The ‘Middle Kingdom’ has a new vision of the role it plays in Africa after meeting the South Sudanese rebels, writes Peter Fabricius.
The civil war in South Sudan means many different things to many different people, most of them unpleasant. China will remember it, though, rather uniquely, as the first occasion when it met the opposition in an African conflict – or maybe in any context.
Zhong Jianhua, China’s Special Representative for African Affairs, recalls how soon after the fighting erupted in South Sudan’s capital Juba on December 15 last year, he travelled to Addis Ababa, with ambassadors of interested countries and regional leaders “where I met for the first time with the delegation of the (South Sudanese) opposition.
“That was pretty dramatic for us. I think for the last two or three decades we were quite rigid about non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries,” Zhong said in an interview last week in the familiar surrounds of the Chinese embassy where he was the previous ambassador.
“This is a typical domestic conflict. Usually when this happens, we try to avoid making direct contact with the opposition because, to some extent we think, it’s a rebel force.
“When you talk to a rebel force that means stepping into internal affairs.”
But his foreign minister decided this time that China needed to meet the opposition too. That decision was based on a pledge which then Chinese President Hu Jintao made at the 2012 conference of the Forum for China Africa Co-operation in Beijing.
Hu promised that China would do more to establish stability and peace in Africa. “On the basis that we understand that sometimes this is also crucial to the development of the continent,” Zhong said, explaining, in rather tortuous Chinese fashion, how Beijing reconciled its new approach to its long-standing policy of non-interference as actually an aspect of its equally long-standing policy of helping African development.
“This was the first time our leaders talked about doing something on peace and security for Africa. So this is the time when we need to fulfil what we have promised.”
Zhong was in South Africa mainly to meet Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa’s Special Representative on South Sudan, and former President Thabo Mbeki, the African Union’s special envoy on Sudan, to discuss the African peacemaking efforts in South Sudan which have yet to bear real fruit.
Zhong acknowledged, though, that China’s significant commercial interest in South Sudan’s oilfields also contributed to Beijing’s decision to get involved in the conflict. “We have billions of dollars of investment in the oilfields, starting from the 1990s. When they split the oilfields after the independence of the South, 70 percent of the oilfields belong to South Sudan. That also goes for our investment there.”
The oilfields generate about 97 percent of South Sudan’s revenue. In 2012 South Sudan stopped production because of a dispute with Khartoum about the fees it was charging to pump the oil through its territory to be shipped from Port Sudan on the Red Sea.
That’s when Zhong gave the South Sudan government a stern lecture about the need to put the interests of the country above its own, invoking the example of Mao Tse-tung.
The South Sudanese leaders had told him; “‘we fought without oil revenue in the jungle so we can still carry on without that.’
“I said no you cannot, its totally different now…you have a different responsibility after you have brought this country to independence. You have a serious promise to fulfil to your own people.
“They were very proud people. They really felt very excited about their own independence. They seemed to forget they have a duty to their own people.”
The South Sudanese eventually accepted his advice, he believes, because “they saw me as their friend and brother… we had become pretty close.” This frank advice might not have been acceptable coming from say, a Western government, he implies.
And so oil production resumed in September last year. By now South Sudan had expelled most of the oil engineers, technicians and workers, who were mostly from the North.
China began training South Sudanese to fill the vacancies. But three months later the civil war broke out in South Sudan in December. “So we never had an opportunity to train enough South Sudanese.
“It put us in quite a difficult situation that we have almost 300 (Chinese) people working in the field. And their lives are in danger.” One small oilfield in the northeast had already been overrun and destroyed by anti-government rebel forces.
In such circumstances cautious China would normally have evacuated all its citizens as it had pulled out 30 000 of its workers from the Libyan oil fields when civil war erupted there in 2011.
But South Sudan was different, Zhong said. Unlike in Libya, the oilfields were still operating and the revenue they produced was the lifeblood of the country.
“They have a lot relying on them; 97 percent of government revenue which provides the country with what they critically need; food, fuel for electricity, medicine and even the chemicals they need to run the water plants.
“And the government requested us not to close down the oilfields. We made a pretty difficult decision to maintain a minimum number of Chinese workers in the field to maintain production.
“Losing that interest would not significantly affect any Chinese peoples’ lives. Losing that interest for South Sudan could be life and death. That’s why we risk our peoples’ lives to be there. To keep it still in production.”
China hired a large aircraft which was put on standby at an airstrip in the oilfields, ready to evacuate all the Chinese workers on a single flight, if necessary.
And this was when Zhong really implemented that decision which had come all the way from the top in Beijing, to engage the South Sudanese opposition. He gave them much the same lecture he had earlier given the South Sudan leadership as a whole when it shut down oil production in 2012.
“I persuaded them that this is the most important property not only of the government but also of the people of South Sudan. Look at this country; the biggest, the most important for the survival of the people is this oilfield.
“Whoever attacked the oilfield would have very serious questions to answer to their own people,” he said, adding that he had told the rebels that whoever governed South Sudan in the future would definitely need the oilfields for the economic recovery of the country after the disastrous war.
They personally assured him they had no interest in attacking the oilfields or harming the Chinese workers.
Though his oil diplomacy seems to have succeeded, Zhong confesses he really does not know exactly what sparked the civil war in South Sudan and who is to blame. Because China is a newcomer to tackling internal African conflicts, it has not yet developed the academic and analytical expertise to understand such conflicts fully.
He was critical of Chinese scholars for failing to provide the country’s leadership with the insights it needs to intervene knowledgeably in Africa. He is now promoting African studies –”but we probably still need a few decades to catch up,” with other foreign countries that are engaged in Africa, he says.
Zhong also explained how China had stepped up its UN peacekeeping efforts as part of its new, greater involvement in African peace and security.
“Until very recently, when we contributed to a peacekeeping force, we usually provided an engineering unit and a medical unit. And only very recently, starting in Mali and now South Sudan, we have deployed real peacekeeping forces, whose job is to keep peace, not like the medical and engineering units.”
As Special Representative, Zhong’s mandate is to tackle African issues which rise above the bilateral (government-to-government) level of normal diplomacy. So in the crisis that erupted between Sudan and South Sudan soon after the latter became independent in 2011, he shuttled between Khartoum and Juba, providing valuable insights to China’s ambassadors in each of those capitals – and to others – about what was happening in the other.
He has also been involved in the conflicts in Somali, Mali and eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
Now the ebola epidemic in West Africa, another pan-African crisis, is moving steadily towards the centre of his radar screen.
China’s response is being directed from the very top of its government, Zhong said. As with the Chinese oil workers in South Sudan, China will not abandon Liberia and Sierra Leone by evacuating the nearly 200 medical workers it already has in West Africa helping to fight the disease, he said.
In fact he said it would be sending in more workers.
China has already sent a mobile laboratory to Sierra Leone to help diagnose patients and was sending in construction workers and more medical personnel to help build a treatment centre in Liberia with about 100 beds. The embassy said China’s assistance and recent pledges amounted to $129 million plus $6m to the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response.
* Peter Fabricius is Independent Media’s foreign bureau chief.
Sunday Independent