Journey with a New Map? Thoughts on the Sudan Agreement and Stability in Africa
Three weeks after a grueling twenty-two months of difficult negotiations-prodded along behind the scenes by a host of special envoys from a number of countries, including the United States-in the Kenyan resort town of Naivasha, the government of Suda
The ongoing U.S. involvement in resolving the conflict in southern Sudan-including the 2001 appointment by President George W. Bush of former Senator John Danforth as presidential envoy to mediate the conflict, Secretary of State Colin Powell's meeting with the two sides in Kenya last October, and Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Charles R. Snyder's presence at Naivasha last month-is grounded on both domestic and international interests. The administration faced pressure to act from both conservative Christian groups concerned with the persecution of their Sudanese co-religious by Islamists and human rights advocates worried about slavery and other abuses. Furthermore, having declared African oil a strategic national interest-oil revenues were the subject of the recent deal-America has every reason to seek an end to the war (most of the oil lies in the south and existing fields straddle the north-south divide). And, in the wake of September 11, it is in the interest of international security that al-Qa‘eda and other terrorist groups do not find refuge in a conflicted Sudan as did Osama bin Laden, who lived in Khartoum in the 1990s. The full measure of the importance of these interests-as well as of the success of his most recent diplomatic efforts to deal with them in Sudan-is perhaps hinted at by Danforth's recent nomination to succeed the Baghdad-bound John Negroponte as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Realists, of course, approach "regime change" (which, ultimately, is what redrawing maps is about) of any type with the greatest caution. However, realism does not automatically preclude changes when they represent the most viable option for long-term stability. While redrawing political maps is always a messy business, one that should be approached with the greatest caution, over the long term, the interests of both the U.S. and the larger international community in global security, state stability, respect for human rights and the development of natural resources-as well as the self-evident interest of Africans in political freedom and economic development, both of which are predicated upon state legitimacy-will best be served by encouraging peaceful processes, like the Naivasha negotiations, that empower Africans to create new consensual political entities to replaced clearly failed "imported states." As Kenyan scholar Ali A. Mazrui has argued,[v] with or without a peaceful means for true self-determination that redresses the wrongs of colonial cartographers, the break-up of the continent's colonial era states and the realignment of their frontiers will occur sooner or later-the only question is whether that process requires the spilling of more blood or whether it can be managed by statesmen with the courage and vision to face reality and defy conventions.
Seventy years ago, in Journey Without Maps, his travelogue of a fact-finding mission through what is today Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, Graham Greene lamented that he could only find two maps for the route of the trek, one of which openly confessed its ignorance with large white spaces and a few dotted lines indicated conjectured courses while the other showed "vigorous imagination" by filling in the spaces with fantasies. One can only hope that the international community, imbued with both a sense of realism and the same boldness that characterized the recent Sudanese accord, can chart more a certain path forward to a more peaceful, stable and free Africa.
Dr. J. Peter Pham, a former diplomat, is the author, most recently, of Liberia: Portrait of a Failed State (Reed Press).
[i] See Robert D. Kaplan, "The Coming Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation and Disease are Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet," Atlantic Monthly 273/3 (February 1994): 44-76; also idem, The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, From Iran to Cambodia-A Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy (New York: Random House, 1996).
[ii] Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (London: Penguin, 1991), 43.
[iii] Makau wa Mutua, "Why Redraw the Map of Africa: A Moral and Legal Inquiry," Michigan Journal of International Law 16 (Summer 1995): 1116.
[iv] Henry Kissinger, Does America Need a Foreign Policy? Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 202-203.
[v] See Ali Mazrui, "The Bondage of Boundaries," Economist (September 11, 1993): 28.