Sudan and South Sudan: EUC Report

Lord Trimble Excerpts

Wednesday 17th October 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Trimble]

My Lords, I very much welcome the fact that this debate is taking place comparatively soon since the publication of the report. After taking out the couple of months in the summer, it is a comparatively early debate. I also welcome the new Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, to her position. I believe we do not have the honour of being her first debate—I think that was last week—but we welcome her here very much indeed.

This follow-up report is very short, just one page. The background has been ably set out by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, so I am not going to go through it. The core concerns are set out in paragraphs 3 and 4. Paragraph 3 says:

“The Committee is particularly alarmed that South Sudan has cut off the flow of its own oil”,

and paragraph 4 says that,

“economic or social development in South Sudan will become profoundly difficult, if not impossible, with rapid and serious adverse effects on its economy and people”.

That, of course, is absolutely right.

In many respects, South Sudan’s actions in cutting off the oil struck us as almost suicidal. However, looked at from another point of view, the South Sudanese were in a situation where they believed Khartoum was deliberately using the pipeline as a lever and was misappropriating some of the oil and consequently the proceeds of it. They felt that they could not allow themselves to be held to ransom by Khartoum. If they had said, “The effect of this on us would be horrendous”, they would effectively have put an ace into Khartoum’s hands. Therefore, while the action had all the implications stated in our report, the South Sudanese had to show Khartoum that if need be they could do without the oil, and that eventually this would start to hurt Khartoum and perhaps bring it back to a more reasonable position. Perhaps that happened; I do not know. My comments are speculative. I am aware that there was pressure from others. Perhaps they—and even the Chinese, who had a very clear interest in getting oil out of Sudan and South Sudan—had an effect.

When we think of the impact on South Sudan, we should bear in mind that its level of development is already comparatively low. None the less, it is a rich agricultural area where people exist largely by subsistence. However, the people have narrow margins to deal with and they have problems with intertribal disputes, as occurred last year. Of course, the flood of refugees into South Sudan was something that they could not cope with. We are looking at this from a development point of view; they are looking from the other end of the pipeline, where things appear rather different.

Since we produced the report, there has been a new agreement. On 27 September 2012 the co-operation agreement between the Republic of Sudan and the Republic of South Sudan was signed and countersigned on every page with the initials of the persons involved. Obviously one welcomes it; a new agreement is a good thing. However, one also asks the question: will the agreement be any better than the other agreements in resolving the outstanding problems?

It is important to step back from day-to-day matters and remember some of the basic facts about, first, the nature of Sudan and of the Sudanese Government. Sudan exists within colonial boundaries, and if ever there was a set of completely inappropriate boundaries, this is it. It unites sub-Saharan Africa with the north of the Sahara in terms of the peoples it covers. The ethnic and economic differences are enormous. In a sense, splitting the country is a sensible thing; one could say that it should never have been one unit in the first place. I will come back to this in a moment.

The second thing to bear in mind is the nature of the Khartoum Government. I will not go into detail, but refer noble Lords to comments I made in the 7 December debate on our first report. We are dealing essentially with an Islamist Government. We should remember that this is where bin Laden first moved when the Saudis drove him out of Saudi Arabia. The President of this Government was indicted as a war criminal. The regime has been responsible for enormous atrocities within its current boundaries and also in the area of South Sudan. My impression is that the regime is hunkering down under pressure and doing things reluctantly when it is forced to, and that if ever it gets a chance to get out from under that pressure and try to reclaim part of the authority that it had, or to destabilise others, it will not be able to resist the temptation.

When we consider these two factors we see that in this situation normal diplomacy will not work. The African Union is—perhaps “incapable” is too strong a word, but it is intrinsically unlikely to be effective. It is heavily inhibited by anything that changes the colonial boundaries, because of the implications that would have through country after country south of the Sahara. Furthermore, it is extremely reluctant to pass judgments on the character of Governments. Too many other African countries have skeletons in their own cupboards. Therefore, the African Union will not be effective in dealing with the character of the regime.

The only thing that will work is pressure. The only thing that produced the comprehensive peace agreement was pressure, and by pressure, I do not mean normal diplomatic pressure, I mean really strong pressure, exerted primarily by the US Government, which left Khartoum at one stage fearing that it was facing an existential threat. I am not saying that we should be trying to persuade the current US Administration to do that. I do not think we would have any chance if we tried and, of course, we must not make any assumptions about what might happen in future. As the interim report says, we end up saying that the international community should be doing what it can to bring about the resolution of the outstanding issues, and while, for the sake of politeness, we have to name check the African Union, the European Union and others, we ought to bear in mind that at the heart of the matter the people who are going to bring effective pressure to bear are those with the ability to do so, which, I am afraid, puts the ball back in someone else’s court.