A UN-imposed arms embargo, improved
border monitoring, and a UN panel of experts mandated to study the funding of
South Sudan’s war are needed.
Neither the 2005 peace agreement that ended Sudan ’s
second civil war nor South Sudan ’s 2011
independence brought stability. The wars in the two Sudans
began to come together when conflict broke out in South
Sudan in December 2013. The International Crisis Group’s latest
report, Sudan
and South Sudan’s Merging Conflicts, analyses the cross-border
alliances that have formed and argues that strong measures are required by the
UN Security Council as well as more strategic engagement by the wider
international community in support of mediation efforts by the regional bodies,
the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) and the African Union
(AU).
The report’s major recommendations include:
· To
better link the stalled Sudan and South Sudan peace processes and ensure
developmentsin one are not undermined by deterioration in the other, the AU,
IGAD, and their international partners, in particular the U.S. and China, must
increase coordination, perhaps via a senior forum including the AU High-Level
Implementation Panel (AUHIP) for Sudan and South Sudan, IGAD and key
international actors.
·Employing
both pressure and positive inducements, China
and the U.S. must deepen
their engagement to persuade Uganda
to use its military support as leverage to press the South
Sudan government to work toward a mediated agreement. China and the U.S.
should also press the South Sudan government to end support for the armed
opposition in Sudan , and Sudan ’s government to remain neutral and
constructively engage in the mediation in South Sudan .
· To
slow regional arms flows, prevent further political deterioration, identify
potential cessation-of-hostilities violations and advance IGAD’s political
dialogue, the UN Security Council should impose an arms embargo on all parties
in South Sudan .
· The
Security Council should establish a panel of experts to examine the war’s
funding and propose concrete measures within six months for stopping South
Sudanese leaders from using oil revenues to fund the war and enable
cessation-of-hostilities violations.
· The
Security Council should consider mandating the UN Interim Security Force in
Abyei (UNISFA) to independently monitor the movement of armed groups and
weapons along and across the border and identify sources of weapons and
violations of the Cooperation
Agreement and Cessation of Hostilities Agreement.
“Halting drift toward a Uganda-Sudan proxy war
requires finding ways to end cross-border interventions, implement workable
border measures and better coordinate mediation so peace can be made for the
interconnected wars”, says Comfort Ero, Africa Program Director. “The
alternative is more escalation and destabilisation, humanitarian crises and
atrocities”.
“New strategies to support regional efforts should
begin with more engagement from the UN Security Council, particularly the U.S. and China ”, says Jean-Marie GuĂ©henno,
Crisis Group President & CEO. “Both pressure and more positive inducements
are needed to change the calculations in Kampala ,
Khartoum and Juba ”.
No comments:
Post a Comment