مجلة فورين بوليسي الأمريكية تنشر كيف باعت الإنقاذ جنوب السودان مقابل وعود

Under pressure to keep the situation from spiraling out of control, Obama appointed a special envoy to Sudan, whose first order of business was getting the aid organizations back up and running. But the man he tapped for the job, Gration, immediately clashed with other members of the Sudan policy review team, and months of infighting began. According to Gavin, Gration had “strong views about how U.S. policy could be most effective” that were “not always shared by other actors around the table.” Hudson, who served as Gration’s chief of staff, was blunter: “There was a very open tug of war going on that was playing out in the press. There were leaks everywhere. It was a very difficult time to be involved in Sudan policy.”

The chief fault lines were drawn around how the administration should deal with Khartoum. One camp, which came to be associated with Rice, was in favor of taking a hard line against what it viewed as an irredeemably genocidal regime. The other camp, which formed around Gration, believed that engagement with the Sudanese government was the only way to achieve U.S. objectives in South Sudan and Darfur. “I realized early on that the only path to the referendum and to fixing Darfur led through Khartoum,” Gration told me. “Sure, it would be nice to get the north-south issues … resolved without going to Khartoum, but it wouldn’t happen.”

The acrimonious review process dragged on for nine months, during which the United States effectively had no Sudan policy. But the document that eventually came out of it resolved nothing, according to former administration officials. It outlined three uncontroversial and minimally defined objectives — to end the fighting in Darfur, implement the CPA, and ensure that Sudan did not become a haven for terrorists — that contained “the right words for everyone,” as Gration put it. As a result, according to a staffer who worked on the review, fundamental disagreements persisted “even after the strategy was agreed upon,” which, the staffer added, “tells you something about how you could read in your own approach.”

By the time it was unveiled, Gration had made it clear that his reading of the policy called for deeper engagement with Khartoum. He made more than 25 trips to Sudan in his first 15 months in office, by his estimation, and threw himself into preparing for national elections in 2010 that were stipulated under the CPA. In his view, the vote offered a “trial run” for the future referendum in the south. To his detractors in the administration, however, Gration’s work amounted to legitimizing Bashir, who was expected to win in a landslide. In the end, the more ideological camp prevailed and Gration was summoned back to Washington. “I got a call from [Tom] Donilon and [Denis] McDonough, saying I’m too close to the election and I got to come back,” the former envoy told me, referring to the then-national security advisor and NSC communications chief, respectively. The message from the White House was clear, Gration said: “We didn’t want to look like we were sanctioning an election that would elect an ICC indictee.”

The elections marked the beginning of the end for Gration. The vote was fraudulent and reinforced one-party rule in both the north and the south. The United States muted its criticism so as not to put the upcoming referendum at risk, but behind the scenes, Secretary of State Clinton was losing faith in Gration. Johnnie Carson, the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, recalled Clinton “expressing strong concern” in a morning staff meeting about the “possibility of serious setback on implementation of the most important part of the CPA — the holding of a referendum on South Sudan’s political status.” After that, Carson told me, “I took a hard look at what was going on”; along with colleagues in the State Department’s Africa bureau as well as the envoy’s office, he “put in motion a diplomatic and development surge for the south.”


(Left) A Sudanese supporter of secession pastes posters upon the arrival of Sudan's president, Omar al-Bashir, at Juba airport on Jan. 4, 2010. (Right) A Sudanese man waits outside a polling station in Juba in southern Sudan on April 13, 2010. Credit: Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty Images; Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images
The decision was made in the fall of 2010 to beef up the envoy’s office by bringing in Lyman, a former ambassador to Nigeria and South Africa, and Dane Smith, another former ambassador who had served as the special envoy to Liberia in the 1990s. Lyman began running point on southern issues, while Smith advised on Darfur. Clinton and Carson “weren’t too enchanted with Gration, but beyond that they believed that he needed some more help,” Smith told me.

With the infusion of new blood into the Sudan envoy’s office, the Obama administration finally began to coalesce around a coherent strategy for getting to January 9, 2011 — the date of the all-important southern referendum. Through what Lyman described as a “long and painful process” led by McDonough at the NSC, officials from the State Department, the envoy’s office, and a host of other agencies hammered out a plan to convince the Sudanese government not to interfere with the referendum and to part with a third of its territory and more than half of its oil reserves if the vote favored independence. (It was a foregone conclusion that this would be the outcome.) Known as the “road map to normalization,” the plan in exchange promised Khartoum sanctions relief and removal from the “state sponsors of terrorism” list.

FOR THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION, THE VIOLENCE PRESENTED AN ADDITIONAL POLITICAL PROBLEM, SINCE IT WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE TO PERSUADE CONGRESS TO LIFT SANCTIONS ON KHARTOUM, AS PROMISED, WHILE SUDAN WAS BOMBING ITS OWN PEOPLE.
The road map was delivered publicly by then-Senator John Kerry — because the U.S. government no longer spoke to Bashir directly after his indictment by the ICC — and bolstered by a diplomatic full-court press that included a high-profile meeting at the United Nations in September 2010, chaired by Obama and attended by other world leaders, in which the U.S. president reiterated the importance of allowing the referendum to proceed. Meanwhile, Lyman, who sources say was effectively in charge of the Southern Sudan portfolio by this point, was working long hours with the southern referendum commission to ensure that it was prepared for the vote. In practice, he said, that meant “countering all the difficult and different things that Sudan threw up as obstacles,” including a lawsuit claiming the referendum was unconstitutional, the withholding of funds to the commission, and even death threats against its chairman.

In the end, the referendum went off successfully. Some 3.6 million Southern Sudanese cast their ballots in January 2011 in favor of forming an independent nation, a figure that represented 98.8 percent of the vote. “We have waited 56 years for this day,” Kiir said six months later at the official independence ceremony in Juba. “It is a dream that has come true!”

By that point, however, fresh conflicts had already erupted in South Kordofan and Blue Nile, two border regions that remained in Sudan after partition. These areas had been SPLA strongholds during the second civil war, and many residents feared being stranded in a Sudanese rump state that had proved impervious to democratic reforms. For the Obama administration, the violence presented an additional political problem, since it would be impossible to persuade Congress to lift sanctions on Khartoum, as promised, while Sudan was bombing its own people.

The result was the demise of the road map, which was added to Khartoum’s long list of perceived betrayals at the hands of the United States. But all was not well, either, in the U.S.-South Sudanese relationship, despite the success of the referendum. The previous 18 months had taken their toll; the internal squabbles that defined the early days of Obama’s presidency had not gone unnoticed in Juba, and South Sudanese officials say they often received conflicting messages from Washington. Amum, the former secretary general of the SPLM, told me, “The Obama administration did not have one policy until after a year, and even after that one year, you find that there still continued to be tension” within the administration. Even more troubling, from Amum’s perspective, was what Gration’s willingness to work with Khartoum said about the U.S-South Sudan relationship. The way he and his southern colleagues saw it, accommodating Bashir meant treating “the question of South Sudan as secondary, as only an element of the relationship between Khartoum and Washington.”


Men queue outside the University of Juba polling center on January 10, 2011, to vote on the second day of South Sudan's landmark independence referendum. Credit: Phil Moore/AFP/Getty Images
IN THE WAKE OF THE REFERENDUM AND THE FAILURE OF THE ROAD MAP, U.S. officials confronted the reality that almost all critical north-south issues remained unresolved. Borders had yet to be drawn, disputed regions remained, and, most importantly, no agreement had been reached on how to share oil revenues. Lyman, who officially replaced Gration as special envoy in March 2011, estimated that he spent 80 percent of his time dealing with these issues over the next two years.

Not infrequently, disputes boiled over into full-blown crises, requiring the U.S. envoy to decamp to Ethiopia for lengthy negotiations led by the African Union and other regional moderators. In January 2012, for instance, a disagreement over how much South Sudan should pay to export its oil through Sudan escalated to the point where Juba shut off the pipeline, eliminating its own most important source of revenue. (Lual Deng, a southerner who served as Sudan’s petroleum minister from 2010 to 2011, told me the decision was akin to “setting fire to your house” instead of securing it after a robbery.) Three months later, the southern army invaded Heglig, a major oil field controlled by Sudan but claimed by both countries, necessitating an eleventh-hour diplomatic push from the United States to get South Sudan to withdraw. Months of negotiations to establish a demilitarized zone between the two countries ensued.

Distracted, the United States paid little attention to South Sudan’s domestic political system. Hundreds of millions of dollars of development aid went into various capacity-building programs — financial trainings, instruction in human-resource management, and IT courses, for instance — but former U.S. officials admit that little effort was devoted to helping the SPLM or the army heal their still-gaping internal divisions. “What didn’t happen was that the SPLM became a democratic political movement,” Lyman said. “We didn’t pay enough attention to this.” Amum said he thought the United States was too focused on implementing the CPA and building governance capacity. “That was futile because they were building a body without an engine,” he told me. “The engine was the party, because it is where the ideas are synthesized and where the vision is articulated.”

Hudson, who served as Gration’s chief of staff, was blunter: “There was a very open tug of war going on that was playing out in the press. There were leaks everywhere. It was a very difficult time to be involved in Sudan policy.”

The chief fault lines were drawn around how the administration should deal with Khartoum. One camp, which came to be associated with Rice, was in favor of taking a hard line against what it viewed as an irredeemably genocidal regime. The other camp, which formed around Gration, believed that engagement with the Sudanese government was the only way to achieve U.S. objectives in South Sudan and Darfur. “I realized early on that the only path to the referendum and to fixing Darfur led through Khartoum,” Gration told me. “Sure, it would be nice to get the north-south issues … resolved without going to Khartoum, but it wouldn’t happen.”

By the time it was unveiled, Gration had made it clear that his reading of the policy called for deeper engagement with Khartoum. He made more than 25 trips to Sudan in his first 15 months in office, by his estimation, and threw himself into preparing for national elections in 2010 that were stipulated under the CPA. In his view, the vote offered a “trial run” for the future referendum in the south. To his detractors in the administration, however, Gration’s work amounted to legitimizing Bashir, who was expected to win in a landslide. In the end, the more ideological camp prevailed and Gration was summoned back to Washington. “I got a call from [Tom] Donilon and [Denis] McDonough, saying I’m too close to the election and I got to come back,” the former envoy told me, referring to the then-national security advisor and NSC communications chief, respectively. The message from the White House was clear, Gration said: “We didn’t want to look like we were sanctioning an election that would elect an ICC indictee.”

The elections marked the beginning of the end for Gration. The vote was fraudulent and reinforced one-party rule in both the north and the south. The United States muted its criticism so as not to put the upcoming referendum at risk, but behind the scenes, Secretary of State Clinton was losing faith in Gration.