For more than a year and a half, since South Sudan seceded from Sudan, presidents Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir and Salva Kiir Mayardit have failed to find common ground.
Disagreements over dividing oil revenue, border demarcation, the fate of the disputed region of Abyei, and the ongoing fights in the states of Kordofan and Blue Nile, linger without any prospect of resolution.
“The main problem is in Khartoum,” said Nico Plooijer, manager of the Africa Program at IKV Pax Christi, a peacekeeping organization based in the Netherlands. President al-Bashir’s regime in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum is delaying any steps toward resolution, hoping South Sudan will fall, explained Plooijer. “It is Khartoum that doesn’t want to find any solution.”
Last September, during a summit under the auspices of the African Union High Level Implementation Panel (AUHIP) and the government of Ethiopia, in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, the two neighboring countries signed nine agreements. The agreements concern oil and economic matters, and include mechanisms for peacefully settling disputes.
However, since then, none of the agreements have been implemented.
“They keep adding criteria and other things to the agreements that have already been agreed upon,” said Plooijer.
Plooijer, who travels regularly to Juba, the capital of South Sudan, says that by doing so, Khartoum is trying to make the south collapse.
“They think that if they cannot ruin [South Sudan] directly, they can ruin it indirectly. They want to show that the Southerners cannot govern by themselves, that they would be best to connect to Khartoum again.”
According to a peacekeeping expert, Khartoum wants the south to remain fragile, because if South Sudan collapses, it will no longer be a threat to the north’s power.
Khartoum is blocking oil flow in an attempt to weaken South Sudan. South Sudan has the oil, while Sudan has the pipelines.
