Culture | Jaw-jaw, war-war

Was the creation of the world’s newest country a wise idea?

Born of bloodshed, South Sudan continues to suffer

First Raise a Flag. By Peter Martell. Hurst; 320 pages; £25.

A Rope from the Sky. By Zach Vertin. Pegasus Books; 528 pages; $29.95. Amberley Publishing; £20.

South Sudan’s Civil War: Violence, Insurgency and Failed Peacemaking By John Young.Zed Books; 256 pages; $29.95 and £18.99.

IN THE MORNING they would pray together, in the evening they would drink. In east Africa’s finest hotels enmities evaporated. Foreign observers watched with surprise as battlefield opponents embraced as old friends. They negotiated in luxury. In 2014 alone South Sudan’s warring elites racked up a tab of well over $20m, shuffling between the Sheraton and the Radisson in Addis Ababa. Over two years, 11 rounds of talks were held in three Ethiopian cities. “A bunch of spoiled brats,” a young South Sudanese woman remarked to Zach Vertin, a former American diplomat. “Everything is always focused on them.”

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War, and peace talks. That was the routine of South Sudanese powerbrokers for decades. Negotiations to end the south’s first war with the north were held in the palace of Haile Selassie, then Ethiopia’s emperor, in 1971. An agreement signed in Kenya in 2005 ended the fighting that had erupted again in 1983, and set the south on its road to independence, which it finally achieved in 2011. The next year the two sides returned to Addis Ababa to put a stop to a skirmish between Sudan and its new neighbour, the world’s youngest state.

Then, in late 2013, South Sudan plunged into an anarchic civil war; many failed agreements between the combatants preceded the most recent, which was struck in Khartoum in September. The bigwigs “settled into a comfortable routine”, writes Mr Vertin in one of several new books about the country. “[They] collected per diem allowances, and waxed adversarial, while their country burned.”

December 15th marks five years since tribal and personal rivalries ignited the latest conflict, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and the flight of around a third of South Sudan’s population. The country is now in a period of relative but uneasy calm; ceasefire violations persist with numbing regularity. As a humanitarian disaster it rivals Syria. As a study in the shortcomings of liberal internationalism, it comes close to Iraq and Libya. Now three authors ponder the extent of Western responsibility in the making—and breaking—of South Sudan. Together they also point to a deeper question: what makes a nation?

“Southern Sudan…has no history before AD 1821,” wrote a former British colonial officer dismissively in 1961. He was wrong, says Peter Martell, a British journalist who lived in Juba, the capital, for three years up to the independence referendum in 2011 (see map). The country is a patchwork of tribes, dominated by the Dinka and, below them, the Nuer. There are animosities and divisions. But the constituent groups share foundational myths and a common history of slavery and oppression—by Turks, then by Arabs, the north Sudanese and the British. “Southern Sudan was conquered with force and is ruled by force, the threat of force and the memory of force,” wrote E.E. Evans-Pritchard, a British anthropologist, in 1938.

To counter the trauma, South Sudanese told legends which recalled the ancient Kingdom of Kush, and traced a common ancestral lineage to it. They hoped that they too would be kings one day.

Many imagined that resistance to foreign dominion would be enough to forge a national identity. “After so much struggle by the people of South Sudan, the United States of America welcomes the birth of a new nation,” President Barack Obama proclaimed when the new flag was hoisted on July 9th 2011. After the disasters of Afghanistan and Iraq, South Sudan was seen as a chance for liberal nation-builders to turn a new page. Blessed with vast oil reserves, the new state had a GDP per head that was higher than India’s.

Earnest Westerners rushed to lend a hand. Like British colonialists, they imagined the place as a tabula rasa. International experts arrived bearing technocratic proposals for equitable management of the oil wealth. They helped draft an elaborate blueprint for a modern liberal democracy. Mr Martell was appalled by the naivety. He recalls being cornered by a young American graduate at a party thrown by an aid agency in Juba. “Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, man,” said the neophyte (paraphrasing John Adams), as he outlined his work on the constitution.

All this was fantasy. America, with the support of its allies, handed the new state over to a kleptocratic elite with precious little support among ordinary South Sudanese. The Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), the insurgent group-turned-ruling party, had long been feted by a motley crew of foreign do-gooders, mostly Americans, of whom the most famous was George Clooney. These outsiders blinded successive administrations in Washington to the rebels’ shortcomings.

John Young, an academic with close connections to some of the group’s leaders, is especially critical of them. He argues that unlike similar movements in neighbouring Uganda, Ethiopia and Eritrea, which took power a generation earlier, the SPLM never showed any interest, let alone competence, in administering its liberated territories. “They are a diaspora elite,” one high-ranking African diplomat scoffed to Mr Vertin. “No roots! No roots at all.”

The high price of statehood

Messrs Martell, Vertin and Young differ over the extent of the West’s culpability for the mess. But they are united in their pessimism about the future. Mr Young, a leftist critic of American foreign policy, dwells at some length on the notion that simply allowing the sputtering civil war to rage might in the long term have yielded more effective state-building than peace talks mediated (and paid for) by the international community. He points out that conflicts in Eritrea, Ethiopia and Uganda ended on the battlefield, with almost no international involvement. In a similar hardbitten vein Mr Vertin wonders whether, like the American civil war, South Sudan’s misery will “ultimately prove an awful but formative part of its becoming a viable state”.

It is a bleak thought. So is Mr Young’s argument that independence itself was a mistake. Nothing like South Sudan—a country created from scratch with almost no history of self-rule—had ever been attempted before. South Sudanese national identity, so far as it existed, was mostly defined in opposition to enemies. Today, internal ethnic resentments are so bitter that it is hard to see how they can ever be overcome. In 2016, two years into the civil strife, Mr Vertin was shocked to hear an otherwise reasonable young Nuer man whisper: “Pssh, these Dinka…just animals.” In Uganda Mr Martell meets a 21-year-old woman who has been beaten to make her miscarry, “part of a wider pattern of [intra-south] ethnic cleansing designed to drive people away for generations to come.”

Yet gruelling as independence has proved, there might not have been a plausible alternative. Autonomy within a federation centred on Khartoum in the north was once the goal of the SPLM. But such a dream was probably illusory: north-south racial animus was too entrenched. In the north, the appearance of southerners was associated with slaves. The south had always been kept subjugated and separate. When Ryszard Kapuscinski, a Polish writer, visited in 1960 he needed a special visa to go there, in addition to his Sudanese one.

Mr Martell meets an elderly man whose seven children have been killed or scattered by the fighting. He asks whether, in the end, it was all worth it. The man replies without blinking: “Oh, it was worth it. Now we have a country.”

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "Jaw-jaw, war-war"

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