Fix the Heglig oil fields

With our eyes on the Heglig Oil fields, Al Bashir can go ahead and drink from the Nile. Non but the Ngok can decide where Abyei belongs.

By Justin Ambago Ramba

We are now in the aftermath of the Abyei Arbitration Award, but surprisingly we are left with more questions than answers contrarily to what the so-called experts stated earlier in their view of the ruling as a win – win.

There are many observations to make about The Hague’s arbitration on the nine Ngok Dinka chiefdoms due to the ambiguity of the situation. At this stage there is a view that the name of Abyei needs to be made more clearly rather than leaving people to the confusion created by the Islamist confusionists of the NIF where Abyei is being used by them to mean a vast area of land where Ngok and Misseriya are expected to mix freely.

So following this arbitration, the area should clearly be referred to as Dar Ngok; in this way the Misseriya will understand what the arbitration was all about.

Secondly the ruling has granted the nomadic Misseriya the right to water and grazing within the Dar Ngok (Abyei) but it must be stressed here that the Arab nomads are not entitled to any political rights within the chiefdom.

No Misseriya should be allowed to hold any position in Dar Ngok (Abyei) in the pretext of representing this particular ethnic community and they should as well know that they have no rights to vote in the forth coming referendum of 2011 contrarily to what is being claimed by President al Bashir in another move to please the Misseriya who accused the NCP of betraying them in return for Oil.

President Omer al Bashir must understand that, the right to vote in these referenda were in fact fought for and there is no way that he can block it or make a mockery of it by asking the Misseriya and even the Jaalien of the extreme north to come and determine the fate of the Ngok Dinka. We already know his intensions from what he and his speaker of the National Parliament said about the formation of the referendum laws that would make it difficult for the secessionists.

The Arab Misseriya are clearly a nomadic people who are not in any way residents of Dar Ngok as they are only granted a seasonal rights to grazing lands and water points entirely based on humanitarian basis.

No political group should be misled to assume that the

Grazing rights awarded to the Misseriya can amount to the same right as enjoying voting rights in Abyei. But to adopt this, the GoSS must correct itself first by stopping the Ngok Dinka people who are now residing in south Sudan from taking up political positions and also not to enjoy any voting rights in the forth coming referendum within the ten southern states as they can only do that in Abyei.

However no loop holes should be intentional created in the GoSS by unconstitutionally favouring certain communities which may play directly in the hands of President al Bashir whose credibility has been completely eroded during the past few months by the ICC arrest warrant issued against him and his problematic loyalists within the National Congress Party and the Arab tribes of south Kordofan.

The Dinka Ngok people wherever they reside have to stand up to the challenge because now their land has been demarcated for them and their presence is needed on the ground. Those 50,000 who are now living as IDPs in Bahr Ghazel should be encouraged to return to Abyei and prove their existence and rights to the land. They need to come and start development very seriously and be ready for the 2011 referendum before the Misseriya and their sponsors in the Umma Party and the NCP move in to set up the scenarios for rigging the referendum. We all believe that it is only the Ngok dinka who have the right to determine their fates in the coming referendum and not any others.

This is a shared view even by international experts, as expressed by Mr. Johnson a former member of the ABC.

“By narrowing the borders, the ruling has made Abyei an unambiguously Ngok Dinka area,” Johnson said. “That makes it almost a certainty that Abyei will vote to join Southern Sudan in the referendum.”

Thirdly, there is an overwhelming concern about the issue of the Oil fields of Heglig the source of Khartoum’s jubilations these days. This very area rightly comes under the Unity State of the southern Sudan. It was a gross mistake to have it included in the Ngok package. And what Dr Luka Biong was quoted as saying that Heglig belongs to the Unity State and the Goss has the documents to prove that it belongs to the south, just makes this ambitious politician a mocking stock. If he knows that Heglig belongs to the Unity State, why then include it into the wrong package in the first place?

Dr. Biong and his committee should have behaved legally right from the beginning to avoid conflict of interests coming up. Basic facts are that Abyei is not part of the Unity State nor is it part of the current South Sudan. So to mix up between these entities was basically wrong and that is why it led to this embarrassment.

Given the calibre of the SPLM delegation to the arbitration, some of us are left to speculate that the inclusion of Abyei and Meiram within the map of the nine Ngok chieftains might have been with the intension of distracting Khartoum from the exact geographical reality by making them concentrate greedily on the oil fields rather, and allow the Ngok to have their ancestral land? Is this not what this expert is trying to express in his following statement?

“The decision has effectively removed oil from the argument,” Douglas H. Johnson, a member of the 2005 international panel known as the Abyei Boundaries Commission, said in a telephone interview from London. “It may reduce tension because the government doesn’t have to worry about losing oil revenues.”

Otherwise somebody, even a Ngok or Dr. Biong for that matter, should have stood up and told the two sides that the arbitration was meant to demarcate the land of the Ngok and not the borders of south Sudan with south Kordofan whereby Heglig area and its oil fields should have been taken out of the whole argument of Ngok versus Misseriya to await its rightful forum where it would be discussed by the Commission on the North – South border currently headed by Professor Abdalla Sedeek.

The idea of stressing this point here lies in the fact that, we don’t want to be the victims of this continuous state of confusion being created by the thirsty Arabs who are desperately looking for ways to grab the resources of south Sudan under the pretext that the Heglig Oil fields have been officially ruled by the Abyei Arbitration Tribune in favour of the government of Khartoum.

No way can such a malignant and misleading conclusion be allowed to go unchallenged when we very well know that the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague was not mandated to define nor redraw the boundaries between the south and the north Sudan.

And in deed if this misconception is not rectified quickly before it becomes another thorn in the flesh, it is certain that such statements as released by the ambassador al Dirdiery the chairman of the Misseriya delegation to The Hague and later President al Bashir where they declared their victory over Heglig Oil fields, are in fact non but war germinators.

From now till the end of September (which is the time limit that the north – south demarcation commission is expected to finish its job), there is a serious need that all the south Sudanese political parties, civil societies, communities and religious leaders from all denominations must work hard to put their maximum support behind our representatives in the boundary commission to see that every bit of the southern soil is reclaimed.

Dr By Justin Ambago Ramba is the Secretary General United South Sudan Party (USSP), he can be reached at: [email protected].