South Sudan is heading towards a catastrophe. Its worsening civil unrest, which has been rapidly deteriorating since a coup attempt last December, has effectively ended the 2015 peace deal that stopped a two-year civil war between rival government factions. The current situation has prompted the United Nations Commissioner on Human Rights to describe the situation there as one that is primed for “a repeat of what happened in Rwanda.”
During a recent visit the Commission received reports of widespread sexual violence by “all armed groups” and heard of “corpses being found along main roads, looming starvation and people fleeing to neighbouring countries on a daily basis.” Most of these developments are the result of lingering political tensions that were meant to be resolved through the Cessation of Hostilities Agreement which notionally ended the previous conflict. That war displaced almost a fifth of the country’s 11 million population and depleted its coffers so severely that the government could not even afford independence celebrations this year. And yet, despite constant dialogue and peace-broking initiatives the international community has been unable to halt the drift towards another war.
Two years ago a researcher for the International Crisis Group (ICG) told Agence France- Presse that it was “shocking [that] in a country with one of the largest UN peacekeeping missions in the world, tens of thousands of people can be killed and no one can even begin to confirm the death toll.” At the time ICG placed the death toll of the conflict above 50,000 men, women and children. Subsequent violence has been met with a similar lack of conviction by the international community, even though so much of it echoes the prelude to the Rwandan genocide. Yasmin Sooka, chair of the UN Human Rights Commission chair recently spoke of “a steady process of ethnic cleansing” in several areas and warned that villagers said “they are ready to shed blood to get their land back.” Chillingly, she also notes that “many told us that it’s already reached a point of no return.”
Few people know more about the precursors to genocide than Samantha Power, the current US ambassador to the UN. Power’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning analysis of modern genocide were said to have furnished her with special insights into the political manoeuvring that is necessary to avoid one, but she and her colleagues have proved unequal to the crisis. US sanctions against senior South Sudan officials have failed to stem the violence and inept lobbying for an arms embargo has been easily rebuffed by China and Russia. Meanwhile, the Government of South Sudan has resisted plans for 4,000 extra UN peacekeepers. Two weeks ago a European analyst told Foreign Policy magazine that “The Security Council has lost its way in South Sudan,” adding that current initiatives were “more like symbolic diplomacy than anything real.”
It is worth remembering what happened in Rwanda. Around 200,000 people engaged in a genocide against the country’s Tutsi minority, hacking to death around 8,000 people a day, for 100 days; slaughtering them in churches, marketplaces, at roadblocks and in the fields. Afterwards, the killers fled from the Rwandan Patriotic Front and found refuge in the Congo, with protection from the French Government and a sympathetic reception from President Mobutu. The subsequent rearming of the genocidaires led to a decade long conflict which drew in neighbouring countries and ending up claiming around five million lives.
The stakes in South Sudan are equally serious and the lack of progress in defusing the crisis has proved to be a sobering reality check on high-sounding doctrines like the “responsibility to protect.” Four years after the Rwandan genocide, President Clinton delivered an infamous apology, in which he lamented that the US and the international community “did not do as much as we could have and should have done.” In fact, as Power subsequently pointed out, the US had made that genocide easier in several ways: by successfully calling for the removal of UN peacekeepers, by refusing to jam hateful radio broadcasts and by hesitating to call the slaughter a “genocide.” Twenty years later, as ethnic violence threatens to engulf another African nation with wholesale slaughter, the diplomatic errors are genuinely sins of omission rather than commission, but the world seems to have learned little about how to prevent a genocide.
