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      • Sudan: Deal On Petroleum Needed to Lubricate Peace Process

Sudan: Deal On Petroleum Needed to Lubricate Peace Process

Juba — A diplomatic war has been going on between north and south Sudan over the oil-rich Abyei region on which a long-lasting solution to the country's political crisis rests.

 

The Southern Sudan Liberation Movement may be set to end its boycott of the Government of National Unity after talks between SPLM leader Mr Salva Kiir who is also Sudan's First Vice President and President Omar Bashir but the issue of the contested, oil-rich Abyei region remains unsolved.

 

SPLM Secretary General Gen Pagan Amum was Thursday quoted as saying the two leaders will discuss Abyei in a week's time.

 

Recently, the Minister for the Presidency in the Government of Southern Sudan, Luka Biong, sent to Sudan from the US where he was visiting, a proposal that was meant to unlock the Abyei gridlock, suggesting that the area should be placed under the United Nations.

 

Under this proposal, China, Saudi Arabia and the United States would form a committee to resolve the impasse. However, this wasn't the first time the proposal was being made.

 

In July, the SPLM Secretary-General, Pagan Amum suggested that SPLM was considering asking the US to intervene and administer Abyei.

 

Mr Amum is not from Abyei as is Mr Biong, who therefore has not been speaking just like any other southerner. He is a native of Abyei who has been travelling with Mr Kiir in the US.

 

To be fair, Mr Biong's proposal is fairly different: UN not United States becomes the administrator with China and Saudi Arabia being part of the solution.

 

That is consistent with Southern Sudan's recent diplomatic pragmatism of picking up allies and enemies alike. When Mr Kiir visited China in June, Beijing rolled out a red carpet for him. The real import of his visit became clear when he later addressed celebrations to remember the death of SPLM founder John Garang.

 

"China is now aware that most of oil produced in Sudan is found in Southern Sudan," Kiir said, adding that he had asked China to play a role in developing Southern Sudan.

 

"We have also asked China to play a role in the implementation of the CPA, and resolve the ongoing conflict in Darfur."

 

UNCTAD says Sudan is the biggest receptacle of Chinese investments in Africa. Significantly, China built Sudan's oil pipeline from the south up to Port Sudan in the Red Sea. The cost is offset from the oil proceeds. Khartoum estimates China's investments at just over $6billion (Sh384 billion).

 

To get any meaningful support from China, south Sudan had to be seen as less threatening to China's interests. And, with China being a member of the UN Security Council, it doesn't pay for Southern Sudan to rub the Asian power the wrong way if it hopes to have any realistic chance of putting the Southern Sudan issue to the UN Security Council.

 

The Nation could not establish why Saudi Arabia was thrown into the mix. However, on face-value, this seems to reflect the need to assuage the Arabic north and the Arab world that the Misseriya Arabs in Abyei, many of them resettled there during the past 50 years, will get a fair deal.

 

The Kiir-Bashir breakthrough followed a seemingly successful diplomatic offensive by Mr Kiir. Sources say President Bashir had requested Mr Kiir, who visited the US , to stay in the country as the acting president because he would be away in an African tour. But the country has two vice presidents, meaning Second Vice President Osman Taha can act as president in case Mr Bashir and Mr Kiir are away. The request nevertheless fuelled suspicion that Mr Bashir wanted to fail Mr Kiir's US trip.

 

While Mr Bashir was feted in Burundi and in South Africa, in Washing DC, Mr Kiir met the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice. Details of their deliberations were not given, although he had said he was going to talk about the CPA and the Darfur crisis. Mr Kiir also presented a paper to academics and policy gurus at the Woodrow Wilson Centre where he said the NCP and President Bashir did not have the political will to implement the peace agreement.

 

On November 15, President George W Bush invited Mr Kiir for a meeting at the White House. That the invitation came after Mr Kiir's talks with Rice signalled the importance of the issues discussed. Or, it may well have been that Ms Rice had all along been warming-up things for Mr Bush.

 

Also, while in Washington DC, Mr Kiir said the SPLM would work with the NCP as the most reliable partner because Sudan's opposition parties had not stated whether they supported the peace agreement.

 

The opposition has been courting the SPLM, clapping its hands in glee whenever there's a setback.

 

In New York, Mr Kiir met UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and wanted to address the Security Council. A Southern Sudan official says Khartoum worked round the clock to ensure that this didn't happen.

 

Meanwhile, in Khartoum, Mr Bashir opened a Pandora's Box by complaining that the south was behaving as if it was independent and complained about Mr Kiir's attempts to address the Security Council. Mr Bashir wondered why the visit was arranged through the SPLM mission in Washington DC, yet Sudan had an embassy there - one that is, moreover, run by a diplomat who is a member of the SPLM.

 

"It is our right, [because of] the current circumstances to have suspicions about why he [Kiir] was invited and why he was invited in this manner?" Mr Bashir said of the vice president.

 

Had Sudan not been a case of two countries in one, Mr Bashir's remarks would have been an accusation of his vice president of treason. But Mr Kiir is the president of a region that's not only semi-autonomous, but one that also holds the key to the future of Sudan as a nation-- and the staying of the NCP in power.

 

Recently, Mr Joel Maybury, the Public Affairs Officer at the US embassy in Khartoum was forced to issue a rejoinder to Mr Bashir's sentiments, which he had expressed in an interview with al Jazeera.

 

"We had noticed false news reports in the local media about First Vice President Mr Salva Kiir's visit to the United States," Mr Maybury said, clarifying that the visit "took place with the knowledge of the Sudanese Government." The uproar over the US trip would seem to lend credibility to a feeling that the belated attacks on Mr Kiir were a reaction to what has turned out to be a diplomatic success for the south in trying to put the issue on the international agenda.

 

But perhaps the most striking and instructive thing about now versus then is how the NCP and SPLM members reacted to the Biong proposal: Silence.

 

The last time Mr Amum floated the idea, there was an uproar from a section of the SPLM that wanted the NCP to be forced to implement the report of the Abyei Border Commission, which placed the region's boundaries farther north. Anything else in their view, was a rewriting of the peace agreement. On the other hand, the NCP considered the idea of putting the matter to the international community preposterous.

 

Some say that Mr Kiir at one time proposed the implementation of the Abyei Border Commission report and sharing of the oil, a proposal that was rejected.

 

Under the CPA, the Abyei borders must be drawn, an administration appointed, and referendum held to determine where the region would like to belong.

 

Now media reports quote Mr Amum as saying during this week's rapprochement, SPLM had agreed to provide funds for border demarcation and the building up of a national consensus. The consensus is supposed to pave the way for national elections in 2009 and a referendum on the possible secession of the south in 2011.

 

The Abyei issue is so close to Southern Sudan such that Mr Kiir once said that even if the case was referred to God, "He knows that the Abyei belongs to the Ngong Dinka and that, "Even Misseriya tribes know the land is not theirs."

 

A month after Mr Kiir's comments, US special envoy to Sudan, Mr Andrew Natsio was quoted last week as saying, "Abyei is the Jerusalem of the southerners, the ancestral home of the Dinka King."

 

The cards seem stacked against Khartoum on this issue but Biong's proposal would seem to give Khartoum a window out of the impasse without feeling defeated.

 

On January 9, Mr Bashir told a crowd that turned up to celebrate the second anniversary of the peace agreement in Juba that the experts of the Abyei Border Commission had overshot their mandate. The experts based their report on the 1956 border, Mr Bashir said, instead of the 1905 border.

 

Putting the area under an East Timor-like arrangement, as the Biong proposal suggests, could at least defer a possible, and costly, military showdown between the two. And it could help the NCP show that it did not give in easily. This is important for the party to retain support in north where some Arab populations see it as a sellout to the south. And, by having the issue resolved, this could enhance Khartoum's chances of convincing the south to remain in a united Sudan come the 2011 referendum.

 

As it is mainly said here, the fight is essentially about oil and, reports that oil in the area could reduce to a trickle by 2011 should reduce Khartoum's attempts to fight over it.

 

Some southern Sudanese speculate that Khartoum has been sucking oil miles into the south from Khartoum side. The rumours seem incredible. But that's what many here think, and the perception is important in that it determines how much the population would want to win it all.

 

Recently, the International Crisis Group reported that oil in the area may actually be reducing on the account of an apparent trick by the NCP to drain the area of oil as fast as possible.

 

According to the ICG, Oil production from the area peaked to 82,874 barrels per day in 2004. The production had dwindled to just 66,296 in 2006, and the projection for this year is 48,487 bpd.

 

"Abyei's oil production is declining, and estimates drop sharply after 2006," says the report.

 

If the long-term oil prospects look grim, resolution of the issue would not be hard.

 

The problem, for now, seems to be that many in the south doubt the amount of actual oil in the region because of the secrecy with which Khartoum holds the issue.

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