We can't stop here, this is new country. [South Sudan]

DarkCrawler

So, South Sudan is probably going to be an independent country soon.

Good news:

A) South Sudanese actually want this

(North) Sudan...might actually be better off. It's significantly the better developed of the two regions.

C) The 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement means that (North) Sudan and rest of the world is going to recognize it as well if at least 60% vote for it, which seems that is going to happen

D) It might help to alleviate the Christian/Muslim - Black African/Arab divide of Sudan

E) South Sudan has oil

Bad news:

A) North Sudanese don't really want it because of E

It's in Sub-Saharan Africa, which means that South Sudan has the usual combination of health problems, poverty, lack of education, resource problems and so on. And it's landlocked to boot and has borders with such winners like Democratic Republic of the Congo and Central African Republic.

C) All the rebellions and other conflicts won't exactly dissappear

D) It might increase further splintering of the country and lead to more secessions, like Darfur

E) South Sudan has oil

The region of Abyei will also hold a referendum in if it wants to join South Sudan or remain in (North) Sudan.



More on BBC, plus check out the map that illustrates the differences between the two in several different factors.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12144675

Southern Sudan votes on independence

Huge numbers of people are voting in Southern Sudan in a landmark referendum on independence from the north.

The week-long vote is widely expected to result in Africa's largest country being split in two.

Amid scenes of jubilation, south Sudanese leader Salva Kiir said: "This is an historic moment the people of Southern Sudan have been waiting for."

The poll was agreed as part of the 2005 peace deal which ended the two-decade north-south civil war.

The leaders of the mainly Muslim north have promised to allow the potential new country, where most people are Christian or follow traditional religions, to secede peacefully.

The BBC's Will Ross in Southern Sudan says he has not met a single person who says they will vote in favour of continued unity with the north.

But President Omar al-Bashir has warned an independent south would face instability.

Many people queued up to vote long before polls opened.

"My vote is for my mother and father, and my brothers and sisters who were murdered in the war," Abraham Parrying told the BBC as he waited to vote in the southern capital, Juba.

"I also vote for my children-to-be - if God grants me that - so that they can grow up in a south Sudan that is free and is at peace."

Another voter, 36-year-old soldier Maxine About, said he had "seen the inside of war so we have to stop the war now".

"We are very happy the Arabs are going away," he told the Associated Press.

Southern Sudan has high levels of illiteracy so voters are faced with two symbols on the ballot paper - a single hand for independence or two clasped hands to remain one country.

On Saturday, Mr Kiir said the referendum was "not the end of the journey but rather the beginning of a new one".

He was speaking in Juba alongside US Senator John Kerry, who has been in talks with both northern and southern leaders attempting to smooth the voting process.

Mr Kiir, who was the first to cast his ballot, urged people to "be patient", in case they were not able to vote on the first day of polling.

Veronica De Keyes, head of the the European Union observer team in Juba, said voting appeared to have started well.

"What I observed this morning was very moving in the sense that you can feel it, in the crowd, the expectation of the people is important," she said.

"It's very, very well organised. People are queuing very quietly so far and I hope it reflects what is happening in the country today."

However, the run-up to the vote was marred by an attack by rebels on Southern Sudan's military in the oil-rich Unity state.

Col Philip Auger, a military spokesman, told the Associated Press on Saturday that his troops had retaliated and killed four of the rebels.

UN officials confirmed that they had received reports of an attack in the area, but did not say which side had suffered the fatalities.

---

EU-style bloc?

In an interview with the Arabic news channel al-Jazeera, Mr Bashir said he understood why many southerners wanted independence, but he expressed concern at how the new nation would cope.

"The south suffers from many problems," he said.

"It's been at war since 1959. The south does not have the ability to provide for its citizens or create a state or authority."

Mr Bashir said southerners living in the north would not be allowed dual citizenship, and floated the idea of the two nations joining in an EU-style bloc.

He also raised the issue of Abyei, an oil-rich region with disputed borders.

He warned that if southerners seized the region for themselves, it could lead to war.

Analysts say Mr Bashir is under intense pressure from northern politicians, who fear that secession of the south may lead to a further splintering of the country, in particular the western region of Darfur which has faced its own rebellion since 2003.

North and south Sudan have suffered decades of conflict driven by religious and ethnic divides.

Southern Sudan is one of the least developed areas in the world and many of its people have have long complained of mistreatment at the hands of the Khartoum government.

Earlier this week the official in charge of the referendum commission, Chan Rene Madut, said the region was attempting "something that has never happened".

"Nobody ever bothered to ask the people of Southern Sudan as to what their destiny should be," he said.

Turnout in the referendum will be important, as the 2005 peace agreement stipulates that for the vote to be valid, 60% of the 3.8 million registered voters must take part.

Personally, I don't think it's going to make things worse, at the least.

Mortal Sky

If they have oil and can get aid right from the start, then South Sudan will likely fare well.
Is darfur part of the seceding area?

Mim

Couldn't the South Sudanese use the oil they have and then use the money from that to help develop their newly independent country?

I learn so much here in D&D but I'm always afraid to ask questions. Figured I'd get over that and try to figure things the hell out.

DarkCrawler

Mortal Sky wrote: »

If they have oil and can get aid right from the start, then South Sudan will likely fare well.
Is darfur part of the seceding area?

Nah, Darfur is in the west.

Mim wrote: »

Couldn't the South Sudanese use the oil they have and then use the money from that to help develop their newly independent country?

I learn so much here in D&D but I'm always afraid to ask questions. Figured I'd get over that and try to figure things the hell out.

Depends on the leadership. Equatorial Guinea for example has so much oil that they are the 25th richest country in the world, but most of the population lives below the poverty line because the leader is a money-grubbing asshole.

Good news is that the South Sudanese leadership seems pretty motivated, and it's unlikely that South Sudanese are going to let someone just take all the money for themselves after having to endure the same thing from the North for decades...bad news is that this is Africa and good revolutionaries always turn into terrible assholes once they get in charge.

ronya

Oil sucks if you discover it while poor. You remain poor until you run out of oil, except for whatever tiny wealthy fraction of your population which is going to become rapidly much wealthier. I don't think there are any exceptions to this.

DarkCrawler

ronya wrote: »

Oil sucks if you discover it while poor. You remain poor until you run out of oil, except for whatever tiny wealthy fraction of your population which is going to become rapidly much wealthier. I don't think there are any exceptions to this.

Saudi Arabia? I don't think I've ever met a Saudi that wasn't at least a relatively well off (discounting the foreign workers) and I thought they have a pretty good welfare state going on.

Of course, that might be because you can't throw a rock in the streets of Riyadh without hitting an Al-Saud and going to jail for it.

And Norway, of course, though I guess they weren't poor.

Mim

I did History of the Third World (with a very dry teacher so I don't remember much), but really so is it the U.S. and Russia's meddling with Africa that put Africa in it's current unfortunate position? Or is it much more complicated than that?

Should I just head to Wikipedia?

DarkCrawler

Mim wrote: »

I did History of the Third World (with a very dry teacher so I don't remember much), but really so is it the U.S. and Russia's meddling with Africa that put Africa in it's current unfortunate position? Or is it much more complicated than that?

Should I just head to Wikipedia?

Europe.

U.S. and Russia aren't much...actually nothing at all, compared to what European colonization did to Africa. None of the countries there we have now besides few exceptions wouldn't even exist in their current terrible borders if European countries had not drawn them with a ruler.

Wikipedia is a good place to start I guess, though this forum has some pretty good experts on the situation too in my opinion.

ronya

Mim wrote: »

I did History of the Third World (with a very dry teacher so I don't remember much), but really so is it the U.S. and Russia's meddling with Africa that put Africa in it's current unfortunate position? Or is it much more complicated than that?

Should I just head to Wikipedia?

Roughly speaking: no, although it didn't help much either.

From the short-lived Africa thread:

ronya wrote: »

Some random possible reasons why Africa is poor:

• started off badly; per-capita income in 1000 AD was about 2/3 income in India and China too. Caloric intake per person, also about 2/3. This was still true in 1900 AD, despite all three being somewhat richer.
  .
• climate; much of Africa's land area is inhospitable to most life, never mind industrial development. Unpredictable rainfall in many areas (compare clockwork monsoons elsewhere).
  .
• desertification; semi-arid Africa is becoming more arid, for a variety of complex reasons. This has been ongoing for the better part of a century, but it still sucks.
  .
• bad soil; experiences during the Green Revolution demonstrated that fertilizers that could be spread easily in America, Europe and South Asia had a tendency to fail in Africa; the soil in Africa derives disproportionately from older rock.
  .
• plantation agriculture; compared to smallholder agriculture, plantations tend to encourage inequality and autocracy (and slavery). Agriculture wants cheap agricultural labor, which development makes more costly - large-scale plantations with many employees will therefore oppose development. So will smallholders, but they tend to be too politically disorganized to stop development.
  .
• diseases; before HIV, there was malaria. Actually, there's still malaria. For many diseases, development moves you away from animals and parasite-ridden drinking water and so on, but malaria actively punishes any kind of development. The mosquito looks for you.
  .
• lack of proximity to navigable rivers; compared to North and South America, or East and South Asia, or Europe - Africa is pretty hard to move around in. This is bad for movement of people and goods (which is important for more reasons than just trade; rivers that don't disappear during the dry seasons can demarcate clear political borders and so on).
  .
• lack of proximity to navigable coastlines; compare Europe and East Asia, in particular. Perhaps not coincidentally, Europe and East Asia have done the best since World War II (besides the obvious US juggernaut).
  .
• different approaches to colonization; not all colonies were created equal. As Daron Acemoglu pointed out, geography tended to create two kinds of colonies - ones where Westerners settled and attempted to call their own, importing their centuries-old systems of governance and economic management - and others which focused on extracting resources efficiently and not much else. The key factor was malaria; it severely punishes attempts to stray away from the shore, especially for white people with no sickle-cell resistance. Since postcolonial leaders generally adopted whatever institutions that existed at independance, unequal and extractive societies tended to stay that way until yet another violent civil war and revolution occured. This seems to describe the African countries around the equator pretty well, actually.
  .
• natural resource curse; an abundance of natural resources encourages three things - military conflict over said resources (funded by the very same resources and thus hard to extinguish - blood diamonds, etc.), and once that is over, autocratic and extractive systems of government that focus singularly on corruptly monopolizing the stream of rent, and once countries painfully democratize, a permanently bad balance of trade for industry because your country keeps exporting resources instead of industrial goods.
  .
• trade volatility; what Africa does export has suffered from wide swings in prices, and since most African countries lack the wealth or institutions to stabilize income over time, this results in chaos. Investment surges end up bidding against each other. Farmers risking unpredictable starvation hoard durable assets instead of investing. etc.
  .
• high aid flows; very large aid flows act like natural resources, hammering the terms of trade and rewarding interest groups that can capture the stream of rent, since donors tend not to be very discriminating. Worse, poverty increases aid flows, so there's a really bad incentive for governments right there.
  .
• harebrained approaches to socialism; seriously, this is shooting fish in a barrel here. Never mind the asset seizures and nationalizations, these were one-off incidents; often there was just bad policy for decades. Kenya once required that new businesses acquire permission from existing businesses in order to gain a license to operate. What do you think happened? Sometimes anti-immigrant sentiment provoked total bans on private trade (the British tended to use India as a source of labor for its East African colonies; post-colonization, this created a dangerous situation of a rich and educated culturally-distant minority among poor and uneducated majorities. Cue pogroms. And, of course, since these immigrants were often business-owners, anti-business legislation). Huge public-sector employment - sometimes up to 75% of all employed, with severe wage controls to maintain viability, and employment subject to ethnic bickering and personal connections.
  .
• corruption and corrupt courts; good legal systems are expensive to operate. Unfortunately, becoming rich is difficult without good legal systems. Corruption is extremely difficult to rapidly eliminate without external help.
  .
• low population densities; you cannot staff factories without putting a lot of people together. This would be okay if transport were easy... but it is also not.
  .
• small countries; India, China, and Africa all have about one billion people each; Africa, however, is subdivided into about fifty countries. If you cannot export, as East Asia has ended up doing, then you need to turn inward for markets, and for that you need a lot of people for industry to become viable.
  .
• lack of nearby rich countries; development spread like a contagion in East Asia - Japan, then the HPAEs, then the NICs. Perhaps rich examples provide a political pressure for reform, or rich countries can export skills and industrial capital, or rich countries can provide a favorable balance of trade.

For all this: Botswana remains an oddly successful puzzle - landlocked, HIV, etc. - and note the enigma of development economics of the 20th century: Africa grew quickly until the 1970s-1980s, after which it slowed or even reversed, while India and China grew slowly until the 1970s-1980s, after which it accelerated (recall that in the 1960s it was thought that Africa would outpace East and South Asia). A purely political account doesn't quite work, since Indian and Chinese acceleration started somewhat before their famous liberalizations.

More specifically on US vs. the USSR: Cold War proxy fights didn't always hurt. Regardless of the ethical purity of intentions or lack thereof, the following seems to be true: the socialist "third way" planning of Nasser and Nehru was mediocre or actively bad for growth; capitalist international trade and investment under Bretton Woods was good for growth, and trade with the West's markets was better for US proxies than trade with the USSR's markets was for the USSR's proxies.

Export-led industrialization turned out to be the future. If democratic socialism had turned out to be the future, instead, East Asia today would be poorer and Africa and South Asia would be richer. But it didn't.

If I were inclined to sketch a more complicated theory of political economy, I would say that Africa's participation in the Non-Aligned Movement failed to buy it independence from the Cold War conflict and instead simply encouraged the US and USSR to refuse to support them in peacetime, unless those countries had something either side really wanted, at which point they blew up into slow-burning battlefields. But I have no idea how to make this rigorous.

adytum

I thought the Sudanese president was on record supporting the independence if the voting is succesful?

ronya

The commitments of presidents may have less meaning than South Sudan's future ability to hold itself together, and Sudan's disinclination to re-annex it.

edit: spelling error

adytum

ronya wrote: »

The commitments of presidents may have less meaning that South Sudan's future ability to hold itself together, and Sudan's disinclination to re-annex it.

Is there a word missing there? That sentence doesn't parse for me.

Anyway, obviously the commitments of al-Bashir to respect the independence won't have any meaningful affect on the future ability of South Sudan to become a real state by itself.

My question is more along the lines of when the split between Kosovo and Serbia occurred; the leadership of Serbia wasn't having any of it, except the international community was already there occupying to tell them to blow off. That war had already occurred by the time independence rolled around, and Serbia had lost. There wasn't anything they could do to stop the inevitable.

The OP here seems to imply that Sudan will annex South Sudan or ignore the results of the voting. It's surely possible, but I hope it doesn't happen!

DarkCrawler

He's agreed to let them secede peacefully and democratically, but he doesn't exactly support it.

I don't think the OP indicates any else, he just doesn't like the idea and many North Sudanese who are against it are pushing him to block it somehow.

ronya

Fix'd.

Sudan doesn't appear inclined to annex South Sudan at the moment, except perhaps fight over the oil region mentioned, I think. We'll see.

adytum

DarkCrawler wrote: »

I don't think the OP indicates any else

It was more the overall tone rather than an explicit statement. Anyway.

Kalkino

There are many potential problems that could jeopardise the success of a Southern Sudan - one being that the area has no history or practice of governing itself in any meaningful capacity. So the various disparate groups - the militas, the tribes, the provinces etc all have to somehow co-operate to form the organs and practices of government. This is a pretty massive undertaking for anyone, let alone with oil, external sabotage (N Sudan and various other neighbours or other countries who might have an interest) and several distinct and uncooperative armed groups

Saint Madness

The fact that they have oil could mean that Shell end up running another African country like their own personal fiefdom.

Also that's a bitchin national seal.

DarkCrawler

I think we all are over looking the most important factor in this decision though:

Algeria is going to be the largest country in Africa and gets to join the Big Ten of geography! Wooo! Viva Algeria!

[Tycho?]

This is a mess waiting to happen.

Lets take a poor, undeveloped and violently unstable region. Add some religious/ethnic/tribal strife. Then make another country that is poor, undeveloped. Now it is totally surrounded by neighbours that are either actively hostile (Sudan) or others that are currently embroiled in conflicts of their own, either internally or with their neighbours. Then throw in a ton of oil to insure that powerful nations will also be fucking with them.

I really doubt this is going to improve anything, this is (another) war waiting to happen, give it a few years.

Hoz

Saint Madness wrote: »

The fact that they have oil could mean that Shell end up running another African country like their own personal fiefdom.

Also that's a bitchin national seal.

I don't think any oil company will be allowed to fuck around in South Sudan while Obama is in office because of the negative effect it could have on the reputation of the US and I'm sure they'll be very careful with South Sudan out of fear of destabilizing it. As far as I know, South Sudanese are pretty friendly to America, so mutual co-operation seems like the most likely way to go. But maybe I'm just a hopeless optimist.

Anyway, another positive with South Sudan is that it might be one of the poorest but there's a potential for it to be more unified than your typical African country, and that over anything will have the most impact on the progress they make.

Tarranon

Hoz wrote: »

Saint Madness wrote: »

The fact that they have oil could mean that Shell end up running another African country like their own personal fiefdom.

Also that's a bitchin national seal.

I don't think any oil company will be allowed to fuck around in South Sudan while Obama is in office because of the negative effect it could have on the reputation of the US and I'm sure they'll be very careful with South Sudan out of fear of destabilizing it. As far as I know, South Sudanese are pretty friendly to America, so mutual co-operation seems like the most likely way to go. But maybe I'm just a hopeless optimist.

Anyway, another positive with South Sudan is that it might be one of the poorest but there's a potential for it to be more unified than your typical African country, and that over anything will have the most impact on the progress they make.

hooray for the merits of fascism

Saint Madness

Hoz wrote: »

Saint Madness wrote: »

The fact that they have oil could mean that Shell end up running another African country like their own personal fiefdom.

Also that's a bitchin national seal.

I don't think any oil company will be allowed to fuck around in South Sudan while Obama is in office because of the negative effect it could have on the reputation of the US and I'm sure they'll be very careful with South Sudan out of fear of destabilizing it. As far as I know, South Sudanese are pretty friendly to America, so mutual co-operation seems like the most likely way to go. But maybe I'm just a hopeless optimist.

Anyway, another positive with South Sudan is that it might be one of the poorest but there's a potential for it to be more unified than your typical African country, and that over anything will have the most impact on the progress they make.

Forgive me if I don't find the US government's ability to stand up to oil companies particularly reassuring.

[Tycho?]

The US largely stays away from the Sudan because China is in there like dirt. Sudan is oil rich, and China has a ton of workers there to improve Sudan's drilling and refining capacity. They also have good relations with South Sudan if they do end up breaking away.

Honk

Omar al-Bashir said the North would honor the election, right?

Not that I'd trust him with much.

Incidentally I hope he gets arrested before someone decides to kill him.

Elki

Maybe the future be full of chest bumps.

Mim

Is that a skin tattoo on her face or is that a disease? I'm intrigued.

Hoz

That's a result of some kind of piercing they do to their skin. So yeah, it's an aesthetic choice.

L|ama

oh boy we get to see Shell fuck over a brand new country in real time!

DarkCrawler

More pics:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/01/a_historic_vote_in_sudan.html