This
finally spells out the size of the hit that the Sudan took when the
new country of South Sudan was established. It looks like a hot
tribal front that must sort itself out through land exchanges and
forced migration. In practice, the sooner the better. It has worked
everywhere it has been tried.
The
folly of the Sudanese approach is that it justifies a warlike
response that is likely to cost Sudan dearly. That may not be very
plausible today but today passes.
In
the meantime a new oil pipeline is clearly in the works and will be
built quickly. South Sudan has to tighten its belt for two years at
most.
In
the meantime, the war making capacity of Sudan is sharply reduced and
the population is hitting the bricks. Perhaps the present regime is
able to learn something.
Arab Sudan Feels
the Pain of Oil Embargo
Posted by Stephen
Brown Bio ↓ on Jul 4th, 2012
While oil-producing
Arab countries have used the oil weapon to threaten and impose their
will on other states, such as the West during the 1973 Arab-Israeli
War, Arab Sudan is discovering what it is like to be on the other end
of the gun.
A dramatic drop in
revenues caused by an oil embargo placed by South Sudan against its
northern neighbor has resulted in demonstrators taking to the streets
the past two weeks in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, to protest the
skyrocketing rise in living costs. Due to substantial revenue loss,
the Khartoum government was forced to cut subsidies for basic
commodities like fuel and sugar to save “the country’s ailing
economy from collapse due to a budget deficit of $2.4 billion US
dollars.”
And while hundreds of
protesters have been arrested in Khartoum, the demonstrations are
reported to be spreading to regional centers. The latest wave of
anti-regime protests occurred last Friday after prayer at the
mosques. The police used “tear gas, batons and rubber bullets” to
brutally break up the demonstrators, some of whom were arrested. One
activist group claims nearly 1,000 Sudanese have been detained by the
security forces following the street unrest that began June 16 and
show no signs of abating.
“The heavy-handed
approach adopted by Sudanese security forces is disproportionate and
deeply concerning,” commented State Department spokeswoman Victoria
Nuland in a June 26 statement, and calls for “the immediate release
of those detained for peaceful protest.”
The wave of
demonstrations and economic problems facing the government of
Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, who is wanted by the International
Criminal Court for war crimes in Darfur, are largely of its own
making. South Sudan, the country responsible for the damaging
embargo, was carved out of Sudan a year ago, becoming the world’s
newest nation, after decades of devastating civil war with Khartoum.
Sudan is mostly Arab and Islamic. It tried to Arabize and Islamicize
by force the largely animist and Christian black African south and
even declared jihad against its fellow southern citizens in 1989 to
accomplish this unwanted goal.
About two million
people died in the ensuing, horrific conflict, mostly in the south,
while millions of black African southerners became refugees. Besides
religious hatred, the African southern Sudanese were also victims of
northern Arab racism that saw tens of thousands of their number
“legally” enslaved.Sudan, along with Pakistan and Iran, are
Islamic states and slavery is legal under the sharia law code that
rules their societies. One former black southern Sudanese slave,
Francis Bok, a Dinka who was captured at age seven in an Arab slave
raid and served a brutal Sudanese Arab master for ten years as an
animal herder, told his story here in FrontPage Magazine of
his years of slavery and escape to freedom to the United States.
The conflict between
north and south actually began almost immediately after Sudan became
independent in 1956. The first phase of the war lasted until 1972
when a truce was declared. War started up again in 1982 and continued
until 2005 when the George Bush-sponsored Comprehensive Peace
Agreement (CPA) ended hostilities and led to the creation of South
Sudan. But the CPA did not see the end of conflict in Sudan as
Khartoum also had begun a brutal war in Darfur. Sudan is still waging
war against its other black African citizens in Darfur and the
Nuba Mountains, conflicts that have caused further tens of thousands
of deaths and millions of refugees and earned it the nickname “the
warfare state.”
However, when South
Sudan became independent in a blaze of colorful celebration in 2011,
it took 75 percent of the country’s oil with it. But the landlocked
nation had no choice but to continue to ship its oil through its
former tormenter’s territory to Sudan’s port on the Red Sea for
sale to customers abroad. What caused South Sudan’s new president,
Salva Kiir, to cut off the oil, however, is that his government
believed Sudan’s transit fee was, at $36 per barrel, ridiculously
high.
“Khartoum was asking
$36 per drum, which is very unusual and not practicable,” said Anne
Itto, Deputy Secretary of South Sudan’s ruling Sudan People’s
Liberation Movement party (SPLM). “If South Sudan ever accepts to
pay such rent, it is like giving our oil away, as well.”
Another factor that
contributed to South Sudan’s decision to embargo the north was that
the Kiir government, based in its new capital of Juba, believed
Khartoum was stealing oil from the pipeline for its own use.
Khartoum’s economic war against the new state also involved
reneging on a currency agreement when the two countries split. Sudan
was supposed to wait six months to introduce a new currency but did
so within a month, which left South Sudan with $700 million of the
old currency, the Sudanese pound, which it could not convert.
Juba’s oil embargo
on Sudan has also hit its own economy hard, depriving it of 98
percent of its income. But it is determined to stick to its guns and
not be subjected to any more of Khartoum’s shoddy treatment. It
appears South Sudan is planning to build its own oil pipeline to the
Kenyan port of Lamu, avoiding the northern route altogether. Lamu is
undergoing reconstruction for this purpose. The Japanese corporation
Toyota has said it has developed a plan for the Kenyan pipeline, and
a Japanese army engineering unit has arrived in South Sudan to build
roads and for other humanitarian projects.
Since independence,
South Sudan has built strong relationships with its black African
neighbors Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia. And it should continue to do
so, since a speech ICC-wanted war criminal Omar al-Bashir made last
April at a rally indicates he has learned nothing after losing half
of his country and remains unrelenting in his hostility towards South
Sudan. Bashir virtually declared war on South Sudan when he said:
“Either we end up in Juba and take everything or you end up in
Khartoum and take everything.”
Sudan also recently
would not accept the African Union roadmap for peace with South Sudan
at ongoing negotiations in Ethiopia. No major issues, such as border
security, could be agreed upon. The border between the two countries
continues to be a war zone where conflict could break out at any
time. Sudan has also continued its bombing raids on South Sudan and
has ethnically cleansed the Abyei border region of about 100,000
Dinka tribesmen who have only now cautiously begun to return home.
In the face of such
statements, hostility and military aggression, it appears that, like
with the Palestinians, one can “peace process” with the Sudanese
all one wants, but peace will never arrive, since they don’t want
it. So in the end, if the demonstrations in Sudan grow and spread,
South Sudan should not end its embargo, even if an agreement can be
reached, since its oil weapon could be the deciding factor in making
Bashir vulnerable to a regime change, which would only benefit
everyone in the region.
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