Sudan on the Verge of Another War?
It has been five years that the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) was signed that brought an end to decades of war in the south of Sudan and its adjacent regions.
However, the peace in Sudan is fragile. The CPA has not been implemented yet. Sudan is on the verge of another war. 2009 has seen the highest levels of violence since the CPA was signed in January 2005.
Now, in the last year of the transition period, general elections have been announced for spring 2010 and there is the plan to hold a referendum in 2011 that might create an independent state of South Sudan.
To draw the current developments in Sudan to the attention of Parliament, a number of NGOs, amongst them the Bonn International Center for Conversion, Oxfam Deutschland, Amnesty International and media in cooperation and transition, invited German MPs to a public panel discussion in the Bundestag on January 7 2010.
Apart from the Left Party (Die Linke), all political parties were represented on the panel: Johannes Selle (CDU/CSU), Christoph Strässer (SPD), Marina Schuster (FDP), Kerstin Müller (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen). Kerstin Müller was involved in the CPA negotiations as a then minister of state in the Foreign Office. Chancellor Merkel sent her deputy advisor on foreign and security affairs, Rolf Nikel, to the panel. The MPs and Nikel discussed on the basis of a speech by Marina Peter of Sudan Focal Point Europe who has spent many years working in and on Sudan.
There was an overall pessimism for the implementation of the CPA in the months to come. Kerstin Müller put the situation in a nutshell by pointing out that the focus has shifted from “make unity attractive” towards “make secession peaceful and acceptable”.
Annette Weber of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), who moderated the event in the Bundestag, and Wibke Hansen of the Center for Peace Operations (ZIF) have just published a paper on scenarios for Sudan in 2011: Countdown im Sudan (in German only).
The Berlin-based NGO media in cooperation and transition (mict) has just launched sudanvotes.com, a media development and voter education project funded by the Auswärtiges Amt (Foreign Office).