The situation in South Sudan is very bad and getting worse, as the New York Times underlined in a lengthy and blunt analysis last week:
South Sudan, born six months ago in great jubilation, is plunging into a vortex of violence. Bitter ethnic tensions that had largely been shelved for the sake of achieving independence have ruptured into a cycle of massacre and revenge that neither the American-backed government nor the United Nations has been able to stop.
The United States and other Western countries have invested billions of dollars in South Sudan, hoping it will overcome its deeply etched history of poverty, violence and ethnic fault lines to emerge as a stable, Western-friendly nation in a volatile region. Instead, heavily armed militias the size of small armies are now marching on villages and towns with impunity, sometimes with blatantly genocidal intent.
But aren’t there UN peacekeepers in South Sudan? There are, but with fewer than 5,000 troops in the country, the UN is struggling to cope. This was emphasized by an attack by Nuer fighters on members of another tribe, the Murle, in the town of Pibor, which the UN made an effort to deter. But the peacekeepers were outgunned:
As thousands of Nuer fighters poured into Pibor on Dec. 31, United Nations military observers watched them burn down Murle huts and then march off, in single file lines, into the bush, where many Murle civilians were hiding. Murle leaders have complained that they were abandoned in their hour of need. Neither government forces nor the United Nations peacekeepers left their posts in Pibor to protect the civilians who had fled, and it appears that many Murle were hunted down.
Hilde F. Johnson, head of the United Nations mission in South Sudan, said the peacekeepers had warned residents that the fighters were coming. But she argued that the United Nations troops had little choice but to stay on the sidelines. “Protection of civilians in the rural areas and at larger scale would only have been possible with significantly more military capacity,” she said.
Why are UN forces so thin on the ground? Independent analysts repeatedly warned that South Sudan could slump into violence after independence in 2010 and 2011. Although I claim no special knowledge of the country, it’s a theme that I’ve occasionally tried to highlight too. In a December 2010 article on Sudan and the UN, I argued that Ban Ki-moon’s top priority should be to “offer the Security Council a compelling version of what the UN can achieve in the South.” Last summer, I repeated rumors circulating in New York of UN turf wars over South Sudan:
More than 40 officials representing various agencies piled into an initial assessment mission. The U.N.’s “integrated” planning process, which has proved cumbersome in the past, was just as unwieldy in this case, and tempers frayed badly in New York.
After I wrote that, quite a few people inside the UN were in touch to say that I was off the mark. While the UN planning process was a bit of a mess, the real problem was that the planners did not believe that the Security Council would accept a large military mission in South Sudan comparable to those in Liberia or the Congo. European members of the Council in particular seemed to be fixated with keeping the costs of the mission down, part of larger austerity drive. UN officials put together ideas for protecting civilians with a relatively small force, but Hilde Johnson’s statement to the NYT suggests that the level of anarchy in South Sudan has now passed the point that it can be handled through “peacekeeping lite”. To make matters worse, troop contributors to the mission are getting (justifiably) nervous. Russia, which provides military helicopters to the mission, seems to have had enough already:
Russia is likely to withdraw its military helicopters servicing the U.N. peacekeeping force in South Sudan after voicing alarm at attacks on Russian personnel there, a Russian official said on Tuesday. Although Moscow has not made a final decision on its possible withdrawal , Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov said the security situation for the 120 Russians aiding the U.N. peacekeepers “recently has not been satisfactory for us.” “There is a likelihood that our unit will be withdrawn,” Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency quoted Gatilov as saying. He said Moscow had repeatedly asked the U.N. Secretariat and the South Sudan authorities to take measures to ensure the Russians’ security.
An anonymous UN official is reported as saying that Russia’s decision is “outrageous”. But if the situation is as bad as it seems, then UN officials – up to and including the Secretary-General – are going to need to go further than that. Last year, Ban Ki-moon took a stand over the crisis in Côte d’Ivoire and, as I point out in the current edition of Global Governance, demonstrated an unexpected degree of moral purpose and leadership. He needs to repeat that feat over South Sudan.
Ban has already expressed concerns about the situation. But he needs to make a huge push on this issue now: if he does not, he may find that the UN stands accused of overseeing massacres and crimes against humanity reminiscient of the 1990s. That would not only sully his second term in office, but the institution’s standing as whole.
