Enough Project calls for Obama to reprioritize Sudan’s CPA implementation
February 19, 2009 (WASHINGTON) – A US think-tank, the Enough Project of the Center for American Progress, released today recommendations for the new Obama administration for how to make a policy on Sudan, where conflict in Darfur is entering its sixth year and the North-South Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) has not been fully implemented.
“The CPA is not a lost cause,” says report author and Enough field researcher Adam O’Brien. “However, it badly needs focused support from the international community in terms of both incentives and pressure to send a clear and consistent message that full implementation of the agreement is the essential foundation for peace in Sudan.”
In its recommendations, Enough Project renews calls since several months that Obama should name a special envoy and grant him two deputies: one focused full-time on promoting CPA implementation and the other on achieving a peace deal for Darfur consistent with the CPA.
Foremost among the recommendations for Obama’s new leadership team is to “reprioritize CPA implementation as part of a comprehensive approach to ending Sudan’s conflicts.”
“Diplomatic initiatives have tended to compartmentalize Sudan’s myriad conflicts, essentially falling victim to Khartoum’s familiar ‘divide and rule’ strategy,” says the report. “By diffusing and distracting international focus, the ruling regime has been able to tighten its reign on power without making systemic changes to the structure of the state.”
Consequently, international actors should focus on the CPA, which “offers a framework for the kind of democratic, structural transformation necessary to alter the root cause of Sudan’s many recurring conflicts,” says the report. Various parts of the CPA are alleged to be not yet implemented: a press law consistent with the constitution, a national security law consistent with the constitution, preparations for the treaty-mandated 2009 elections, north-south border demarcation, demobilization of armed forces and militias, withdrawal of forces from border areas, full oil revenue sharing, formation of effective Joint Integrated Units and other special protocols for once highly contested areas.
With this report, Enough joins some other American policy advisory bodies, such as the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, in calling for more support to the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), the guerrilla force that is one of the two main signatories to the CPA.
“The SPLA has struggled to transition from a guerilla movement to a formal army, a process complicated by attempts to integrate southern militias that opposed the SPLA during the war. To ensure that the south is stabile and the Government of Southern Sudan can deliver a peace dividend, the SPLA must continue to modernize through a well-supported process of security sector transformation that improves discipline, command and control, capacity, and competency. Toward this end, the Obama administration should explore the sale of an air defense system to the GoSS,” recommends Enough.
Enough also advises providing more help to build the South’s infrastructure, and warns against focusing solely on either short- or long-term goals: “The overriding policy objective of too many in the international community seems to be to limp toward 2011 by preventing a premature collapse of the CPA and accomplishing the bare minimum necessary to stamp the referendum as free and fair,” the report states, referring to South Sudan’s right to hold a referendum on secession in 2011. The report goes on to argue that just waiting for the referendum will not be enough to prevent “a new civil war in Sudan and the violent dissolution of Sudan as a state.”
Finally, the report looks beyond the 2011 terminus date of the interim period outlined by the CPA, recommending that the United States assist SPLM and NCP, the two signatories to the peace agreement, to negotiate an oil revenue-sharing deal beyond that time. The proposed measure, if accomplished, would lessen the incentive for the two largest political and military forces in the country to renew their decades-long struggle.
Some members of the new administration have been more vocal about Darfur than they have about CPA implementation. Since taking office, Ambassador Susan Rice, the US representative to the UN, referred to the “ongoing genocide in Darfur.” Yet during a Senate roundtable event last week, Jerry Fowler, the director of Save Darfur Coalition, cautioned against a “false dichotomy” in which the two policy areas are seen as competing.
South Sudan’s president, Salva Kiir Mayardit, visited the White House and State Department in early January, appealing to US leaders not to forget about the CPA
(ST)