The Other McCain

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#SouthSudan Update: Obama Urges Calm, Reconciliation, Sends Small U.S. Force

Posted on | December 19, 2013 | 16 Comments

President Obama has sent 45 troops — just to protect U.S. personnel and property — to South Sudan, and issued a statement:

In 2011, millions of South Sudanese voted to forge a new nation, founded on the promise of a more peaceful and prosperous future for all of South Sudan’s people. In recent years, against great odds, South Sudan has made great progress toward breaking the cycle of violence that characterized much of its history.
Today, that future is at risk. South Sudan stands at the precipice. Recent fighting threatens to plunge South Sudan back into the dark days of its past.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. South Sudan has a choice. Its leaders can end the violence and work to resolve tensions peacefully and democratically. Fighting to settle political scores or to destabilize the government must stop immediately. Inflammatory rhetoric and targeted violence must cease. All sides must listen to the wise counsel of their neighbors, commit to dialogue and take immediate steps to urge calm and support reconciliation. South Sudan’s leaders must recognize that compromise with one’s political enemy is difficult; but recovering from unchecked violence and unleashed hatred will prove much harder.
Too much blood has been spilled and too many lives have been lost to allow South Sudan’s moment of hope and opportunity to slip from its grasp. Now is the time for South Sudan’s leaders to show courage and leadership, to reaffirm their commitment to peace, to unity, and to a better future for their people. The United States will remain a steady partner of the South Sudanese people as they seek the security and prosperity they deserve.

This is a good first step, although I’d feel better if he had sent 450 troops instead of 45, but OK. My concern is that South Sudan is flanked on the west by Central African Republican, which has recently descended into anarchy, and the Islamic Khartoum government to the North would like nothing better than instability in the South to justify intervention. The tribal aspect of the fighting in South Sudan is the real danger: “the race card is being played by both sides” —  which sounds crazy to American ears, since both the Dinka and Nuer are black as coal, but tribal animosities are the bane of political stability in modern Africa.

Thursday’s attack on a United Nations peacekeeping base in Jonglei killed three Indian troops, and there’s this:

South Sudan’s government declared that its security forces are in “absolute control of the situation,” but admitted later Thursday that the central government had lost control of Bor, the capital of the country’s largest and most populous state, where barrages of gunfire were reported.

This is not good news:

[R]ebels have taken the town of Bor.
The town, which lies about 200 kilometers (125 miles) north of the capital, Juba, was under heavy shelling, said Col. Philip Aguer, an army spokesman. Bor Mayor Mhial Majak Mhial said the town was under rebel control and heavy artillery was in use. . . .
President Salva Kiir has blamed soldiers loyal to his former vice president, Riek Machar, for starting the violence.
“The government has lost control of Jonglei state to the forces of Col. Machar and his group,” government representative Ateny Wek Ateny told CNN, referring to the state where Bor is situated.
The government could not yet confirm the number of fatalities from the violence, but “casualties are in the hundreds, including army forces and civilians,” Ateny said.

Lots more at the link. Thousands of refugees are fleeing. Even the best-case scenario — government forces swiftly defeating the pro-Machar rebels — would likely mean weeks of fighting and hundreds more casualties. And the worst-case scenario is almost unthinkable, a full-blown Rwanda-style ethnic bloodbath.

UPDATE: Andrew Green reports from Juba for Foreign Policy:

It will probably never be clear what triggered the Dec. 15 firefight that broke out at a Juba military barracks and has now brought the world’s newest country to the brink of a civil war. In the hours after the barracks shootout, fighting spread rapidly across the city — leaving hundreds of people dead and tens of thousands displaced.
By the following afternoon, before the army could even launch its investigation, President Salva Kiir — in full military fatigues — appeared on a delayed state television broadcast to denounce the fighting as an attempted coup by his former deputy, Riek Machar, a gap-toothed mechanical engineer turned fighter in the Sudanese civil war. Hours later the police detained ten leading political figures.
Machar, who slipped out of Juba and into hiding around the time the other politicians were being rounded up, fired back in an interview with a local newspaper two days later. He called the fighting “a misunderstanding” between soldiers and accused Kiir of using the clash as a cover to remove his rivals.
Whether coup or confusion, the incident has revealed just how fragile the coalitions that once held the country together really were.
Independence has not come easy for South Sudan. After decades of war, a country the United States helped midwife into existence less than three years ago, has come to the brink of war with Sudan and watched its economy crumble after it shut down oil production early last year over a refusal to pay grossly inflated transit fees the government in Khartoum was charging to use its pipeline. Meanwhile, rebel groups have continued to crisscross vast swathes of the country, engaging soldiers and disrupting humanitarian efforts. But now South Sudan faces its most serious challenge: Unresolved political divisions have already caused hundreds of deaths and now threaten to split the country along ethnic lines. . . .

Read the whole thing.

 


Category: Barack Obama, Sudan

Comments

16 Responses to “#SouthSudan Update: Obama Urges Calm, Reconciliation, Sends Small U.S. Force”

  1. 24Robertson
    December 20th, 2013 @ 1:12 am

    RT @smitty_one_each: TOM #SouthSudan Update: Obama Urges Calm, Reconciliation, Sends Small U.S. Force http://t.co/r0Z04FVUJR #TCOT

  2. Can This Bloodsucker Save the President? | Regular Right Guy
    December 20th, 2013 @ 2:49 am

    […] #SouthSudan Update: Obama Urges Calm, Reconciliation, Sends Small U.S. Force […]

  3. #SouthSudan Update: Obama Urges Calm, Reconciliation, Sends Small U.S. Force | Dead Citizen's Rights Society
    December 20th, 2013 @ 9:02 am

    […] #SouthSudan Update: Obama Urges Calm, Reconciliation, Sends Small U.S. Force […]

  4. MichaelAdams
    December 20th, 2013 @ 9:51 am

    And the report on the Holiday concert? I can say that from a safe distance of fifteen hundred miles. A blessed Advent season to all the McCains. Could you ever have thought that grand children might be even more fun than the kids were?

  5. PCachu
    December 20th, 2013 @ 10:26 am

    Boy, it sure is a good thing that The Won’s words can reshape our reality. Otherwise the cynical among us would have to point to this as yet another example of his patented Empty Gesture Foreign Policy.

    (Okay, yeah, that’s deeply unfair. Africa’s a f***ing mess, always has been, always will be, and nothing short of crushing military force can get the various groups to even agree on a common enemy. But still, if there’s one lesson we can learn from our port-side pals, it’s to never let an opportunity for a cheap and inappropriate partisan hit go to waste.)

  6. richard mcenroe
    December 20th, 2013 @ 10:37 am

    Marines are great troops but a single platoon can only protect so much. Find the Obama bundler down there and stand arond h

  7. Eric D. Mertz
    December 20th, 2013 @ 4:40 pm

    Its not the Marines, its a platoon of the 1st ID sent to supplement the Marines in Juba already.

  8. Eric D. Mertz
    December 20th, 2013 @ 4:42 pm

    Stacy, don’t discount non-African support for the rebels. China has illegal gold mines operating on both sides of the border and would love to get a puppet regime in place to build a pipeline to the Indian Ocean to access more cheap oil.

  9. servative
    December 20th, 2013 @ 7:50 pm

    RT @rsmccain: The #SouthSudan crisis is complex. http://t.co/cDzMrF0j3C @Cosmopeleton @Red__Rover @twitter

  10. Red__Rover
    December 20th, 2013 @ 7:53 pm

    #SouthSudan Update: Obama Urges Calm, Reconciliation, Sends Small U.S. Force : The Other McCain http://t.co/ohaYTSdPMV

  11. BeccaJLower
    December 20th, 2013 @ 8:11 pm

    #SouthSudan Update: Obama Urges Calm, Reconciliation, Sends Small U.S. Force http://t.co/ukWqBH4VJn via @rsmccain #tcot #teaparty #lnyhbt

  12. rsmccain
    December 20th, 2013 @ 8:15 pm

    RT @BeccaJLower: #SouthSudan Update: Obama Urges Calm, Reconciliation, Sends Small U.S. Force http://t.co/ukWqBH4VJn via @rsmccain #tcot #t…

  13. JadedByPolitics
    December 20th, 2013 @ 8:41 pm

    #SouthSudan Update: Obama Urges Calm, Reconciliation, Sends Small U.S. Force http://t.co/uvWiZfayrb 45? I see a #Somalia #PrayForOurTroops

  14. SteveBrandonOTT
    December 20th, 2013 @ 8:55 pm

    RT @rsmccain: The #SouthSudan crisis is complex. http://t.co/cDzMrF0j3C @Cosmopeleton @Red__Rover @twitter

  15. #SouthSudan 3 U.S. Troops Wounded as Rebels Fire on Transport Plane : The Other McCain
    December 21st, 2013 @ 9:32 am

    […] when it was announced Thursday that President Obama was sending 45 troops to South Sudan, my first comment was that I would have been more comfortable if he had sent 450. But maybe even […]

  16. trof4st
    December 23rd, 2013 @ 9:33 am

    RT @faris007: @rsmccain: #SouthSudan Update: Obama Urges Calm, Reconciliation, Sends Small U.S. Force http://t.co/yYwTxGYxBh @CatholicLisa