South Sudan

Welcome to “Global Conflict This Week,” a series that highlights developments in conflicts across the world that you might have missed this week. Stay up to date on these conflicts and others with the online interactive, the Global Conflict Tracker, from the Center for Preventive Action (CPA). Peace Deal Prospects Dim in South Sudan On July 9, rebels in South Sudan rejected a peace plan that would have reinstated insurgent leader Riek Machar as vice president, claiming it would leave President Salva Kiir with too much power. Then on July 12, South Sudan's parliament voted to extend President Salva Kiir's term until 2021, a move opposition groups have claimed would be illegal. Separately, a UN investigation revealed that South Sudan government troops and allied forces killed at least 232 civilians and carried out mass rapes of women and girls in attacks on opposition-held villages in the country’s north in April and May. Revisit CPA’s report Ending South Sudan’s Civil War and CFR’s The Internationalist blog post, “Salvaging South Sudan’s Sovereignty (and Ending its Civil War),” for proposals on bringing peace to South Sudan. More on the civil war in South Sudan » UN Envoy Warns Israel Over Ban on Goods into Gaza Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered an immediate closure of the primary cargo crossing, Kerem Shalom, between Israel and the Gaza Strip on July 9 in response to incendiary kites and balloons launched into Israel by Palestinians. The following day, UN Special Coordinator to the Middle East Peace Process Nickolay Mladenov urged Israeli officials to reverse the decision. “Everyone must step back from the trajectory of confrontation and escalation,” Mladenov said. More on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict » Developments Across Afghanistan U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made a surprise visit on July 9 to Kabul, where he promised support for Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s push to initiate peace negotiations with the Taliban. The next day, more than two hundred religious scholars from fifty-seven countries convened in Saudi Arabia to discuss ways to end the conflict in Afghanistan. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), some 13,700 Afghans returned voluntarily or were deported from Iran in the first week of July, bringing the total number of returnees from the country so far this year to more than 370,500. The IOM cited “deteriorating protection space” in Iran and Pakistan as push factors. Separately, a U.S. service member was killed and two others wounded on July 7 in a so-called insider attack at a small outpost in Uruzgan Province. CFR’s Courtney Cooper argues that the recent cease-fires underscore the importance of confidence-building measures in building peace in Afghanistan. More on the war in Afghanistan » Over One Thousand Ceasefire Violations in Ukraine The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine reported 1,200 ceasefire violations last week, as fighting between the Ukrainian armed forces and separatists in the east continues. More on the conflict in Ukraine » Bombing at Campaign Rally in Pakistan Kills More Than Twenty A suicide bomber attacked a campaign rally held by the secular Awami National Party (ANP) in Peshawar on July 10, killing twenty-one people including provincial assembly candidate Haroon Ahmed Bilour. The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, which wounded sixty-five other people, vowing more attacks and warning people to stay away from ANP rallies. Nationwide elections in Pakistan are scheduled for July 25. More on Islamist militancy in Pakistan »

Developments in conflicts across the world that you might have missed this week.

Developments in conflicts across the world that you might have missed this week.

Developments in conflicts across the world that you might have missed this week.

In March at the Carter Center in Atlanta, South Sudan’s minister of health announced that Guinea worm transmission had been stopped within South Sudan. It has been fifteen months since the last reported case, and the disease has a life cycle of twelve months. That means the disease is gone from South Sudan, though it could be reintroduced from elsewhere. The World Health Organization is expected to certify South Sudan as free of Guinea worm. Elimination of Guinea worm is a massive, even spectacular, achievement orchestrated by an American non-governmental organization, the Carter Center, working with African ministries of health, numerous local partners, and a veritable army of village volunteers. In 2016, there were twenty-five reported cases of Guinea worm in the world, in South Sudan, Mali, Chad, and Ethiopia, but now, the disease is found only in the last three. Those three countries have a better health infrastructure than South Sudan, with its ongoing civil war and massive displacement of population. Hence, if the disease can be eliminated in South Sudan, it is likely soon to be entirely eliminated from the face of the earth. That would make it the second human disease after smallpox to be eliminated. It is to be hoped that polio will be the third. When the Carter Center began its campaign in 1986, there were an estimated 3.5 million cases worldwide. Present in ancient Egypt and mentioned in the Old Testament, Guinea worm is (or was) a scourge of the poor. It is a parasite, the larvae of which are transmitted in water. After the larvae is ingested by a human body, a three-foot worm develops. The worm then makes its way out of the body through a sore, often on a foot, by excreting an acid. Guinea worm itself is not fatal, but it is excruciatingly painful, debilitating, and increases vulnerability to other diseases. There is no cure for the disease. Modern treatment is the same as it was for the ancient Egyptians: the emerging worm is carefully wrapped around a stick to prevent infection. Guinea worm can be prevented through the filtering of water. That requires a public education campaign. The Carter Center had the imagination to take as its focus a disgusting but non-fatal disease that almost exclusively plagues the poor. With its campaign against Guinea worm, it might be argued that the Carter Center has done more than most official assistance programs to mitigate the lives of the African poor. A UN publication announcing the end of Guinea worm in South Sudan noted that former president Jimmy Carter, the founder of the Carter Center, announced in 2015 that he had been diagnosed with cancer: “He said he was responding well to treatment and he expected to outlive the last case of Guinea worm. President Carter is now 95 and cancer free, and Guinea worm disease just lost the fight in South Sudan.”   

Welcome to “Women Around the World: This Week,” a series that highlights noteworthy news related to women and U.S. foreign policy. This post, covering November 26 to December 12, was compiled with support from Becky Allen and Anne Connell.

This post originally appeared on the Council on Foreign Relations The Internationalist Blog and is written by Kate Almquist Knopf, director of the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, and Payton Knopf, former coordinator of the UN Panel of Experts on South Sudan. On Tuesday, the UN Security Council will convene to discuss the ongoing civil war in South Sudan. The meeting, chaired by Nikki Haley, the U.S. envoy to the United Nations, in her capacity as president of the council in April, comes at an inflection point for the world’s newest nation and for the global institutions, the United Nations (UN) and the African Union (AU) in particular, that are mandated to manage international crises of this magnitude and preserve the state system. Absent a fundamental change in the current humanitarian and security trends in the next eight months, nearly half of South Sudan’s population will have died of starvation or fled the country by the war’s fourth anniversary in December. Such a rapid depopulation of a sovereign state is nearly unprecedented; Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and Rwanda in the throes of genocide are the closest analogues for such a tragic record. Debates aside as to whether a full-scale genocide has yet begun in South Sudan, the level of trauma and psychological distress endured by South Sudanese citizens is on par with these cases. In a study conducted by the South Sudan Law Society using the Harvard Trauma Questionnaire, 41 percent of South Sudanese exhibited symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder, rates comparable to those of post–genocide Rwanda and post–genocide Cambodia. That was two years ago. The magnitude of the war’s human cost has since continued to escalate and now dwarfs that of nearly every other global conflict, with the exception of Syria. In just three years, South Sudan has become the fastest growing refugee crisis in the world; the largest refugee crisis in Africa, and the third largest globally, after Afghanistan and Syria; and the largest cross-border exodus in Africa since the Rwandan genocide. Over 1.7 million South Sudanese have fled the country since 2013, and nearly 1.9 million are displaced internally. Of those that remain, at least one hundred thousand people are dying in a man-made famine, and a further one million people are on the precipice. Fortunately, the United Nations and the African Union have the necessary legal authorities to salvage the sovereignty of one their own member states by establishing an international administration, with an executive mandate, in South Sudan to run the country for a finite period of time, as described in a Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Council Special Report, Ending South Sudan’s Civil War, published by the Center for Preventive Action. Given the extreme degree of South Sudan’s state failure, such an administration is the only remaining path to protect the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, restore its legitimacy, and empower its citizens. Though seemingly radical, international administrations have been previously employed to guide Cambodia, Kosovo, East Timor, and other countries out of conflict, without a greater financial investment from the United States and others than is currently being spent on the humanitarian operation and UN peacekeeping mission in South Sudan. Although each of these cases differ from one another and from South Sudan, the challenges to establishing a transitional administration can be managed through a combination of politics and force. Article 4(h) of the AU Consultative Act permits “the right of the Union to intervene in a Member State pursuant to a decision of the Assembly in respect of grave circumstances, namely war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity,” a clause capturing the AU principle of “non-indifference” arising from the failure to prevent the Rwandan genocide. The AU Commission of Inquiry on South Sudan, led by former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, in fact concluded in 2014 that the killings in Juba in December 2013, which sparked the civil war, and subsequent acts, constituted war crimes and crimes against humanity. Numerous other independent, international investigations have since presented similar findings, most notably the UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan, which reported in March that “the targeting of civilians on the basis of their ethnic identity is unacceptable and amounts to ethnic cleansing.” Although, as Paul Williams has noted, invocation of Article 4(h) might appear to be a direct challenge to the authority granted to the UN Security Council by the UN Charter, Article 4(h) has never been invoked, and it is likely that the African Union would not proceed with any such intervention without prior (or at least concurrent) authorization by the Security Council. Action by the Security Council and by the African Union to legally mandate the administrative and peacekeeping components of an international transitional administration in South Sudan could, however, be complementary rather than conflicting. The Security Council has long-since determined that the war in South Sudan constitutes a threat to international peace and security and has exercised Chapter VII of the UN Charter on multiple occasions in the last three years to authorize and sustain a sanctions regime as well as a peacekeeping mission. Equally noteworthy is that the application of Article 4(h) in concert with a Security Council resolution would not require anything akin to the NATO operation for Libya authorized in 2011. Instead, the Security Council and the African Union—with leadership from key member states, including the United States—could orchestrate the establishment of a transitional administration through diplomacy, following the request of a configuration of South Sudanese religious, civil society, traditional, and political leaders, who retain more legitimacy across the population than the regime in the capital. The state’s sovereignty need no longer be held hostage—and squandered—by a morally bankrupt elite that continues to commit widespread atrocities against its own people and bears primary responsibility for the humanitarian and security crisis while exercising none of the responsibilities of a sovereign government, including preservation of the country’s territorial integrity. When, as political scientists David Lake and Christopher Fariss have shown, the state exercises only “limited or abused sovereignty,” international trusteeship—used sparingly—can break a vicious circle in which narrow, extractive coalitions and competition for state control have led to a “vortex that pulls states down.” Lake and Fariss also conclude that in these instances, the objective is not capacity-building but limiting violence and shepherding a transition to a new, more legitimate governing order by leveling the playing field among belligerents. The effectiveness of trusteeship is, however, contingent on two factors. First, the trustee must have few, if any, interests beyond stability in the failed state. Second, the interests of the trustee and the average citizen must overlap. It is hard to find a more clear-cut case of a predatory elite abusing a state’s sovereignty than that of South Sudan. However, formal UN trusteeship is neither applicable to UN member states, according to the UN Charter, nor necessary in this case. The Security Council and African Union have the legal authorities to authorize the components of a transitional administration, with an executive mandate, in South Sudan, and the conditions outlined by Lake and Fariss are present for such an administration with such a mandate to succeed. The Security Council meeting on Tuesday presents an opportunity for Haley, who has already stressed the link between human rights abuses and insecurity in the council, to demonstrate U.S. resolve in confronting the crisis in South Sudan. The success of the proposal in the CFR Council Special Report will depend on getting the politics right both at the United Nations and the African Union of course. But both institutions must act quickly to end the war and salvage South Sudan’s sovereignty before there is nothing and no one left in the country to save.

The March 28, 2017 edition of The New York Times on the front page above the fold has a color image of a Somali child clearly starving to death. Heading up The Times’s international section is a full page story by Jeffrey Gettleman, “Drought and War Deepen Risk of Not just 1 Famine, but 4.” The story is accompanied by four photographs. Gettleman reports on famine or near famine in Somalia, northern Nigeria, Yemen, and South Sudan. The famine story is not new, and relevant UN agencies have long been trying to get the attention of the developing world. Now that the story is getting attention, it must be anticipated that the U.S. media, at long last, will increase its reporting. Americans should be prepared to confront almost unspeakable—and largely man-made—tragedy with their morning coffee. Once awakened, American public opinion usually demands that its government “do something” about a tragedy. That may pose a challenge for the Trump administration. The president’s “skinny budget” cuts the budget for the Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Department of State by about 30 percent. If the skinny budget, or something like it, is implemented, there will be no money, or only trifling amounts scattered over various agencies, for famine relief, just as there will be none for the support of UN peacekeeping operations. In February the UN organized a donor’s conference in Oslo with the goal of raising $1.5 billion for famine relief in northern Nigeria and the Lake Chad basin. Donors, led by Norway, pledged $672 million. In what may be a sign of what is to come, the United States pledged nothing.

The Africa Center for Strategic Studies (ACSS) has published a useful map showing the top ten countries in Africa for population displacement. It finds that 71 percent of the continent’s 18.5 million displaced are from Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). It observes that each of the five are experiencing serious conflict, and that of the top 10, nine are autocratically governed. (Nigeria is the exception, with credible elections in 2015 that brought opposition leader Muhammadu Buhari to the presidency.) This map was designed by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies. It was originally displayed in the update "Population Displacement in Africa: Top 10 Countries of Origin," on September 19, 2016. The ACSS map can be studied in conjunction with the Council on Foreign Relations Sub-Saharan Security Tracker (SST), which tracks violence. It is updated monthly. It shows violence concentrated in Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, the DRC, the Central African Republic, and Nigeria—the same countries the ACSS identifies as having the largest displaced populations. The conclusion must be that the internally displaced and refugee flows are directly tied to internal conflict within African states. Elsewhere, on this enormous continent, levels of violence and displacement are low.

FIFA Investigates Its Own Corruption A year after the United States and Switzerland went after top FIFA officials on fraud, money laundering, and racketeering charges tied to a $150 million corruption scheme, soccer’s international governing body is taking actions itself. The federation fined former vice president Jeffrey Webb $1 million for accepting bribes and banned him for life from the sport. It also opened an investigation on former President Sepp Blatter and two top associates for bribery, corruption, and conflicts of interest, including adding several illegal provisions to their contracts—boosting their combined salaries to over $80 million, and guaranteeing them eight years of pay even if fired for just cause. FIFA’s new dynamism may begin to restore its tarnished reputation, and the information it uncovers could help U.S. and Swiss prosecutors with their own ongoing criminal cases. Romania Steps Up Anticorruption Efforts, the Maldives Falls Back Romania’s and the Maldives’ paths are diverging in the fight against corruption. Last week, Romanian prosecutors showed their independence and resolve by charging former Prime Minister Victor Ponta with abuse of office for influence peddling, for nominating a media mogul to parliament in exchange for financing Tony Blair’s 2012 visit. (Ponta resigned last year amid protests over a separate corruption case.) Ponta’s problems follow the interior minister’s resignation over a pending investigation into alleged embezzlement and abuse of power. In contrast, Maldivian President Abdulla Yameen responded to an Al Jazeera documentary exposing his role in a $1.5 billion money laundering scheme by raiding the offices of a local newspaper and human rights NGO. With a cowed judiciary and a stifled press, it is unlikely the increasingly repressive president will face an investigation any time soon. Corruption Fuels Conflict in South Sudan A new report from advocacy organization The Sentry documents how South Sudan’s leaders have looted the country throughout three years of brutal conflict that has displaced 2.5 million and left even more destitute. President Salva Kiir and former Vice President Riek Machar have stoked ethnic fighting and killings while making millions from illegal stakes in oil, mining, telecoms, construction, and defense companies. With the ill-gotten proceeds, their families and cronies purchased luxury cars, flew in private jets, and bought lavish properties in Australia, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda. The United States—South Sudan’s largest donor—can help hold these leaders accountable by imposing sanctions, cracking down on money laundering, and helping to seize and return assets.

It is early to assess the long term consequences for sub-Saharan Africa of the United Kingdom’s (UK) vote to leave the European Union (EU) on June 24. However, in the short term, it is useful to look at the performance in the exchange rates and stock exchanges of Nigeria and South Africa since the referendum. They provide something of an indication of the wider impact Brexit had on Africa. Nigeria and South Africa together account for more than half of sub-Saharan Africa’s gross domestic product. Both have long had close ties with the UK, especially with respect to trade and financial services. In addition, there are myriad other ties between the UK and Nigeria and South Africa. For example, there is a large British expatriate community living in South Africa. The Nigerian expatriate population in the UK is also significant, and wealthy Nigerians have long favored the UK for education, health services, and second homes. Stock Market Exchange: Source: Bloomberg Terminal Foreign Exchange Rates:  Source: Bloomberg Terminal Highlights of the above figures show:   As of June 28, the decline in the selected stock exchanges has had a narrow range, between 3.5% (UK –the lowest) and 4.81 percent(Nigeria—the highest). The second greatest decline was the New York Stock Exchange. Forward exchange rates for the pound (UK) and the dollar (U.S.) are stable, but investors foresee continued fall in the value of the naira (Nigeria) and a small decline in the value of the rand (South Africa). Beyond the statistics, there can be a silver lining in the clouds. In the aftermath of Brexit, according to Bloomberg, foreigners acquired shares in South African companies at the highest rate in the past seven years. Especially popular were shares in gold producers. South African companies that earn dollars but report profits in British pounds sterling have particularly benefited from the fall in sterling against the U.S. dollar. Those companies include SABMiller PLC (beer) and British American Tobacco, according to Bloomberg. For now, this data would indicate that the direct, short-term impact of Brexit on sub-Saharan Africa will not be as large as had been anticipated. This data also reflects the assumption that Brexit will actually happen. That remains to be seen.

This is a guest post by Allen Grane, research associate for the Council on Foreign Relations Africa Studies program. Last week, authorities at Juba International Airport seized nearly a ton and a half of ivory in South Sudan. This seizure highlights some of the critical factors in the fight against wildlife trafficking. The flight coming from Uganda was scheduled to fly to Malaysia via Cairo, one of the key entrepôt’s for wildlife trafficking in Africa. In 2014, C4ADS conducted a study called Out of Africa that highlighted the five airports from which most African ivory is trafficked to Asia. These are: Quatro de Fevereiro (Angola), Addis Ababa Bole International (Ethiopia), O.R. Tambo International (South Africa), Jomo Kenyatta International (Kenya), and Cairo International (Egypt). But, the Juba seizure highlights the importance of monitoring transit points for ivory smuggled within Africa. As the Juba seizure illustrates, ivory and other wildlife products may travel through many countries and transport hubs prior to ever leaving the continent. From the enforcement perspective, this means that there are more opportunities to prevent these products from reaching consumer markets. In the case of Juba, it is worth noting that such a large shipment was transported by air. Based on the experience of previous seizures, this is relatively uncommon. For various reasons, including transport costs, airfreight has been less appealing for smugglers transporting large quantities of ivory. Up to now, the volume of trafficked wildlife has been much greater by sea than by air. In most cases of airborne trafficking the amount seized is under ten kilograms. The Juba shipment was more than 280 times that. The Juba seizure highlights the importance of monitoring all potential routes for trafficked wildlife. As pressure from the international community and law enforcement agencies increases, wildlife traffickers will begin to try and find new locations to transport their cargo from and new strategies for distribution. Hence, a two and a half ton airfreight of ivory through Juba international airport.