Is the world’s youngest country about to go to war – again?
| Johannesburg
The world’s youngest country is no stranger to conflict. South Sudan fought a two-decade war for its independence from Sudan, which it achieved in 2011. Then, just over two years later, a bitter civil war broke out.
That conflict ended in 2018 with a wobbly peace deal between the country’s two top leaders, President Salva Kiir and his rival, Riek Machar. But now, their power-sharing agreement is fracturing. And fighting has broken out between government forces and a local militia in the country’s northeast.
All of this brings the oil-rich nation to the brink of its second civil war in 15 years.
Why We Wrote This
With the world’s attention on wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, an uptick in violence across Africa – from South Sudan and Sudan to Congo – risks going ignored.
How did we get here?
First of all, South Sudan is in bad shape. The economic situation has been deteriorating since the country’s main oil export pipeline was damaged a year ago. At the same time, the military is fractured, lacking a unified command, and long overdue elections have been repeatedly postponed. Add to that widespread food insecurity and 2 million people displaced within the country, as well as the worst cholera outbreak since its independence.
All that means “The country is a powder keg waiting for a match,” says Moses Chrispus Okello, a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies, a think tank headquartered in South Africa.
That match? Mr. Kiir and Mr. Machar.
The two men have a long history of animosity. They fought a war that left some 400,000 people dead. In part, that conflict was drawn along ethnic lines. Mr. Kiir is Dinka, the country’s largest ethnic group, and Mr. Machar, is Nuer, the second-largest.
When the war ended in 2018, the two formed a unity government, but it was always precarious because of its bitter origins.
Recently, there has been much jockeying over who is first in line to replace Mr. Kiir, who is in his 70s, when he leaves office. Analysts say he is trying to sideline Mr. Machar, who is now first vice president.
In early March, a militant group called the White Army attacked a South Sudanese military encampment in the country’s northeast. Mr. Kiir claims the mostly Nuer group is affiliated with Mr. Machar, who denies the allegation.
The same week, Mr. Kiir ousted Mr. Machar’s allies from the Cabinet and arrested several Machar-aligned ministers. He even briefly had troops surround Mr. Machar’s home.
Meanwhile, as Mr. Kiir was maneuvering his pieces in Juba, the White Army downed a United Nations helicopter evacuating troops in the northeast, killing more than two dozen people. Mr. Kiir has since launched airstrikes and warned civilians to evacuate the area.
Mr. Machar, meanwhile, denies links to the White Army. All this leaves the country “teetering on the edge of a relapse into civil war,” warned Nicholas Haysom, chief of the U.N.’s large mission to the country, on Monday.
Aren’t there a lot of conflicts in this part of Africa? Is there a chance this could turn into a regional war?
It’s entirely possible. Mr. Okello, the researcher, calls it “an extremely volatile internal situation within a chaotic neighborhood, surrounded by anxious neighbors.”
Upper Nile state, where the clashes with the White Army are happening, sits at the confluence of Sudan and Ethiopia. Both face serious fighting of their own. Sudan has been engulfed in a brutal civil war for almost two years. In Ethiopia, tensions are flaring both internally and with neighboring Eritrea, against whom Ethiopia has fought a war before.
Meanwhile, at least one foreign military force has already arrived in South Sudan. This month the Ugandan government sent special forces troops to Juba to back up Mr. Kiir’s government. Mr. Machar’s political party reacted by pulling out of some parts of the 2018 peace deal.
That sounds really bad. Is there anything that can be done to stop the situation from escalating?
There is still some space, small though it might be, for optimism.
For one thing, time is on the side of peace. The rainy season is coming, and that makes military maneuvers difficult. South Sudan often struggles with flooding and has few paved roads.
“Logistical challenges will make large-scale armed operations more difficult,” wrote Jan Pospisil, an associate professor at the Centre for Peace and Security at Britain’s Coventry University, in a recent op-ed in The Conversation. “This period could allow for confidence-building measures on the ground between Nuer communities and the army.”
On Monday the U.S. State Department echoed that sentiment, writing on the social platform X that Mr. Kiir and Mr. Machar “must engage in direct dialogue to curb escalating violence.”
Dr. Pospisil argues that the international community must go further and clearly denounce Mr. Kiir’s arrests of opposition figures.
Meanwhile, Mr. Haysom of the U.N. says the success of any deescalation effort will depend on Mr. Kiir and Mr. Machar. The two leaders, he says, must “put the interests of their people ahead of their own.”
