MuseumDESCRIPTION:
Sudan expert, Roger Winter, has been documenting the threat and now destruction of Abyei in a series of reports published by the Enough Project. In this interview, he discusses how, in mid-May of this year, the Sudanese military burnt this North-South border town to the ground.
TRANSCRIPT:
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: This is Bridget Conley-Zilkic. With me today is Roger Winter, who has worked on Sudan for over two decades at the highest levels of both nongovernmental and within the United States government. Thank you for joining me today.
ROGER WINTER: Nice to be here.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: You previously spoke on this program in August of 2007, and at that time, you offered a wide-angle view on Sudanese politics. You also mentioned several points that could be potentially dangerous moving forward in Sudan. One of them seems to have become the danger that you had pointed to, and that is the town of Abyei. I wondered if you could start by telling our audience, what is the significance of Abyei?
ROGER WINTER: Abyei, based on current analysis, is thought to be peculiarly important because of oil. Abyei’s on the border between North and South Sudan, and it’s a very oil rich area. However, Abyei has been an issue for a long time in Sudan. During the British colonial period, Abyei, which is populated basically by a population which is called the Ngok Dinka. It’s an African population, non Islamic. It had been clearly in the South, but for ease of administration, the British moved Abyei into northern Sudan, and that fit has always been uncomfortable. While Abyei became known as a link or a bridge between North and South Sudan, in fact, there was a lot of violence, particularly against the Ngok Dinka, and even the local officials would sometimes participate in that violence. It’s been a difficult situation for a long period of time.
As Sudan moved to independence from being a British colony, a war broke out that involved Abyei significantly but ultimately was concerned with the entire South. That war went on from just before 1956 independence to 1972. In 1972, that was ended by the so-called Addis Ababa Peace Agreement. The South was accorded autonomy in that peace agreement, but Abyei was provided for a referendum, so it could choose whether it would be in the northern or the southern part of Sudan. Well, the South really never got its autonomy, and Abyei never really got its referendum. Of course, this all that I’m talking about was before oil was discovered in Sudan.
It’s been a controversial and volatile location for quite a long period of time. Abyei is probably the single most volatile location in Sudan. As a result, the peace agreement, called the Comprehensive Peace Agreement [CPA], was negotiated and ended the second war between north and south. The CPA, which was signed in January of 2005, had a separate provision, which is called the Abyei Protocol, to delineate the process under which peace and hopefully ultimately a political solution to Abyei could be implemented. That Abyei Protocol, the text of it, was actually produced by the US negotiators at Naivasha.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And you were among those negotiators.
ROGER WINTER: Yes, I was on that team. It was signed by both parties ultimately. In fact, [it was] signed at the event for the Comprehensive Peace Agreement on January 9th of 2005 , and ultimately provided for in the interim constitution of Sudan. However, the key elements of the Abyei Protocol have never been implemented. The provisions of the agreement were firstly that designation of the boundaries of Abyei. There was provided for in the Abyei Protocol an independent commission that contained representatives of the government in Khartoum and representative of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, but also five independent international experts. The commission, called the Abyei Boundaries Commission, formulated its conclusions and presented them to the presidency in mid-2005. President Omar Bashir, the president of Sudan, rejected them, and as a result, never triggered the implementation of the rest of the provisions of the Abyei Protocol.
What that means is that for basically three-- more than three years actually-- Abyei has had no boundaries. That meant that it also then had no local government. By not having a local government then the monies that were being provided, via oil revenues, to meet the needs of the population of Abyei, were never released. The net bottom line of the situation was that you had basically an area long fought over, entirely destroyed, denuded of human population, that was beginning to move back, survivors beginning to move back into Abyei, having been displaced for ten or 15 or even more years by the fighting and the war itself. [They were] coming back, expecting to rebuild their lives with their meager possessions, building houses and businesses and so forth, and yet, without any of the benefits. By none of the benefits -- it’s not only economic, it is also security. If soldiers do not know where a boundary is, they will clash with each other, trying to patrol where they think the boundary may be.
It’s been a very difficult situation right along, and the complaint that I think most advocates for peace in Sudan who focused on the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, has been that there’s not only been no implementation, but there’s been no outcry from the United States or the rest of the international community, that the Abyei protocol be implemented.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: What happened then in May of this year? You alluded already to tensions increasing between soldiers who are there because of uncertainty over lines, and probably mixed agendas as well. How did that culminate mid-May?
ROGER WINTER: Basically, the whole border area between North and South Sudan has been a violence prone area because the borders generally are not known, and Khartoum has been slow to clarify the entire border situation. Now specifically, with respect to Abyei, there was enough trouble that for me -- I’ve actually been to Abyei three times already this year, trying to understand what was developing. What was developing was that this area, which was supposed to be denuded of partisan militaries -- that is, the military of the government of Sudan, or the military of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement -- which was supposed to have just a UN military component there, along with what’s called a JIU, a Joint Integrated Unit, made up of selected soldiers from both the government’s military and the SPLM’s military. Nobody else of a formal military nature was supposed to be in or around the town. But what had been happening was that various Khartoum-related militaries and most particularly the 31st Brigade, had been moving through the greater Abyei area, and basically cleansing those areas of the indigenous population, the population that was moving back to their original home areas.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And this was happening over the past year, or even longer?
ROGER WINTER: What I’m very clear on: that it has been happening at least this year, 2008. There were incidents before that. There were blockages of populations, of IDPs [internally displaced persons], seeking to return to their home area, and that kind of thing. But what we know for certain is that the 31st Brigade was highly mobile in the greater Abyei area. I went with some journalists to actually visit some of those areas earlier this year. One village we went to was a village called Todaj. It was an area completely denuded of population by the 31st Brigade. What happened with that population is that they fled into Abyei town, and because of this kind of activity, the whole town was being engorged by people who had been displaced from surrounding villages.
The immediate issue that caused the total driving out of the population was that the 31st Brigade began, with a local incident, began to rampage through Abyei proper, and basically chased away the entire population of Abyei -- everybody else that were in the surrounding villages, numbering close to, probably at this point, 100,000 people -- and then proceeded to entirely destroy Abyei town itself. When I say destroy, what they did was they entirely looted the market. Then they burned the place. When I say burned the place, it wasn’t just the market areas. It was all the residential areas, all the areas for all practical purposes. So when I say burned, I mean basically to the ground. You basically couldn’t see a more devastated area, until you looked at perhaps some of the pictures of World War II, even after the atomic blast. Yes, there were some outlines of buildings still standing, but basically, everything was entirely flat, burned to the ground.
That’s what has happened in Abyei town, but because, as I say, places like Todaj, it was happening earlier this year on a more limited scale. There was warning that this kind of thing was in motion. The reason I took journalists there in March, early April was, in part, to try to create some visibility for this situation, and to say it is predictable. In fact, in reports that we produced for the Enough Project, we did in fact point out that experts suggest that there will in fact be a massive attack against Abyei in the middle of May. Of course, unfortunately, that’s precisely what happened.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: What has international response been?
ROGER WINTER: I would say fairly mute, unfortunately. What I mean by that is, there are a lot of other things of a dramatic, humanitarian nature that have been going on in the world, such as the earthquakes in China, and the issues in Burma, and so forth, all around the same time. The reporting on Abyei I think has been pretty slow. But most dramatically, at least in my view, is essentially non-reaction from the US government about Abyei, which carries a lot of implications, because the US, after all, drafted the Abyei Protocol.
What we experienced was, first of all, almost no reporting on Abyei, because journalists weren’t present there. The UN finally was able to bring some journalists in there, and the kind of reporting that we were doing started to get some attention. I think we’ve seen a growth, particularly an awareness amongst the larger Sudan constituency that exists in the United States, Europe and elsewhere, about what’s happened. So it’s gained a degree of visibility, to the point where our American special envoy went to Khartoum for a session of what he calls his normalization talks, he was forced to divert to actually visit Abyei and see the place. It was clear from his reaction that he was stunned at the level of devastation that he actually saw. All of that doesn’t necessarily mean much in some ways, because if governments, or the international institutions that we have are not prepared to both protect the population and punish the violators in some way, then essentially, as it were, the bad guys get away with it. That just causes bad guys there and anywhere else to be bolder when they wish to take similar actions.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Just one final question, if you can briefly tell us -- there have been reports that indicate that the two sides, so the southern leadership and the Sudanese government based in Khartoum, have agreed to an international mediation again. As you said, they’d previously agreed and the decision was not implemented. Can you just clarify for us where things stand today?
ROGER WINTER: Yes, I think actually what I was just suggesting is that the failure of the international community to react to the violation and non-implementation of the prior agreement, which was the Abyei Protocol -- has placed the SPLM in a position where, to try to resolve the situation without actually going to war, they have to basically agree to another international process. What they have agreed to is a process of arbitration, which in many senses of the word duplicates the Abyei Protocol itself. The Abyei Protocol called for the Abyei Boundaries Commission to determine the boundaries. It did so, but that decision was never implemented, nor the rest of the Abyei Protocol. Now there’s an agreement that there will be some international arbitration with respect to the boundaries issue again. I would suggest that while an agreement that helps move things forward can be useful, we’re only doing a second agreement because the first one wasn’t implemented. Actually, we have no guarantee that this one will be either, I’m afraid. So it leaves Abyei, in my mind at least, in a very vulnerable position. Its vulnerability threatens the stability of the entire comprehensive peace agreement.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Thank you, Roger Winter. All three of Roger’s reports on the Abyei area are available on the website of the Enough Project and we will also link to them from our website. Thank you.
ROGER WINTER: Okay, thank you.
NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about preventing genocide, join us online at www.ushmm.org/conscience. There you’ll also find the Voices on Genocide Prevention weblog.
