Preventing Civil War in South Sudan

James Akena/Reuters Displaced families waited this week at a United Nations base near the international airport in Juba, South Sudan.

Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management and co-author of “White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters to You.”

The news from Juba is very bad. South Sudan is in the throes of political conflict and serious fighting that has the potential to become civil war. Several hundred people have been reported dead and more injured. Unless cooler heads prevail, the situation could spiral out of control in places including Juba, the capital; Bor, the capital of Jonglei state, about 125 miles to the north of Juba; and Bentiu, the capital of Unity state, which has a lot of oil.

The outside world needs to get serious about preventing the escalation of this conflict. We can do this by applying appropriate economic pressure to all the military forces involved and by assuring that oil revenues are not used to fuel the conflict. This will require China, India, France and the United States to cooperate closely and in ways that may not come naturally.

This week Ban Ki-moon, secretary general of the United Nations, called for an increase in the peacekeeping force on the ground, while about 45,000 people have already sought protection at United Nations compounds around the ground. It is obviously imperative for the United Nations to safeguard their lives.

Two or three peacekeepers were killed last week trying to protect their base in Akobo, in Jonglei state; the shadow of the 1995 massacre of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica, who were supposedly under United Nations protection, looms large.

There are currently 7,600 United Nations security personnel in South Sudan (counting both police and military); the Security Council is discussing raising this number to 13,000. (You can follow the United Nations peacekeeping Twitter account and consult this useful map for tracking events or this map for tracking aid to South Sudan.)

Scaling up the peacekeeping force makes sense. But no one wants to charge in with a very large military force; this can go wrong in many ways (even a small United States evacuation mission came under fire and suffered casualties on Saturday). The emphasis is on persuading the key players to stand down and work out how to cooperate in a peaceful manner. Samantha Power, the United States ambassador to the United Nations and author of a book on genocide, put it well:

They can return to the political dialogue and spirit of cooperation that helped establish South Sudan, or they can destroy those hard-fought gains and tear apart their newborn nation.

But there is another card that should now be played: economic pressure from the outside, particularly in terms of how South Sudan’s oil revenues are handled. In the short term, a willingness to limit access to these revenues could signal less money available to finance conflict. The bigger goal should be to communicate that there must be greater transparency on exactly how this money is spent within South Sudan.

As the China National Petroleum Company is a major investor in South Sudan, and the oil is transported by pipeline across Sudan to the coast, there is a real opportunity - and pressing need - for international cooperation on this situation. (Petronas, the Malaysian state oil company, is also involved, as is ONGC of India and Total of France.)

After a long struggle, South Sudan became independent from Sudan in 2011. Unfortunately, civil conflict in newly formed countries is not unusual - think, for example, about the versions experienced in Russia after 1917, Ireland after 1922, or Mozambique and Angola after 1975. The nature of the internal divisions differed, but in all these cases there was a brutal struggle to determine who exactly would be in charge.

Details from the ground are not entirely clear, but a rift appears to be deepening between President Salva Kiir and his former vice president, Riek Machar. Last week Mr. Kiir accused Mr. Machar of organizing a coup. Mr. Machar has denied this, but he definitely has a military force in the field that has had some recent success (as this timeline shows).

Mr. Kiir and Mr. Machar belong to the same party, but Mr. Kiir is from the Dinka ethnic group, which is the largest in South Sudan, while Mr. Machar is from the Nuer ethnic group. The fear is that the split between these individuals will now morph into a broader ethnic conflict (the BBC reports that this is already happening; see the map in that article for the main locations of some of South Sudan’s many ethnic groups; other maps on that page include the location of oil fields and pipelines).

South Sudan’s population is estimated at just over 11 million, with one of the highest population growth rates and an average age of just 16.6 years. The size of its army was estimated in January to be 80,000 to 200,000, although presumably some of these people are now “rebels.” (More background information is available from the Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook.)

The international situation today should be quite different from what it was during previous civil wars. The Cold War is over and is no longer an excuse for propping up unpleasant regimes or fueling conflict. We have learned in many countries that once civil conflict takes hold, the human cost is terrible - and it takes a long time to get back to any kind of reasonable living conditions. And there are many ways in which instability can spread - look again at the map of South Sudan, with its neighbors â€" including the problems now manifest in the Central African Republic and the potential for conflict elsewhere in the region.

This is not a conflict that can be fueled by dispersed and easy-to-grab resources such as so-called “conflict diamonds” (from alluvial deposits that are easy to mine and that have contributed to civil wars in a number of places). South Sudan is poor but its foreign income is based almost entirely on a single capital-intensive sector operated by foreign companies: oil.

If outsiders wanted to make a difference, they would make clear that the oil revenues from South Sudan would be fully accounted for - both as a revenue source (i.e., total dollars earned) and in terms of how they were spent.

South Sudan funds almost its entire government budget from oil revenues, which amount to $2 billion to $3 billion (with production previously running around 250,000 barrels per day).

Background material from Global Witness emphasizes,

In South Sudan - the world’s newest and most oil-dependent country - it is vital that the government follows through on commitments to managing its natural resources transparently and in the best interests of the wider population.

South Sudan should join the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, although ideally only after proper preparation as suggested in October by Global Witness. (You can follow Emma Vickers of Global Witness on Twitter.)

Given the latest developments, the United States, China, India, France and other responsible governments should step up the pressure for exactly this kind of transparency - and for making it clear that oil revenues will not be allowed to fund the fighting. This message must get through to both the government and its opponents.

This will not be easy, but South Sudan must and can be prevented from descending into a brutal conflict for control over its oil revenues.