Pastor urges action on Sudan crisis

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Pastor urges action on Sudan crisis

Tensions in southern Sudan mount in wake of political deadlock

By Lisa Nuch Venbrux
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
October 31st, 2007

KURT VINION/THE PRAGUE POST

Christopher Obua Ogwetta criticizes Khartoum for failing to honor the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. enlarge

Episcopal Pastor Christopher Obua Ogwetta left his home in Juba, southern Sudan, in 1996, amid the gunfire of a catastrophic civil war.

Now living in Denmark after nearly a decade in a refugee camp in Uganda, he visited Prague in mid-October in an effort to raise awareness about a conflict that still threatens hundreds of thousands of lives.

The conflict in the region of southern Sudan, which has raged on and off since 1956, has taken a new turn in recent weeks but has remained largely overshadowed by the events in neighboring Darfur. The 44-year-old Ogwetta describes recent developments in an Oct. 19 interview at a New Town church.

“You don’t see a single person on the road,” says Ogwetta, who remains in touch with his children, who still live in the region’s capital, Juba. “[Southern Sudanese people] are focusing. They want to start another war, to fight the Khartoum government because they refuse to leave the oil fields.”

Forces of the Islamist government in Khartoum and rebels in the mostly Christian south have fought along religious and ethnic lines, with oil providing even more combustible material in one of the deadliest modern wars. Between 1983 and 2005, when the U.S.-brokered Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) officially ended the war, more than 2 million people had died, according to the U.S. Committee for Refugees.

The agreement created a semi-autonomous government in southern Sudan drawn from members of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), the former rebel group. It also stipulated that revenues from oil must be split between the Khartoum government and the government of southern Sudan, and specified that Sharia law should not apply to non-Muslims, among other provisions.

Ogwetta emphasizes that the government in Khartoum has done virtually nothing to honor this agreement, however.

“The government of Khartoum was supposed to give us part of the oil, part of the money. … But [we] haven’t gotten it,” Ogwetta says.

As a result of Khartoum’s failure to observe the agreement, SPLM members withdrew from participation in the national unity government Oct. 11, triggering a political crisis that is escalating tensions in the region.

Ogwetta’s prediction that armed conflict could resume has already come true, according to a Sudan Tribune article containing a press statement from the military wing of the SPLM. Ten soldiers, nine of them from Sudan’s armed forces, were killed in a skirmish near southern Sudan’s main oil fields Oct. 25.

Officials representing the government of southern Sudan have downplayed the fight and reiterated their commitment to peace.

“Nobody is mobilizing arms with the intentions of resuming the war,” SPLM Secretary of Information and Culture Mading Deng Kuol told The Prague Post Oct. 28.

With refugees returning each day from camps in neighboring countries, Ogwetta says he is concerned that people will return to greater suffering. He has advised his mother and siblings, who live in camps in Uganda, not to go back.

Fatoumata Kaba of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) says about 160,000 refugees have returned to southern Sudan from refugee camps. The UNHCR assisted 69,000 of those, while roughly 260,000 remain in camps.

So far, recent events have not affected the agency’s efforts to repatriate refugees, all of whom are returning on a voluntary basis, Kaba says.

“We’re watching to see if it’s going to have an impact on the return trends,” she says. “It’s too early to say yet.”

Time for pressure

To address the crisis, officials from both north and south have been meeting to discuss solutions. Unless the international community takes action, however, the conflict could enter a deadlier phase, says Sudan expert Eric Reeves.

“[The Khartoum government] has never abided by agreements with any Sudanese parties. Not one, not ever,” Reeves says. “There are continued reports of military buildup. …We’ve got a lot of potential for violence and it’s just waiting to happen.”

“If conflict were to resume, it would be the most destructive phase, which is saying a lot,” he adds. “The roads that have been built in order to allow the movement of heavy oil drilling equipment have gone so far south [that] they would allow for the projection of mechanized military power in ways that have never been possible before.”

Like Ogwetta, Reeves urges intervention from the international community, which he says has fallen asleep at the switch.

He recommends a European Union arms embargo and the suspension of all commercial and capital investment. Meanwhile, China, which has invested billions of dollars in Sudan over the past decade, must apply diplomatic pressure of its own.

“This is a serial genocidal regime, and they understand one thing only — that’s pressure. And there’s not nearly enough of it,” Reeves says.

After a lifetime spent in conflict, Ogwetta is tired of fighting. The only solution now, he says, is total independence from Khartoum.

“We don’t want people to die anymore, but the Khartoum government doesn’t want dialogue. …. We need to have a total separation.”

A 2011 referendum, promised by the Khartoum government in the CPA, could allow southern Sudan to break away to form a nation of its own. Given the region’s oil wealth, however, Reeves suspects they won’t go without a fight.

“There’s no way Khartoum will allow the south to secede peacefully,” he says.