by Julie Flint

10-06-05

When UN Secretary General Kofi Annan went to Darfur recently, he went to the front line -- to Labado, where more than a hundred people died in one of those aerial bombardments the Sudan government says isn't happening.

When he went to Southern Sudan, he went to the back line -- to Rumbek, administrative centre of the new Government of Southern Sudan (GoSS), where the children of a relief generation greeted him with banners saying: "Kofi, no food, hunger imminent."

Had Annan gone to the front line -- to a village like Payuer, on the east bank of the White Nile -- he would have received a very different message. "The war's not over."

Five months after Africa's longest-running civil war ended -- officially, at least -- Rumbek and Payuer are worlds apart. Everyone visits Rumbek; almost no one visits Payuer. Peace will not break down in Rumbek, but it could in Payuer.

Rumbek is a seethe of UN officials, relief workers and rebel commanders turned ministers-in-waiting. It has a secondary school (built by the British in 1948), roads, solid brick buildings, satellite dishes and restaurants with napkins. It has children who hold up banners that appear to have been dictated by adults. The biggest security problem the town has experienced since the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) was signed on January 9 was a fatal hit-and-run accident involving a UN driver. The driver fled into the local police station. Relatives of the victim attacked the police station, took the driver away and lynched him.

There are no cars in Payuer, no police and no paper to write slogans on. No one like Annan has ever visited Payuer, and until recently the place received no relief from the UN. Two years ago, Southerners displaced from government attacks on villages around the Adar oilfields were living in stone-age conditions there -- eating leaves and re-boiled fish heads; sleeping without blankets or mosquito nets; dying of malaria, kala-azar, diarrhoea, respiratory infections and wounds sustained during indiscriminate aerial bombardments.

Things are a little better now: there's a small market offering shoes, clothes and oil brought from government towns for the few, the very few, who can afford them. There are a couple of aid workers investigating malnutrition (and finding less than they expected).

There are cattle too, although most of them belong to Fellata -- Sudanese Muslims of West African origin who have crossed to their pre-war dry-season grazing grounds in rebel-controlled territory for the first time since 1983. There is universal relief that aerial bombardment has stopped, but also widespread scepticism about the durability of peace.

People here aren't asking for food: not one person, among scores interviewed in the course of a week, even mentioned it. Their message to the international community is this: "You forced this peace through. Now take the government militias away -- or see peace fail."

Throughout the war, the Khartoum government used ethnic militias to divide and rule, denying any hand in the resulting mayhem. "Tribal trouble," it said, as it says now in Darfur.

The CPA was negotiated, and signed, only by the Khartoum government and the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA). The militias had no involvement in it. And in Northern Upper Nile, around Payuer, they are not fading away. Far from it: they are recruiting -- at government urging, defectors say -- training and attacking. Not quite as before, it's true. But attacking nonetheless.

Since the CPA was signed, government-supported Southern militias have attacked two SPLA positions around the oilfields near Payuer and displaced Southern civilians from a number of villages. The government has responded by promoting the militia leaders, confirming local people in the belief that the attacks were government-inspired.

Militiamen who have chosen to join their kin in SPLA-controlled territory have paid a heavy price: their villages have been attacked and looted, and their families displaced.

The people of Payuer see a short-term and a long-term goal in the continued activation of the militias. Both involve oil, an industry currently worth more than a bn dollars a year to the Khartoum government.

In the short term, they say, the government means to keep oil flowing, in ever greater quantities, by forcibly removing any people who still live in its way; in the long term, Khartoum will use the militias to fight against the separation of the South (and its oil) if Southerners vote for separation in a referendum in six years' time.

The war in Southern Sudan was fought for 21 years and took more than a million lives without ever reaching the UN Security Council. Darfur was raised at the Security Council in May 2004, barely a year after the rebellion there began. The oil war that has raged in Southern Sudan from 1998 onward never captured international imagination, and indignation, in the way that Darfur has. But it was every bit as terrible. Villages were burned, civilians slaughtered, women and children rapedand mutilated.
Most of the oil discovered in Sudan is located in the South, and to exploit it the government first had to capture the land under which it lay. Hundreds of thousands of Southerners were displaced and remain displaced.

Negotiations over oil were among the most difficult in the discussions that led to the CPA. Under the agreement, existing contracts remain valid, but can be reviewed in the event of environmental or ecological problems. New contracts will be negotiated and approved by the National Petroleum Commission, a joint government-Sudan People's Liberation Movement (which controls the SPLA) body which will be the industry's regulatory body. The GoSS will get 50 % of net revenue from oil produced in the South.

But here's the rub: the CPA does not give a categorical definition of the South. It defines the border as the border which was in place at independence in 1956. But even this border was controversial, and there is already disagreement over where the giant Heglig oilfield belongs, with some SPLA officials accusing the government of altering its administrative boundaries to shift it from South to North.

If the government sets Southerner against Southerner to try to hold onto oilfields like Adar, or if it seeks to play the boundary card, the SPLA will have only itself to blame. In the weeks before peace, the SPLA signed a number of seemingly illegal deals unilaterally granting oil concessions in the South. Khartoum has challenged the agreements as violations of the CPA -- and leading industry analysts agree.

As a particularly trenchant critic of SPLA "greed" says: "We have a government which doesn't yet exist -- the "Civil Authority of New Sudan" -- handing out oil licenses, the rights to which it doesn't own, to so-called oil firms which no one has ever heard of and which appear to have none of the technical, financial, management or operational requirements to take on the " Nile swamplands which are at the centre of the disputed leases.

If this is the way the South is going to approach the post-war environment, rather than accepting 50 % of oil revenues and a role in the negotiation of any new oil licenses, then the whole peace agreement will fail.

We'll be back to another decade or two of war and the petroleum will stay in the ground for another century."

Veteran journalist Julie Flint has written extensively on Sudan and researched and co-authored a Human Rights Watch report on Darfur titled "Darfur Destroyed."

Source: The Daily Star