South Sudan is the newest independent country…it is a country located in Central Africa…..
A little history and geography of this new country…..
Egypt attempted to colonize the region of southern Sudan by establishing the province of Equatoria in the 1870s. Islamic Mahdist revolutionaries overran the region in 1885, but in 1898 a British force was able to overthrow the Mahdist regime. An Anglo-Egyptian Sudan was established the following year with Equatoria being the southernmost of its eight provinces. The isolated region was largely left to itself over the following decades, but Christian missionaries converted much of the population and facilitated the spread of English. When Sudan gained its independence in 1956, it was with the understanding that the southerners would be able to participate fully in the political system. When the Arab Khartoum government reneged on its promises, a mutiny began that led to two prolonged periods of conflict (1955-1972 and 1983-2005) in which perhaps 2.5 million people died – mostly civilians – due to starvation and drought. Ongoing peace talks finally resulted in a Comprehensive Peace Agreement, signed in January 2005. As part of this agreement, the south was granted a six-year period of autonomy to be followed by a referendum on final status. The result of this referendum, held in January 2011, was a vote of 98% in favor of secession.
Since independence on 9 July 2011, South Sudan has struggled with good governance and nation building and has attempted to control opposition forces operating in its territory. Economic conditions have deteriorated since January 2012 when the government decided to shut down oil production following bilateral disagreements with Sudan. In December 2013, conflict between government and opposition forces killed tens of thousands and led to a dire humanitarian crisis with millions of South Sudanese displaced and food insecure. The warring parties signed a peace agreement in August 2015 that created a transitional government of national unity in April 2016. However, in July 2016, fighting broke out in Juba between the two principal signatories, plunging the country back into conflict.
That illustrates the this region knows conflict…..they know full well what it means…..but there is good news about the conflict killing many South Sudanese….
On 27 June 2018, South Sudanese President Salva Kiir and former First Vice President Riek Machar, the principal adversaries in South Sudan’s civil war, signed a Declaration of Agreement in Khartoum. The declaration does not resolve major points of contention between the two leaders, deferring them to talks which are ongoing in the Sudanese capital. Moreover, nearly five years of mediation and a 2015 peace deal have failed to end South Sudan’s brutal civil war. Circumspection as to whether the Khartoum negotiations can do so is thus warranted. But for now, those talks offer the only hope, however slim, of a breakthrough. The African Union’s Peace and Security Council, and the leaders of Algeria, Chad, Nigeria, South Africa and Rwanda, who have been involved in past rounds of negotiations, should use their meetings on 30 June in Nouakchott, Mauritania to lend the Khartoum talks cautious support, while laying out clearly what they expect from next steps and the measures they would take against parties obstructing progress.
I brought this to my readers attention for I want to predict here and now that in the next decade the country of South Sudan will disappear….possibly re-absorbed by Sudan…..and this will not end the fighting or the dying…..just change the nature of who does what.
