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| Africa Horn |
| Southern Sudan oil boom to bust-up? |
| 2010-04-10 |
| [Al Arabiya Latest] With southern Sudan stumbling towards independence next year, the Chinese oil workers in Africa's biggest country are bracing for trouble. For southern villagers like Maria Jande, trouble is already here. Dinka tribesmen briefly abducted Jande, her family and more than a dozen other women and children in a raid last month that destroyed crops and food stores and killed five men from her Mundari tribe. It's a far cry from the hopes that sprung up in southern Sudan five years ago, when a peace deal with the Arab-dominated government in Khartoum in Sudan's north promised to end a generation of conflict. Elections this month and a secession referendum by January were meant to secure a stable future for the south after 22 years of civil war and the loss of two million lives. Instead, age-old rivalries between the south's dozens of different tribes are resurfacing. "If we stay here, we'll die of hunger. There's no food," Jande said, standing beside a pot of rancid goat meat cooking beneath a mango tree in Terekeka, a tiny town 100 km (60 miles) north of southern Sudan's capital, Juba. As she spoke, her five-year-old twins hid in the folds of her tattered brown skirt, which would be scant protection from the annual rains and malaria-carrying mosquitoes due in force within days. A host of foreign governments including the United States, Kenya, Uganda and Britain backed Sudan's 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) which gave the south autonomy, a 50-50 share of oil revenues from wells within its borders and a route to independence via referendum by January 2011. Mutual distrust and vitriol between Khartoum and Juba in the run-up to the April 11-13 elections mean the plebiscite is not assured: if it does proceed the south is almost sure to split and declare itself an independent state within six months. So the deeply impoverished region's outlook is far from clear. In the worst-case scenario, the hostility between north and south that has riven Sudan since before its independence from Britain in 1956 will boil over once again, rekindling a civil war that would destabilize east Africa and halt oil output from the sub-Saharan region's third-biggest producer. Or the south could negotiate--as the United States is hoping--a "civil divorce, not a civil war" with Khartoum, securing billions of dollars in oil revenues that it can use to drag itself out of its war-induced time-warp. Under this view, a flood of foreign investment should ensue, developing hoped-for oil reserves across the region and giving birth to state-of-the-art farms and fisheries fed by the waters of the upper Nile and its tributaries. In their more fanciful moments, southern ministers even talk of droves of foreign tourists flying in to witness wild animal migrations said to rival those in Kenya's Masai Mara. |
| Posted by:Fred |