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| Sudan People's Liberation Army |
Okay, so let’s get started on the origins of the current crisis in
South Sudan. To help you understand the relevant (and complex) history of South
Sudan more easily, I’ll be using a pretty universal analogy: the birth of a baby.
By the end of this series of posts, you’ll be sick to death of the analogy, but
you should understand the crisis.
Let’s begin with the origin of the idea of an independent South Sudan. As
you’ve already learned from the previous post, South Sudan is the world’s
youngest country, and was born on July 9, 2011 when it officially separated
from Sudan. This independence, however, didn’t come easily. The Sudan People’s
Liberation Army (SPLA) fought the Sudanese government for independence from 1983
to 2005. Long before the emergence of the SPLA, however, the first civil war between
Sudan and South Sudan began. For a variety of reasons, since Sudan’s
independence from Egypt and Britain in 1956, the southern region has sought
separation. The most often cited reasons include the racial and religious differences
between the peoples of Sudan and South Sudan. Over 40% of Sudan’s population is
Arab and Muslim, while South Sudan’s population is largely black, and Christian
or animist (religions in which people believe spirits or souls live within
animate objects). The fact that these differences exist is not, in and of
itself, what aggrieved the people of South Sudan. Instead, the fact that the
racial and religious differences were directly related to the distribution of
power and wealth led to the desire for independence. Though the first civil war,
which began in 1955, ended with a peace agreement in 1972, once the idea of
independence was conceived, there was no turning back.
The SPLA began fighting for independence just 11 years after the first
civil war ended. By the mid-1980s, the SPLA began to see military success
against Sudan. In fact, by the late 1980’s the SPLA controlled a lot of
territory in what is now South Sudan. Just when things were going well for the
SPLA, however, in 1991 the group experienced a major internal problem: a
splinter group. Splinter groups occur when one or more members of the original
group decide they’re angry enough about something to leave and start their own
group. The formation of splinter groups is a common feature of armed groups
around the world, including one of the best known armed groups: the Irish
Republican Army. The SPLA’s first splinter group was formed by Riek Machar
(remember this name as it will be important later!). Machar left the SPLA for a
few reasons (some of which only he knows). First, there was internal ethnic
conflict within the SPLA between the Dinka, who make up 16% of the population
of South Sudan, and the Nuer, who make up 6% of the population. Machar, a Nuer,
argued that the Nuer and smaller ethnic groups had no voice in the SPLA, which
is majority Dinka. He also argued that the SPLA’s leadership was dictatorial,
and that decisions were made with no input from the group’s members. For these
reasons, Machar, and later other SPLA members, left to form his own group.
Machar ran his own group separate from the SPLA for a decade. By the
early 2000s, however, many of Machar’s supporters had left his group to rejoin
the original SPLA, which had seen military success throughout the rest of the
1990s. In 2002, Machar himself rejoined the SPLA, and shortly thereafter the
unified group began negotiating with the government of Sudan to reach an
agreement to end the war that had raged for 19 years. Though the negotiations
were long and difficult, the SPLA reached a peace agreement with Sudan in
January 2005. This agreement ended the civil war for good, and all parties
agreed to allow South Sudan to vote on whether it would become independent.
Until the vote, which would take place in January 2011, the South would operate
as a separate part of Sudan with its own government and rules. We can consider
the peace agreement as the conception of independence, and the 6-year period
between the agreement and the vote as the pregnancy (yes, I know this is a
rather long pregnancy, but work with me).
The next post will discuss the pregnancy (the period between the peace
agreement and the vote) and the labor (the voting process in which South Sudanese
citizens voted on independence). Stay tuned…
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