Does last week's creation of a Southern Sudanese state point to secession as the solution to other African conflicts?

Perhaps after 50 years of civil war and 2 million deaths.  Also helpful is a major national silent partner.

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Africans agreed not to unravel arbitrary colonial borders which ignored tribal and other realities, but failed to nurture the pluralistic societies which they contain. Elections are one key step toward democracy. But post-election populist tribal majorities often lord it over minorities and losers. Conflict erupts.

Count about 20 recent or active internal conflicts in Africa, outside “Arab spring” uprisings. They include 8 Islamist terror insurgencies. The others reflect regional, ethnic, and/or sectarian separatist ambition, resisted at great cost by governments with successful secession seldom an outcome.

South Sudan’s secession from majority abuse is a rare exception. Better that Africans learn to guarantee minority rights to avoid these often deadly and draining civil conflicts. They need help. Given European populist backlash against their own pluralism, it falls to Canada, since pluralism is our best-respected soft power brand, to be strengthened soon by the Aga Khan Global Centre for Pluralism in Ottawa.

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No. Creating new states out of existing ones is exceedingly hard, and the creation of South Sudan happened only after 30 years of war and more than 2 million dead. Since the end of the Cold War, only one other African case has been resolved this way, namely the separation of Eritrea from Ethiopia – and that was followed by a bloody war that killed more than 300,000 people. Earlier episodes of potential secession include Biafra, which sought independence from Nigeria – triggering a civil war that killed roughly 1,000,000 people. The international community hates succession as a model: to get a sense of how much so, just look at Somaliland, which has been a de facto separate entity – and a relatively stable one – within Somalia for over a decade; to date, no government has recognized Somaliland as a separate entity, and there’s no evidence that South Sudan will create a new move in that direction.

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During the Rwandan genocide, I was at one point convinced that both sides were posturing on the battlefield to essentially split the country in two and create a Cyprus type of situation. Although not the best option, it might have been a reasonable interim option as the country as a whole catches its breath after a civil war, patches its wounds after the genocide, and permit a possible political evolution to some sort of federation. The fly in the ointment was that the Hutu side would have had to be the moderates I was negotiating with, and not the extremists who were running the genocide.

So separation into two states is a possibility, but not an essential or only solution.

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The short answer is a categorical NO.  The Organization of African Unity (OAU) and its successor organization, the African Union (AU), have both exalted the principle of territorial sovereignty in the African subcontinent through the principles of non-interference anduti possidetis juris thus ensuring that colonial boundaries would remain permanent.  These principles have prevented the outbreak of wars of secession in a continent where ethnic and tribal groupings and affiations spill across the boundaries of most countries in the region. The Sudanese case should be treated as sui generis and it is not a compelling one either.  There are continuing conflicts between Khartoum and Juba over revenue-sharing of oil fields in oil-rich South Sudan and the designation of the actual border between the two countries. Karthoum also continues to wage battle with rebels in the western Darfur region who are emboldened by the precedent set by South Sudan’s independence.  In short, its still a huge mess.

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South Sudan’s independence highlights that secession remains an exception rather than the rule. There were a number of reasons for this conflict to have had such an outcome and they are very unlikely to obtain in other African cases. First, there is the history of the Sudan where, even prior to independence, the South had asked for a federal system in recognition of its specificity and where, the long history of almost uninterrupted conflict since independence until 2005 made it difficult for the partners to trust each other. As a result, and given implementation difficulties that beset it, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement could not fulfill one of its two main objectives: to make unity attractive to Southerners. Even then, the January 9, 2011 referendum in which Southerners decided to go their own way had to meet a number of procedural criteria for its outcome to be recognized by the international community, but also, particularly, by the African Union, which was extremely worried that this would indeed be understood as a precedent. Finally, it is not clear that secession has brought conflict to an end. Rather, the number of pending issues that continue to provide opportunities for renewed violence abound. North and South Sudan have neither agreed on borders, nor on citizenship rules, or on resource-sharing. They have not settled the issue of the division of the Sudan’s assets and debts and continue to disagree on the disputed region of Abyei. More importantly, and even if violence were not to resume between the two parties, other conflicts organically linked to the conflict which divided North and South continue to beset each of the two rump states. In the North, the Darfur conflict shares many of the causes which underpinned the violence between North and South; in the South, the various rebellions in the states of Jonglei and Unity are fuelled, in part, by concerns that the ruling Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, is becoming hegemonic, thus threatening to marginalize other groups from access to power and resources. In short, both the history of the conflict and the pending issues show secession should be cause for prudence before this scenario is replicated elsewhere on the continent.

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