The Economist, Feb 27th: Sudan - The war and the pipeline project
KAJO KEJI
Nice words, pity about the war
IF KEEPING Sudan together means war, then we prefer separation and peace. That seems to be the message from Omar el Bashir, president of Sudan, to the southerners in his country who want to secede. After some 40 years of intermittent fighting and war-caused famines, and at least 1.5m deaths, is the end of Sudan's interminable civil war at hand?
Alas, no. For a start, the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) does not claim to be fighting for the secession of the south, where it draws its support, but for a secular and democratic Sudan. Second, and more important, the two sides have vastly different definitions of where the north ends and the south begins. The government puts the oilfields around Bentiu and Muglad in the north, the SPLA have them in the south.
And what of the millions of southern Christians in the Muslim north?
In fact, the president's "offer" on February 20th contained little new. In April 1996, the government signed a peace accord promising southern autonomy to several factions that had split from the SPLA. Last May it agreed with the SPLA itself to a referendum that could, in theory, lead to independence. But no attempt was made to hold the vote. Fighting and starvation are all that have followed. Some suspect that the government talks peace but finances and arms anti-SPLA groups in the south to create chaos.
Even so, President Bashir has conceded that the war is expensive. And a recent decision to allow legal opposition parties hints at a new willingness to contemplate change.
By the end of the year, a 1,500-kilometre (950-mile) underground pipeline will be completed to carry oil from the Muglad basin to Port Sudan on the Red Sea. Built by a consortium of Chinese, Malaysian, Canadian and Sudanese companies, it will pump 150,000 barrels a day, and be the sole means of getting oil out from the middle--and the south--of the country.
Thus even if the north eventually lost political control of the south, it would maintain an economic grip. Some optimistics argue that the oil revenues will give the north enough economic security to tempt them to settle for an Islamic state in the north and to let the south go. But in any event the security of the pipelines will be a priority.
Parts of the south already claim autonomy. The SPLA has controlled a region larger than France since 1997 and is slowly setting up an administrative structure of sorts. The National Liberation Council--elected by voters in rebel areas--presides over various commissioners in an embryonic state known to the rebels as "New Sudan".
But, lacking a local economy and taxes, it depends on aid agencies to feed refugees, pay for roads, provide seeds and carry out other development work. |
