The seventh anniversary of South Sudan's independence on July 11 is, at best, a bittersweet occasion. Seldom has a country come into being with such promise and good will. Dozens of heads of state, including Sudan's president, Omar al-Bashir, came to Juba to witness the birth of the world's newest state. Messages poured in from leaders who could not make it, including US President Barack Obama, who granted South Sudan immediate diplomatic recognition, declaring: “Today is a reminder that after the darkness of war, the light of a new dawn is possible.”
Amid the celebratory choruses, I sounded a note of caution that day: “While the United States and other partners of South Sudan have helped to win freedom for the peoples of South Sudan, the challenge now is for them to consider what can be done to assure that political independence is not followed by state failure and/or conflict, but rather that there be a real chance for the improved human security and geopolitical stability, the promise of which justified the international community's recognition of the breakup of a sovereign state in the first place.”
Alas, it did not take long for things to fall apart as the new country's leaders put personal ambition above all else. South Sudan was barely two years old when a bitter civil war broke out in the wake of President Salva Kiir's botched attempt to settle his rivalry with dismissed Vice President Riek Machar once and for all by killing the latter and other opponents within the ruling Sudan People's Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M). The result has been a brutal conflict that continues today, leaving, out of a population of approximately 13 million, 2.5 million refugees in neighboring countries, 1.9 million internally displaced, and 7 million requiring humanitarian assistance, including 5.3 million in need of food assistance, a 40 percent increase in the number of people facing acute food insecurity from just one year before. As US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo observed ruefully in a July 9 statement on the independence anniversary, the people of South Sudan have “paid a heavy price for their leaders' divisions: driven from their homes, facing life-threatening hunger, and subjected to unspeakable cruelty.”
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