By Rachel Brock, Special Contributor for Human Rights and Development Issues
Today, South Sudan teeters on the brink of collapse. Its government is split into two rival factions: one led by President Salva Kiir, and one led by former Vice President Riek Machar. Amdist a power struggle that began in late 2013 between President Kiir and Vice President Machar, the president fired his entire cabinet and accused the vice president of plotting a coup. Mr. Machar denied the coup and fled, catalyzing the civil war and leading factions loyal to each side to take up arms. The situation has since escalated to a full-scale civil war: the country has experienced only fleeting moments of peace since gaining its independence from Sudan in 2011.
Despite an impressive list of IGO-brokered peace accords, widespread fighting ravishes the land-locked East African country. Civilian centers and populated cities have become important battlefields for the two main warring factions, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA, led by President Kirr) and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-in-Opposition (SPLM-IO, led by Mr. Machar). Both sides target women and children in particular and employ mass rapes and mutilation campaigns as part of their tactics. Ethnic violence further fuels the conflict. Although both the President and the Vice President receive support across ethnic lines, President Kirr’s Dinka ethnic group has been accused of waging ethnic warfare. Mr. Machar’s Nuer ethnic group faces similar accusations.
As of March 2016, The United Nations estimated that at least 50,000 people have been killed as a result of the South Sudanese Civil War. However, the actual number is unknown—this figure of 50,000 was originally quoted by the International Crisis Group in November 2014. Two years later, the UN has stuck with a clearly-unadjusted estimate of 50,000 fatalities. Anonymous aid workers and officials recently estimate that up to 300,000 people have been killed. That is, roughly the same number of people have died during the South Sudanese Civil War as those killed in Syria during five years of fighting. [1] Up to 3 million people out of a population of 12 million are displaced: roughly 1.8 million are displaced internally, and approximately 1.2 million refugees have fled to Kenya, Sudan, and Uganda, and other neighboring states. Up to 6 million people—40% of the population [2]—now face starvation – mainly a result of the destruction of fields and crops and insufficient infrastructure that renders adequate food distribution impossible.
The nonprofit organization Fund for Peace ranks South Sudan as the second most fragile state in the world on its 2016 Fragile States Index, after first-ranked Somalia. Sudan ranks fourth. Syria sixth. Iraq does not even make the top ten. [3]
Those dubious about the ability of international organizations to negotiate peace in intrastate conflicts will not be shocked by the spectacular failures of multiple ceasefires. In January 2014 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia the east African eight-member trade bloc IGAD mediated the first ceasefire. This was shortly broken. Parties agreed on another ceasefire in August. A third was mediated in November, again Addis Ababa. It lasted a few hours. The African Union, the United Nations, the European Union, China, and the United States are among other entities that have become involved in peace negotiations. An agreement called the “Compromise Peace Agreement” was signed in August 2015. [4] However, after Mr. Machar returned to assume his role as vice president in 2016, the violence resumed, and these international guarantees and threat of sanctions held little determinant power.
Further, violence against UN and other foreign workers has escalated: “Aid workers [are] increasingly under threat—South Sudan overtook Afghanistan as the country with the highest reported number of major attacks on humanitarians in 2015. At least 62 aid workers have been killed during the conflict, and U.N. experts warn that threats are increasing in scope and brutality.” [5] This outward-lashing violence suggests that resentment against foreign intervention may be one of the only sentiments that transcends political and ethnic divides in South Sudan.
The failure of the internationally-negotiated accords to bring about lasting peace combined with retaliatory violence against foreign aid calls into question the effectiveness of international intervention. In a world starkly separated between developed and developing countries, in which fragile states are overrun by UN or state-sponsored missions and injected with foreign workers, in which inflexible templates of democracy and modernization are forced upon countries that do not meet the standards of Western ideologies, the continuing strife in South Sudan serves as a reminder that a one-size-fits-all resolution will not cure all pre-existing problems.
To be sure, the developed world has displayed its glaring inaptitude to fix the world’s problems—in most cases, its intervention has even worsened the situation. One need only think of the UN’s stunning failures in Bosnia and Rwanda, or the United States’ blunders in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria to see how good intentions can run awry… or how national interests can blind an intervening entity to the realities of a conflict and to its own limitations as a participant.
This is not to say that international intervention does not have its merit. International organizations and foreign states have regularly prevented mass atrocities and helped bring violent conflicts to an end. Using a moral compass to guide decisions should be at the center of each entity’s policy decision-making process. However, South Sudan, among other examples, proves that Western idealizations of immediately-effective democracy and rapid modernization are just that—ideals. Perhaps the international community should take a hint from its efforts in South Sudan, which locals and pundits alike have rebuked. Instead of bulldozing ahead with a template of intervention that has historically had an ambiguous-at-best effect on intrastate conflict resolution, leaders should focus on identifying what went wrong where, making systemic changes to address these failures, and re-engaging with a more nuanced understanding of the conflict. Likely conclusions of such self-reflection include accepting that change takes time and that progress is often (although not obligatorily) propelled by bloodshed.
Further foreign intervention must be precluded by the development of an intensively intimate understanding of the situation. Granted, there are multiple forms of intervention, and this article does not intend to address emergency measures that are enacted in response to humanitarian crises. But foreign intervention, on a more lasting and long-term scale, must not rush in ostentatiously treat the symptoms of intrastate conflict. It should rather treat the root causes of the deeper conflict at hand in order to work towards a lasting peace, and eventually lay the foundations for mutually-beneficial development.
Rachel Brock is a junior at UPenn studying International Relations and French. She is the Deputy Online Editor for the SIR Journal.
Sources
[1] http://www.news24.com/Africa/News/south-sudan-is-dying-and-nobody-is-counting-20160311-4
[2] https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R43344.pdf
[3] http://fsi.fundforpeace.org/
[4] http://www.newvision.co.ug/new_vision/news/1332521/south-sudan-war-list-broken-deals
[5] https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R43344.pdf
