Fettered Self-determination: South Sudan’s Narrowed Path to Secession

Abstract

The interpretation of self-determination as a vote for secession shaped the state that South Sudan has become since the 2011 referendum. Self-determination, this paper argues, is a democratic political process in which citizens determine their preferred form of statehood and nature of governance for their country. In South Sudan, however, political actors—with international support—established conditions that reduced such complex democratic processes to narrow technical matters. Equating self-determination with secession consolidated political and military domination in a process designed to end such domination. This was done at the expense of a more inclusive, process-oriented and political interpretation of self-determination.

Introduction

Instead of celebrating the 5th anniversary of the independent Republic of South Sudan on 9 July 2016, the capital Juba witnessed the violent unravelling of the power sharing agreement that had been signed nearly a year before between the government of South Sudan and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army – In Opposition (SPLA-io). This Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan (ARCSS) was meant to end the civil war that had started in December 2013, when elite fractures and realignments had turned to a full-scale civil war less than three years after people exercised their right to self-determination. After a shooting outside the presidential palace on 8 July 2016, South Sudan’s capital was again in lockdown. Fighting between the government forces, the SPLA, and the SPLA-io continued for a few more days.

The leaders of South Sudan had once again failed to do justice to the aspirations the South Sudanese hold for their country. The hope that an independent South Sudan would deliver peace had been most obviously expressed in 2011, when most South Sudanese citizens voted for independence from Sudan. And yet, in the years leading up to the referendum, enthusiasm about independence had been accompanied by concerns about the direction that the government was taking. The 2010 elections had been a display of force, rather than a democratic exercise. The government had emerged from them victoriously, of course, but the former liberation movement’s choice of political pressure and violence to ensure an overwhelming victory in both elections and the referendum also presented a puzzle. Did the government force people to vote one way to consolidate its own powers? Or was it too soon for a military movement to switch gears to non-violent ways of political contest – too soon for a political landscape that could deal with dissent non-violently, even on such big choices as independence?

South Sudan’s experience of exercising the right to self-determination through a referendum poses a number of important questions about how meaningful such processes can be in a situation of political power consolidation. In the run-up to the referendum, the leadership of South Sudan had publicly interpreted self-determination to mean only one thing: secession. Writing about Eritrea – the only other African country that seceded through a popular vote albeit after a military victory – Abdel Salam and de Waal described the Eritrean referendum on independence from Ethiopia as ‘affirmatory’ with the purpose of giving ‘legitimacy and recognition to what is already a political fait accompli’. (Abdel Salam and de Waal 2001).¹ The 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) suggested that all options were still open in South Sudan but as we will show, the path towards the southern referendum in January 2011 became a matter of affirmation, rather than choice.

Despite huge support for the SPLA, the South Sudanese had not expected the transition from rebel army to government to be smooth. Warning bells had been sounded regularly along South Sudan’s path towards independence (Young 2012, Schomerus and Allen 2010, Kalpakian 2008, Branch and Mampilly 2005, Young 2005b). Yet, it came as a shock that independence has meant war, violence, economic collapse and international ostracisation. South Sudan’s first five years of independence reveal a grim picture. An increasingly selective group within the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) continues to consolidate power. The idea of the SPLM as a broadly supported movement has crumbled. The space for political discussion is closed, only a few years after the celebrated referendum on self-determination.

Argument and Structure

The closed political space and open violence that South Sudan is experiencing post-independence has its origins in how political expression was shaped during the years of the Interim Period. During this time, the government, the international community and the vast majority of the South Sudanese people collectively reduced the notion of self-determination to a single decision that meant only one thing: secession. In this paper, we offer an alternative understanding of the notion of self-determination: as an inclusive process – not a one-off decision – in which citizens exercise their right to determine the form of statehood and governance for their country. The point of the right to self-determination is that it broadens political choices and notions of citizenship. In South Sudan, self-determination, which could have meant an inclusive and politically nuanced process centred around the primacy of the individual will, was suppressed – at times violently – to mean a vote for the independence from Sudan, without any form of debate about the repercussions. Instead of opening a long-term political process that invited all South Sudanese to contribute, the singular decision was enforced through a violation of nascent democratic processes.

Taking self-determination to simply mean an affirmative vote for secession meant that a process that was designed to broaden the political choices of citizens through the primacy of the individual will was curtailed. It is an abuse of the principle of self-determination. We aim to show how in South Sudan the application of carefully crafted political principles that were expected to support the transition from liberation war to democracy took a damaging trajectory. Armed liberation movements are likely to tout the concept of self-determination in their liberation rhetoric to gain popular support. Reducing self-determination to mean secession allowed the SPLM/A to merge military with political processes until the two were no longer distinguishable.

In this article, we start with a discussion on the various interpretations of self-determination and how these have been applied on the African continent, including in the history of the Southern Sudanese quest for autonomy and independence. The paper then examines how the CPA between the government of Sudan and the SPLM/A in 2005 set up a contradiction between the ‘making unity attractive’ provision of the agreement and the political reality in the run-up to the 2010 election. We explain how domination became the means to organise the democratic process, including the referendum. In the last part, we highlight the consequences of this process, including the narrow interpretation of the concept of self-determination.

Methods and Limitations

The article uses historical sources and a review of the literature on the role of South Sudan’s liberation movements in achieving independence. Further, we draw on our own extensive socio-anthropological research in which we have had a long-standing shared interest in how different state and non-state authorities shaped and governed the transition period in the years before and after independence. Since 2008 and 2006, respectively, we have worked in many corners of South Sudan with an emphasis on the Equatoria region. Our data comprise hundreds of interviews with state officials from national to local levels, militia members or other military actors, ordinary citizens and people working in the fields of diplomacy and aid. We also engaged in participant observations and have had countless informal conversations as part of that. Both authors were also involved in the 2010 election observation process for the Carter Center; one author continued to work in the observation of the referendum. Because of South Sudan’s political environment in which it is increasingly difficult and dangerous to have open political debates, we are anonymising our sources here for their protection.

This article makes a number of broad generalisations. We often present the SPLM as if it was a monolithic entity in which consensus ruled. We also often imply that there was consensus and cohesion among the SPLM/A leadership about the future of southern Sudan. Particularly recent developments have brought to light the extent of division within the SPLM, and even during the 1983–2005 civil war, the SPLM/A’s lack of a coherent vision was striking. The SPLM was a national party with the northern sector not in favour of secession, and thus did not officially endorse independence until the final heady months before the referendum when messages became more muddled and individual and party views became blurred.

Likewise, our paper does not do justice to the differences among and within international actors in approaching southern independence. Both sets of actors experienced a less clear-cut process than we at times suggest. However, the fact that internal debates were often invisible supports the argument that the international community broadly viewed it as more important to successfully implement the referendum since it was part of the CPA it had also supported. This meant that the emphasis was on the outcome, rather than the process of self-determination.

Self-determination as Process and the Primacy of the Individual Will

Although the notion of self-determination constitutes a key aspect of international law and international relations theory, it has never had one fixed meaning. The UN Charter takes a broad approach, proclaiming that ‘all people have the right to freely determine, without external interference, their political status and to pursue their economic, social and cultural development’ (United Nations General Assembly 1970). There are many different views on what such broad understanding of what self-determination means implies for its practical reality, depending on context or academic discipline. Perhaps the concept can be explained by its malleability: depending on the situation self-determination could take the form of autonomy, federation or outright independence (Walter and Von Ungern-Sternberg 2014). A stark contrast of interpretation exists between those who relate self-determination to the sovereignty of nations and those who focus on internal politics of democratic values and well-being.

Self-determination has been on the minds of the emerging Southern Sudanese elites even before independence of the Republic of Sudan in 1956. What self-determination meant, however, varied as time progressed, with Johnson arguing that there had been ‘multiple meanings of self-determination’ (Johnson 2013) as Sudanese in different parts of the country used the concept differently.

To examine how the South Sudanese right to self-determination came to mean secession for the referendum – and thus, as we argue, constituted an abuse of principle – requires a brief look at the multiple interpretations of the term. A broader, more philosophical understanding of self-determination is that it emphasises and protects the ‘primacy of the individual will’ (McLean and McMillan 2009). This means that democratic values, inclusivity and freedom are integral to an individual’s right to determine one’s future – rather than one-off political decisions. This definition connects with the more common interpretation of self-determination that states that groups of people with social ties have the right to form or determine the shape of their own government, within or outside the borders of the country in which they find themselves (Fabry 2010).

Secession – or the ‘right to secede’ – on the other hand is understood as the (unilateral) withdrawal from the authority of a sovereign state. It is the most extreme expression of the political right to self-determination. Less radical alternatives might include various degrees of autonomy and federation. The international community is generally committed to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of states, which means that outright secession is considered an unfavourable political outcome of a process that could have come up with alternatives. The African Union (AU) and the wider international community have been reluctant to support self-determination. In the case of the AU, argues Bereketeab (Bereketeab 2015), this indicates ‘how the AU is still bent on prioritising state integrity over people’s rights’.

This may be one of the reasons why the African continent has known few secessionist conflicts. Another is likely that internationally recognised sovereignty is valuable to elites (Englebert and Hummel 2005) and gaining international recognition is challenging (Walter and Von Ungern-Sternberg 2014). The Polisario Front of Western Sahara and Somaliland both proclaimed their right to self-determination through independence, but are not internationally recognised (Bereketeab 2015). Calls for self-determination on the African continent are common, usually accusing a central government of wrongdoings and abuse, as well as citing a history of separate administration during colonial times.

This tension between self-determination as an expression of the rights of the individual and recognition of self-determination through the sovereignty of the state is highly relevant for South Sudan. It helps us understand the paradox of a liberation movement fighting for the rights of marginalised people on the one hand, and using methods in this fight that contribute to rights violations and marginalisation on the other. In the run-up to the referendum, the SPLM leadership equated self-determination to mean secession, thus profoundly altering the vision of its leader Dr John Garang de Mabior who had fought for a united ‘New Sudan’. As we will explain later, Garang’s thoughts on political inclusivity were never popular in the South and among his fellow SPLM/A commanders, but Garang’s vision on self-determination was much broader. He insisted that self-determination was not an objective in itself’ but crucially a democratic process (Johnson 2013).

The International Council for Human Rights states that ‘a democratic deficit is ultimately a deficit in self-determination’ (International Council for Human Rights and International Human Rights Association of American Minorities 2013). Yet, the emphasis in International Law and International Relations on secession and external recognition as the most important expression of self-determination makes self-determination seem an outward-looking process oriented towards international recognition, instead of an occasion in which the relationship between the people and their leadership is redefined. Thus, while independence was presented as the ultimate fulfilment of self-determination in South Sudan, this narrow interpretation of the concept has deepened the democratic deficit and created a political environment that prohibits the complex and continuous political process that self-determination is. Dismissing the internal dimensions – the primacy of the individual will with regard to the system of government and the workings of politics – has repercussions for the type of states that ensue from calls of self-determination.

Fighting for Self-determination

The Southern wish for self-determination formed an important foundation of Sudan’s two civil wars between the central Khartoum government and southern rebels (1955–1972 and 1983–2005). The specific meaning of self-determination shifted over the course of the two wars and the more stable period in between. At the 1947 Juba Conference, for instance, the British presented plans to integrate southern and northern Sudan, suggesting that there was southern support for a decision that had already been taken by the British in collaboration with the emerging Sudanese political elite. Yet, the Southerners, generally speaking, opposed the idea because unification formalised northern political domination.

While other African countries experienced a growth of independence movements, Sudan was caught in a struggle between its two administrators, the British and the Egyptians. To weaken Egypt, Britain supported Sudan’s independence as one country. Britain withdrew on condition that Sudan would be administered under federal structures, which were supposed to strengthen the South’s position in the country. Because of this condition, argues Deng (Deng 2005), the south reluctantly supported the move towards Sudanese independence, while demanding guarantees for self-governance and autonomy. At the same time, northerners continued to obstruct the southern wish for regional autonomy and self-determination (Johnson 2003). It did not bode well that when the British started to transfer administrative tasks to the Sudanese, only 6 of the 800 positions went to southerners (Oduho and Deng 1963).²

When Sudan declared independence from colonial rule on 1 January 1956, north and south Sudan, Belloni writes, ‘found themselves together unprepared in the same political and administrative entity’ (Belloni 2011). The year before, a mutiny in southern Sudan’s Torit had expressed growing Southern discontent with the evolving path to Sudan’s independence. This mutiny laid the groundwork for Sudan’s first civil war from the early 1960s onward – the Anya-Nya I war – which had clearly separatist objectives (Rolandsen 2011a). Khartoum quickly reneged on the promise of support for southern development, instead focusing on unifying the country through Arabisation and Islamisation. 1972 saw the end of this first war that had been explicitly been fought over self-determination and separation.

The peace agreement, signed in Addis Ababa, accorded constitutional recognition to the distinctive, non-Islamic area of the south within the Sudanese state. Despite the semi-autonomy of the south, including a separate parliament, the Anya-Nya rebels had not achieved what they wanted. One veteran, interviewed in 2009, succinctly summarised the agreement: ‘South Sudan was given an autonomous government but everything was controlled from Khartoum’.³ Nevertheless, the agreement marked the start of southern self-administration through the Southern Regional Assembly with a High Executive Council (HEC).

The weak semi-autonomy of the southern Sudan ended a decade later. The diverse south faced the growing challenge of how to unify its people without internal power struggles, which were most commonly organised along ethnic lines. Leaders of the HEC were accused of bias towards their own ethnic group (Green 2011), and the Southern Regional Assembly was notoriously plagued by infighting. Green cites a commentator of the time who said that ‘regional autonomy for Southerners did not only mean coming to terms with Northerners, it meant essentially coming to terms with themselves’ (Green 2011).

Over that same decade, relations with Khartoum became increasingly strained. In 1983, Sudan’s President Gaafar Nimeiri provocatively denounced the Addis Ababa Agreement by dissolving the Southern Regional Assembly and establishing three regions – Greater Bahr el-Ghazal, Greater Equatoria and Greater Upper Nile – to reduce the regional influence of the South. He also decided to implement partial shari’a law in the predominantly Christian south. These decisions contributed to Sudan’s descent into its second north–south civil war in 1983. Ending in 2005, it claimed an estimated 2.5 million lives and displaced five million people (UNMISS 2009).

The same year, the new rebel group SPLM/A with Garang as leader published its first manifesto, highlighting problems of underdevelopment, religious freedom, elitism and economic hardship in the whole of Sudan (Johnson 2003). In a marked shift from the Anya-Nya I rebellion, independence for the south was not an outright demand by the SPLA, nor did Garang present it as the solution to the problem of the peoples of Sudan. Instead, the 1983 SPLA manifesto called for a ‘united, democratic and secular’ New Sudan that would use its diversity to create unity (Garang de Mabior 1992, SPLM 2008). The southerners among the rank-and-file of his movement, however, continued to long for secession. Garang’s strong leadership allowed him to maintain this position even against internal disagreement (Cockett 2010) while pursuing a vision of New Sudan that was, argues Deng, ‘incongruent with their [Southerners’] aspirations, and in any case was utopian, since the government in Khartoum could never allow it’ (Deng 2005). Against the odds, the appeal for a New Sudan worked: people from Blue Nile Province and the Nuba mountains in Southern Kordofan in particular joined the SPLA and contributed to its success in the late 1980s while the southerners continued to fight for independence.

Nonetheless, the SPLA lacked internal ideological coherence and was instead, as Thomas writes, ‘a diverse collection of interests and factions’ (Thomas 2011). Young argues that the New Sudan agenda was opportunistic rather than heartfelt, as it garnered the SPLA much-needed regional support from Ethiopian leader Haile Mengistu Mariam (Young 2005a). Mengistu’s communist Derg government, which was fighting its own Eritrean separatist movements, would not have supported a separatist ideology. Instead, Mengistu appreciated the SPLA’s ambitions for Sudanese unity and the movement’s Marxist undertones, which the SPLA developed to secure Ethiopian support in the 1980s. Nonetheless, Young writes, the ‘‘New Sudan’ never had any resonance among southerners’ (Young 2005a). The end of Ethiopia’s Derg regime in 1991 resulted in an abrupt drop in military support and the SPLA had to retreat from the Ethiopian territory which they had used as their rear base.

Self-determination via the ‘New Sudan’ or via Independence?

The movement’s diversity and the discrepancy between the ‘New Sudan’ vision of its authoritarian leader and the wish for secession of many of the rank-and-file culminated in a powerful manifestation of internal resistance. In 1991, three SPLM/A commanders – Riek Machar, Gordon Kong and Lam Akol – left the SPLM/A to fight for southern independence. The fall of the Derg regime, together with the internal split, set back the SPLA for most of the 1990s as different parties used violence to fight over separate visions for South Sudan. The legacies of this internal violence were to come back to haunt the SPLM in 2013.

Within the divided SPLA, the battle was not only military, but also ideological. In 1992, the split SPLA convened for peace talks in Abuja at the invitation of the Nigerian Government. While Garang continued to hold on to his vision of New Sudan, the SPLA faction under Machar – who was later to become Vice-President of the Republic of South Sudan and then leader of the armed opposition against the government in 2013 – vocally supported secession. The Abuja talks were supposed to bridge the divide between the two positions. It was the first time that Garang’s SPLM/A put self-determination on the agenda with the loss of Ethiopian support having opened up the space or need for this debate (Young 2007). After several days of negotiations, the two delegations developed a surprising joint position which would have been unlikely had the meeting been convened by the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), rather than bilaterally: both SPLA delegations announced self-determination – with independence as a possibility – as their common goal (Wondu and Lesch 2000).

In 1994, during the first round of peace talks between the SPLM/A and the Government of Sudan (GoS) under the auspices of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), the SPLM/A was conscious of needing to reconcile the southern wish for self-determination with the continued engagement of people from the northern areas of the Nuba mountains and Blue Nile, as these provided rank-and-file for the SPLA. Thus, the SPLM/A articulated more inclusive demands for, as Rolandsen writes, ‘a secular, pluralistic Sudan and self-determination for the South’ (Rolandsen 2011b). This demand was explicitly not framed in the language of ‘independence’, but more within the notion of Garang’s New Sudan.

In many ways, the Declaration of Principles (DoP) that kicked off the first round of IGAD talks in 1994 reflects the continuing tension between using self-determination as a concept and the wish for secession. The DoP states that ‘extensive rights of self-administration on the basis of federation, autonomy, etc. to the various peoples of the Sudan must be affirmed (GOS/SPLM/A/SPLM/A-UNITED 1994). Only a breach of these principles would allow the next step: ‘In the absence of the above principles …the respective people will have the option to determine their future including independence through a referendum’ (GOS/SPLM/A/SPLM/A-UNITED 1994). The main point of the DoP was that the option of secession was only granted if Sudan as a state failed to move towards democracy and secularism, which implicitly meant that self-determination was the process of living under a government that shared resources and power equally among all (Young 2007).

The difference between forms of self-determination and outright secession is important because it alludes to another debate that was particularly virulent at the time: the position of the OAU and members of the international community regarding separatist movements in Africa. In 1993, the OAU and the international community had had to accept the outcome of the referendum for Eritrean independence. Another case could result in further claims for self-determination from secessionist groups all over the continent. Thus, during the first round of the 1994 negotiations, neither GoS, IGAD, the OAU nor other members of the international community were ready to even negotiate on self-determination.

Among the rank-and-file of the SPLA and the other militias active in the South, the call for secession remained strong. Only a few of Garang’s intellectual allies in the movement and people from Blue Nile and the Nuba Mountains supported the idea of a New Sudan. Machar, more in line with these demands, had named his faction the South Sudan Independence Movement, with which he pursued his interpretation of self-determination as moving towards secession (Machar, not dated (ca. 1996)). Paradoxically, Machar liaised with the Khartoum government to receive support for his armed group fighting Garang in exchange for the promise of a referendum on secession. Thus, when various southern militias signed the 1997 Khartoum Peace Agreement, it prominently included ‘self-determination exercised through a referendum’. Although the agreement itself is generally considered unsuccessful – the main SPLM/A was not a signatory, and the signatories quickly violated what had been agreed – it did lay the foundations for claims later made by the SPLM/A during negotiations over the CPA. Counting on the failure of the Khartoum agreement, the Government of Sudan perhaps went along with it, not knowing that parts of it would later serve as the basis of the protocols for the CPA.

The first part of the CPA – the Machakos Protocols – enshrined the highly unusual precedent of supporting self-determination. Garang, aware of the continuing conflict potential of the independence question, had accommodated secessionist demands by not opposing a referendum, although Garang’s deputy, Salva Kiir had largely negotiated this part of the agreement. What ultimately emerged from the Machakos talks was, as Young argues, ‘very different political waters’ with regard to self-determination than the IGAD DoP had proposed and what Garang had been fighting for. Self-determination was no longer assumed to be fulfilled through the reform of the Sudanese state to a secular democracy with respect for human rights. Instead, self-determination was explicitly equated as a vote ‘after a transitional period, irrespective of any changes within the central state’ (Young 2007).

This stark shift unpleasantly surprised the US representatives at the talks, and also Garang himself, who dismissed Kiir as his deputy (Ofuho 2006). Nonetheless, the southerners’ ‘right to self-determination’, with the options of remaining part of Sudan or becoming an independent country, became part of the CPA. With support from the US, UK and Norway, the CPA formalised the vote for self-determination at the end of a six-year Interim Period, while also stipulating both parties’ commitment to ‘making unity attractive’ through a process of democratic transformation and inclusive development from the side of the Government of Sudan and its southern semi-autonomous counterpart the Government of Southern Sudan (GoSS), as it was called during the years of the Interim Period.

With this, the SPLM/A had set up a contradictory agenda for itself that would cause a range of problems in subsequent years. Even after the signing of the CPA, Garang maintained that New Sudan was still an option, but he acknowledged that if political transformation within Sudan were to prove impossible, independence was the only other choice for the south (Johnson 2013). South Sudan’s path towards independence substantially changed after Garang died in a helicopter crash in 2005, weeks after the start of the Interim Period of the CPA.

The Failure to ‘Make Unity Attractive’

The CPA Interim Period of 2005–2011 can roughly be separated into two phases. During the first four years, the secessionist and New Sudan agendas still coexisted within the SPLM/A, and the party showed some interest in Sudan-wide Government of National Unity (GoNU). The second phase started in 2009 with preparations for elections, and was marked by a move towards a focus on secession and controlling political debate.

In the first years of the Interim Period, the former guerrilla movement was expected to build a credible political party, government institutions and a professional army. Although this happened on paper, the reality turned out to be more complicated (de Vries and Justin 2014, Kalpakian 2008). These years also demonstrated how difficult it was to create cohesion in the south: the SPLM/A’s role in negotiating the future of all southern Sudanese without representing everyone’s interests had taken its toll. Reminiscent of the HEC period in the 1970s after the signing of the Addis Ababa Agreement, southern divisions – such as contentions between the SPLM/A elites and other militias, narratives of ethnic dominance and people’s dissatisfaction with their leaders – soon started to surface (Schomerus and Allen 2010, Branch and Mampilly 2005).

During the first three years, the SPLM was balancing a wish for secession by many of its southern supporters with the commitment to unity and New Sudan, which was still supported by a small but influential group of SPLM members who had been close to Garang. The uncertain future of Southern Kordofan, Blue Nile and Abyei (the so-called ‘three areas’), all of which had supported the SPLM/A along the way, and the SPLM’s role in the GoNU fuelled a re-affirmed commitment to the New Sudan. The SPLM officially confirmed its commitment to Sudanese unity and the New Sudan policy at the second SPLM national convention in May 2008 (SPLM 2008). The official line before the elections was that all candidates had to prove their commitment to the CPA, and hence to ‘making unity attractive’.

Yet, neither SPLM nor northern Sudan’s ruling National Congress Party (NCP) engaged in serious efforts ‘to make unity attractive’ (International Crisis Group 2010) by working towards Garang’s new Sudan. In the north, the Darfur peace talks and the issuing of an arrest warrant for President Omar al Bashir by the International Criminal Court in The Hague in March 2009 occupied the NCP. Numerous commentators we spoke with during those years suggested that the NCP was expecting that the SPLM/A would fall apart during the Interim Period.

In those first years, self-determination was debated through a focus on concrete, almost technical points: What might southern independence mean for the south, for southerners living in the north and for people in the three areas? At the same time, the road was paved towards a successful vote for separation: Garang’s successor, President Salva Kiir Mayardit stated in October 2009 that only with independence would the southern Sudanese stop being second-class citizens (Belloni 2011). As the referendum approached, emphasis on unity became subdued, as did any substantial political debate on the advantages and disadvantages of secession.

The combination of lack of political will in either north or south to address political challenges and encourage debate set the scene for overthrowing the principles that underpin self-determination. Instead, the rhetoric of the Interim Period emphasising the thrive for an inclusive, peaceful and democratic (south) Sudan – in other words, emphasising the individuals’ right to determine how they want to be governed – was traded for political domination. This became manifest during the last three years of the Interim Period, when the concept of self-determination could have been filled with meaning during the 2010 general elections and the referendum in 2011. Yet, rather than becoming an empowering political process, both milestones left little room for debate and political opposition.

Self-determination Through Domination

Electing Repression

In late 2009, widespread discontent within southern Sudan at the leader’s failure to build a southern Sudan that cherished its entire people grew as enthusiasm over the CPA wore off (Schomerus and Allen 2010). Theoretically, preparing for national elections was an opportunity for the SPLM/A to demonstrate their commitment towards self-determination as a process in which citizens could freely participate in public debate and enjoy political diversity. Instead, the path towards the national elections showed how the SPLM struggled to speak with one voice across the northern and the southern sections of the party. People in the three areas, who felt left out of the CPA, were disappointed when the SPLM-North party announced it would boycott the elections. This only worked at the advantage of the two dominant parties in the north (the NCP) who lost its strongest opponent, and in the South (the SPLM) who no longer had to reconcile contradicting political messages across the northern and southern wings of the party. The run-up to the election thus strengthened both signatories to the CPA in their individual interests, leaving others out.

For the ruling party in the South, winning the elections was a crucial precursor for consolidating power and achieving independence. The SPLM thus used the elections to largely close down space for genuine political discussion, as Young describes:

Freedom of association was limited; non-governmental political parties faced periodic harassment …. Thus the elections took place in an environment in which democratic freedom and respect for human rights were limited and political repression was common. (Young 2012)

Observers reported arbitrary detention and harassment of opposition candidates and political opponents, direct interference in polling, ballot fraud and the intimidation of voters by security forces (International Crisis Group 2010). It was, Willis and el Battahani argue, a moment when the notion of the secret ballot in the south was ‘tarnished by its association with an authoritarian and violent state’ (Willis and el Battahani 2010).

Numerous analysts and observers questioned the SPLM’s actions in its role as patron of the CPA agenda, particularly as security forces were often heavy-handed (Human Rights Watch 2009, Kalpakian 2008). The shift towards political domination made international actors uneasy. Yet, having championed the CPA, the UN, US, Norway and the UK could neither officially renege on ‘making unity attractive’ nor stop supporting the two milestones of the CPA, the elections and the referendum.⁴ At the same time, representatives of the UN and foreign governments often unofficially acknowledged that support for unity had become lip service, particularly as there were limited signs of political transformation in Khartoum.

It was a confusing mix: a southern government steering towards only one goal, an international lip service commitment to democratic principles and the reality of southern Sudanese politics that repressively prevented political influence from outside the SPLM/A. International observation missions voiced concerns and largely concluded that the elections had not been up to international standards (Carter Center 2010). Nonetheless, the international community did little to support the genuine implementation of democratic principles, and instead focused largely on technical issues. High-ranking diplomats commonly commented that the most important thing at that time was not to conduct free and fair elections, but to get to the referendum without a hitch.⁵ Process – the crucial element of self-determination – was sacrificed for results.

The elections were not merely fraudulent: they were the opposite of a political process. Through this experience, a curious modus operandi was put in place that largely reduced political processes to technicalities both for political actors and for voters, who had experienced being observed at the ballot by an armed soldier or given pre-marked ballots. Yet, the visible performance of the democratic ritual of elections was enough for them to go unchallenged by the international community. The elections cemented, rather than challenged, the political status quo (Hemmer 2009). The first opportunity that would have allowed the southern Sudanese to exercise their democratic rights – as the primacy of the individual will – had been missed. In the aftermath of the elections, several unelected candidates launched rebellions and the southern government prioritised security issues over anything else.

Steering a Single Outcome

The SPLM’s conduct during the months between the elections and the referendum indicated that they knew some fences had to be mended. In October 2010, the government organised an all-party conference in Juba with the explicit aim to speak, as reported, ‘with a united voice’ and called for a ‘timely and transparent conduct of the region’s referendum on independence’ as well as for ‘achieving reconciliation in the region’ (Sudan Tribune 2010). At the occasion, President Kiir pardoned ‘all the officers and men in uniform who rebelled against the government before and after April [2010] elections’ (Sudan Tribune 2010).

Having displayed these conciliatory gestures and with international support for independence muted yet widely taken for granted, the SPLM/A was in a position to ‘instrumentalize the state and engage in “predatory activities”’, as Englebert and Hummel have called the process in other contexts (Englebert and Hummel 2005). Debates about the political, social and economic consequences of separation for both countries were silenced. Only after the referendum would the governments of Sudan and southern Sudan deal with issues such as who would be granted citizenship of which country, how national wealth would be shared and international debt divided or how cross-border grazing rights would be administered and border demarcation tackled.⁶ The highly political issues of the status of Abyei and the oil-rich border areas were also parked until after the referendum. Instead, debates in Juba turned to whether the security situation would allow the referendum to be held at all, and under what conditions the government in Khartoum would accept the outcome. What once had been, as one report called it, ‘a deep ideological division’ in the liberation movement, especially between the northern and the southern sectors of the SPLM, had become settled in the south only in favour of separation (International Crisis Group 2010) – implicitly also in favour of a separation of SPLM north and south.

For the international community, too, it became increasingly difficult to engage in and support constructive political debate in southern Sudan. International actors who did not openly support secession were called Khartoum allies. Caught between the commitments to make unity attractive and to support an environment of democratic governance and the emerging reality that was the opposite of both, the international community again focused primarily on technicalities. McNamee argues that the international community during the Interim Period ‘buried its head in the sand until secession was all but inevitable’ (McNamee 2012).

Thus, secession acted as a damper on the political processes of debate, opposition and non-violent dissent. Falling into line with the SPLM/A on the question of independence became synonymous with being a good southern Sudanese. Southerners resident in the north were intimidated into not talking about the option of staying united, while in the south, according to an official of the humanitarian wing of the SPLM, discussing unity was strongly discouraged.⁷ The sentiment expressed by a bookstore owner in Yambio was typical: ‘The government will not give a chance to anyone not to vote for separation’.⁸ During a political rally in Yei, one public speaker said: ‘If you don’t want separation, go away’. Another speaker concluded: ‘If you are an Arab, if you are a Muslim, go away’.⁹ At a public rally in Ayod town attended by the SPLM, the minority parties and various community leaders, it was stated openly by government officials that it was best to kill those who wanted unity.¹⁰

Debate over the practical consequences of separation or unity was non-existent. A depoliticisation of the public sphere had created, in Habermas’s words, ‘the exclusion of practical questions from public discussion’ (Habermas 1996). Some brave critics stated in interviews that they preferred unity to independence because of a concern that the SPLM was turning increasingly towards autocracy.¹¹ With a simplified political discourse, southerners living in the north were invited to come ‘home’. Indeed, more than 264,000 southerners left the north to travel to southern Sudan between October 2010 and March 2011(OCHA 2011). This was not a return for all of them: the war had split families, and many of those stepping off river barges in Juba had never been to the south before. Secession was in many cases not just a question of liberation, but also of a personal loss of identity, home and family. The future of the thousands of southerners arriving from the north was just one of the many unresolved issues.

On 9 January 2011, six years to the day after the signing of the CPA, southern Sudanese in southern, northern, eastern and western Sudan, as well as those living abroad, exercised their right to self-determination. 4.8 million southern Sudanese had registered, four million cast their vote and nearly 99% of these voted for secession, according to the official result (Belloni 2011). In the enthusiasm that followed both within and outside the country, reports of ballots pre-printed to vote for secession and incidents of intimidation were drowned out.¹²

Constitutionalising Dominance: Interpreting Self-determination

Since the referendum and declaration of independence, South Sudan’s government and the SPLM have increasingly dominated and determined the boundaries of political space for debate. The first post-independence sign of the SPLM/A’s grip on power was the constitutional review process in the months after. On paper, the process aimed at developing a broad support base beyond the SPLM/A, with representatives from all political parties and civil society jointly deciding on how the government should be run. Instead, the Transitional Constitution greatly centralised and further strengthened the powers of the president, who was to be given the right to dismiss elected governors and declare a state of emergency without parliamentary consent – a right which he later exercised and which arguably contributed to violence post-2013 (Kisiangani 2011, International Crisis Group 2011).

Ever since the worrying signs of the constitutional review process, the potential for democratic governance has been further reduced. Towards the end of 2013, South Sudan’s president had eliminated critical voices from within the government and the army by replacing the cabinet and dismissing military personnel. Prominent members of the SPLM – most importantly dismissed Vice-President Machar – publicly voiced their dissatisfaction with the government, denouncing it as a liberation movement turned political oppressor that was tarnishing Garang’s vision of political inclusiveness. Just a few days after the open critique from within the party, the government in December 2013 cracked down violently on perceived opponents, claiming that there had been a coup attempt (de Vries and Justin 2014). Within days, parts of the SPLA loyal to the government were engaged in severe fighting with those opposed to it, meaning entire battalions had split from the SPLA.

Three years later, the power sharing agreement that was signed with reservations in August 2015 by the warring parties – the SPLM and the SPLM-In Opposition (IO) – is largely considered a failure. South Sudan continues to be at war with itself, while being ever more in a deep political crisis. In almost four year, the civil war has killed thousands of people, displaced hundreds of thousands from their homes and terrible violence has been inflicted on civilians by both the government army and the opposition forces (Panel of Experts on South Sudan 2016). As violence becomes the choice tool for dealing with political dissent, South Sudan’s current situation serves as a reminder that the seeds for denying political expression were sown when the notion of self-determination was used to oppress political voices during the elections and the referendum.

Conclusion

It is fair to say that the majority of South Sudanese supported independence. Yet, the way in which it was achieved – with complete disregard of the process – was an indication that the political and military leadership of South Sudan was pursuing its goal without putting much weight on developing a relationship of trust with South Sudan’s citizens. With self-determination reduced to meaning one vote during the referendum and secession branded as the only possible choice for that vote, the regime in South Sudan denied its people the process of self-determination that Garang had envisioned. Southerners supported independence, but their right to self-determination as a process in which they are invited to jointly decide on what system of government, constitution and political leadership they would prefer has been denied. As their voice became curtailed, South Sudan paved its way towards violent conflict as a means of expression of political discontent.

In academic and policy circles, discussions about the right to self-determination tend to focus on why the international system struggles with supporting the principle. What internal conditions are necessary to make exercising the principle meaningful is rarely the subject of debate. South Sudan managed to cross the hurdle of achieving international recognition, but the world’s youngest nation is fighting a war against itself. The six-year Interim Period would have allowed the GoSS and its international partners to focus the broader interpretation of self-determination as such a process in which the primacy of the free will gives all citizens the chance to decide on the system of government. It is very likely that the outcome of a non-repressice political process would have been just the same with the SPLM as the voted-in ruling party and South Sudan an independent country. Instead, self-determination was reduced to the single vote in the referendum in which the outcome was predetermined, marginalising those that had hoped for a democratic process. Because the former liberation movement came to view secession as the only acceptable outcome of self-determination, it disposed of the principles of self-determination it had fought for.

Although secession was achieved, the more comprehensive interpretation of self-determination for South Sudanese people – meaning that they would be citizens of an accountable, inclusive and democratic state with a government acting in their interests – was abused. This article showed how the carefully crafted political principles that were supposed to accompany the SPLM/A’s transition from a liberation movement to democracy took a different trajectory than what the party suggested in its declared intentions. International actors and the South Sudanese people had wanted to believe that the military methods of the SPLM/A were a means to a democratic end, assuming that the rebel movement of the SPLA would transform into a democratic political party. But a long history of war cannot simply be wiped away. While there were warning signs along the way, hindsight allows the clear insight that using the principle of the right to self-determination – here reduced to mean secession – enabled the political-military elite to deny its people what they had fought and hoped for: in inclusive, democratic and peaceful South Sudan.

Notes on contributors

Lotje de Vries is an assistant professor at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Her research focuses on state–society relations and dynamics of marginality and (in)security.

Mareike Schomerus is a senior research fellow in Politics and Governance at the Overseas Development Institute (odi) in London. Her research focuses on the experience of democratic and peace processes.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editor of Civil Wars for their valuable suggestions, as well as Jon Abbink and Alex de Waal.

Notes

1. See also Yohannes (1993), Pool (1998).

2. It is not entirely clear what was proposed to Southerners: Oduho and Deng list four positions as having been given to southerners, while Holt and Daly argue that there were six. Oduho and Deng (1963), Holt and Daly (2000).

3. Author 1, life history interview with the security advisor to the CES Governor, an Anya-Nya veteran and retired Major General of the Sudan Armed Forces, Juba, October 4, 2009.

4. See also the online debate between John Young and Alex de Waal, accessed January 29, 2016, http://sites.tufts.edu/reinventingpeace/2013/05/14/democratization-and-the-failure-of-the-sudan-peace-process/.

5. From 2006 to 2011, the authors spent more than four years in Sudan between them, during which they regularly discussed the issue with international representatives. See also: O’Leary 2012.

6. For an overview of issues of citizenship and cross-border relations in South Sudan’s borderlands, see Vaughan et al. (2013).

7. Jonglei research notes/Eastern Equatoria fieldwork notes, ‘Conversation with acting SSRRC chair’, Ayod: November 2010, given to author 2.

8. Yambio fieldwork notes, ‘Conversation with bookstore owner’, Yambio: December 2010, given to author 2.

9. Yei fieldwork notes, ‘Observations during rally to welcome the speaker of the GoSS General Assembly’, Yei: December 2010, given to author 2.

10. Jonglei/Eastern Equatoria fieldwork notes, ‘Observation during rally’, Ayod: November 16, 2010, given to author 2.

11. Fieldwork interviews 2009–11, author 1.

12. One of the authors reviewed internal reports submitted by referendum observers, who reported widely on such incidents.