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African states’ right to secede
Comment
Gwynne Dyer
BAN Ki-moon is not the best secretary-general the United Nations
ever had, but he has grasped the essential nature of his job. The UN
is an organization made up of sovereign states, and their highest
priority is the preservation of their own privileges. It is the
trade union of the sovereign states of the world, and Ban is their
shop steward. Which is why he said what he did last weekend.
Speaking just before the African Union summit opened in Addis Ababa,
the UN secretary-general declared that both the UN and the AU had a
big responsibility “to maintain peace in Sudan and make unity
attractive.” It is not immediately obvious that “peace” and “unity”
are compatible in Sudan, where civil war killed about two million
people and created four million refugees between 1983 and 2005, but
Ban was in no doubt about it.
The fighting in Sudan ended in 2005 when the northern-based
government and the southern-based rebels signed a Comprehensive
Peace Agreement that created a unity government in Khartoum and a
separate regional government in the south and promised the
southerners a referendum on secession next year. That promise was
what stopped the fighting, and despite many crises and clashes it
has held for five years. Not only that, but President Omar Bashir,
recently declared yet again that he will respect a southern decision
to secede. “The National Congress Party favors unity,” he said in
December.
“But if the result of the referendum is separation, then we in the
NCP will be the first to take note of this decision and to support
it.” So here is this secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, urging African
countries to back the unity campaign of the regime in Khartoum.
What’s more, Ban is ultimately in control of the United Nations
troops who are stationed in Sudan to guarantee the Comprehensive
Peace Agreement. Yet he clearly said which side he backed in the
referendum: “We’ll work hard to avoid a possible secession.” BAN
knows he is the shop steward of the Federation of Sovereign States
and Allied Trades (also known as the United Nations), and his job is
to preserve the rights and privileges of its members. Their most
important right, of course, is to keep control of all their
territory forever, regardless of the views of the local people.
The African Union is particularly devoted to “preserving the unity”
of all its members, because Africa’s borders are particularly
arbitrary and irrational. If any of the disparate ethnic groups that
are trapped together in country A were allowed to secede, then the
demand for similar secessions in countries B to Z would become
irresistible, or so the African orthodoxy has it. “No secessions”
was the paramount rule of the old Organization of African Unity, and
it survived unbroken until Eritrea got its independence from
Ethiopia in 1993. That was not an encouraging precedent, since
Eritrea and Ethiopia soon ended up at war with each other, and no
further secessions have been recognized since then.
But there is another way to look at this, and that is to count the
cost of all the wars that have been fought in Africa to prevent
secessions. From the Biafran war in Nigeria in the 1960s down
through the various secessionist movements in Congo and Ethiopia and
on to the breakaway movements in Sudan’s south and west (Darfur)
today, at least 10 million Africans have been killed. For what?
Nobody except some elites would be worse off if the secessions had
been allowed to succeed. The Nigerian elite would have somewhat less
money to put into its overseas bank accounts, since the oil money
would have stayed in the southeast (Biafra), and a new Biafran elite
would have bigger Swiss accounts. Maybe what remained of Nigeria
would have split into a Muslim north and a Yoruba-speaking Christian
southwest, since without Biafra the country would have become a
Muslim-majority state. So what? Maybe everybody would have been
happier that way.
Most people will probably be happier if Sudan does split in the
referendum planned for January 2011. Those in the Muslim,
Arabic-speaking north would have co-existed peacefully with the
various Christian and animist ethnic groups of the south if they had
been left to their own devices. However, the northern elite imposed
Shariah law to consolidate its power, and the southern elite
responded with appeal to ethnic solidarity.
If the south leaves next year, it will take most of the oil with it.
That is why the northern elite fought so hard to save “national
unity.” But the oil still has to go out to the sea through northern
territory, so the revenue will still be shared. After two decades
the best solution for Sudan could be independence for the
south.—Arab News |
