Peter Fabricius says it’s hard to see how AU leaders will give strife-torn South Sudan a third chance, especially since the country has failed to implement many of the past agreements.
South Sudan cannot afford to miss this opportunity for a second chance,” Donald Booth, the US Special Envoy to the Sudans, was saying just last Thursday. “It will be difficult to get a third chance.”
Two days later, the South Sudanese were doing their best to blow that second chance as vicious fighting once again erupted between the troops of President Salva Kiir and his vice-president-cum-mortal enemy Riek Machar in the capital Juba.
South Sudan’s first chance was its secession from Sudan five years ago, this past Saturday, after about 30 years of war between the south and the Sudan government in Khartoum. Kiir and Machar blew that promising first chance when the bitter personal rivalry between them ignited a major political and ethnic civil war in December 2013.
Untold atrocities later, the two leaders grudgingly signed a ceasefire and peace agreement last August, under heavy pressure from neighbouring countries and the international community.
Kiir would remain as president and Machar would return, in a transitional government, to the VP position he occupied before Kiir fired him from the post mid-2013.
The problem was that Kiir and Machar had implemented very little of the August agreement, Booth said.
Kiir and Machar met under further regional and international pressure in June, where they agreed to a number of actions to kick-start the stalled implementation of the August 2015 agreement.
But as Booth told journalists last Thursday, they hadn't implemented any of those - like lifting the emergency, releasing prisoners of war or deciding how many regional states there should be within the state of South Sudan. Kiir unilaterally expanded the number of these states from 10 to 28 last year, which greatly aggravated the mistrust and friction between him and Machar.
That move also provoked localised tension and violence among different ethnic groups as they suddenly found themselves being governed by leaders from other groups, or otherwise losing the autonomy they had enjoyed before.
Booth said Kiir and Machar had not even been able to agree on the terms of reference of a boundary commission that is supposed to resolve that issue.
Critically, Kiir and Machar had also been unable to make any progress so far on implementing security agreements, such as cantoning and registering combatants; or creating a joint integrated police force to take over security in Juba; or joint military groups which were supposed to go around the country to ensure implementation of the August ceasefire.
In its usual fashion of massively ducking responsibility, the South Sudan government had blamed a lack of funding from the international community for the failure to implement all these agreements.
“And that is clearly not the case,” Booth said, adding that when the South Sudanese reached agreement among themselves on all these issues “and showed that they have some seriousness of purpose”, the money would flow.
Until the dust has settled, it won't be clear what triggered the current clashes.
Kiir’s people say Machar’s attacked them at a roadblock. Machar’s people say Kiir’s people attacked Machar’s house.
What is abundantly clear is that all the elaborately negotiated security measures which were precisely meant to avoid such a clash had not been put in place.
Though he doesn't say so, one could read between the lines of Booth's description of the problem that Kiir has been the most remiss in not keeping his side of the bargain.
But Machar is no angel either.
Booth said these unresolved issues would be handed over to the AU and Igad at the AU summit in Kigali this week. Now they also have a new outbreak of open warfare to try to deal with.
It's uncanny how some such crisis always seems to erupt just before an AU summit.
Yet it's hard to see how all the continental leaders and all their international backers are going to be able to put Humpty Dumpty together once again and give the wretched South Sudanese a third chance.
Foreign Bureau