It is the youngest country on Earth.
It may turn out to be one of the shortest-lived.
South Sudan, which came into being as a nation in 2011 after a long and taxing liberation struggle from its northern neighbor Sudan, is now a moribund state on the verge of total collapse.
Ranked number two on the U.S. think-tank Fund for Peace’s Fragile State Index (right after Somalia), the oil-rich, fertile, but desperately poor, predominantly Christian South Sudan rejected a proposal earlier this week by the African Union to increase the number of foreign troops in order to secure its capital Juba following the deaths of more than 300 people as a result of clashes between warring factions.
The country already has 12,000 U.N. peacekeepers struggling to keep the forces loyal President Salva Kiir and his not-so-chummy vice-president, Riek Machar, from each other’s throats.
This latest spate of violence has threatened to upend a brittle foreign-brokered peace accord reached a year ago between Kiir and Machar, who spearheaded a civil war since December 2013 that led to the death of tens of thousands and inflamed already-tense ethnic tensions.
It is easy to play the blame game in trying to understand what went wrong in South Sudan.
In many ways, it is more of a question of what didn’t go wrong.
Throughout its history, the country has always been an object of spoils for a parade of conquering forces, having been subjugated by the Ottomans, Egyptians, Belgians, French, British and, of course, Sudan.
And since its independence, South Sudan has endured an equally oppressive procession of corrupt and inept leadership.
The foreign architects of South Sudan’s fragile peace process that led to its independence also share part of the responsibility for its current political and economic chaos.
Khartoum only agreed to grant its southern region indepdence because of persistent high-level pressure from Washington and London.
And once Sudan finally gave in to Western coercion, a war that had been raging between north and south simply transmuted into a brutal civil war that spread throughout the infant state.
The landlocked Sudan, despite its rich oil reserves and having once been the breadbasket of east Africa, is now a dysfunctional dependent state that suckles on foreign aid and well-intended donations of billions of dollars that are almost inevitably usurped and misappropriated by a barrage of grasping generals and local warlords.
South Sudan is bankrupt.
It has the world’s highest maternal mortality rate and 16th-highest infant mortality rate.
Over half its population lives in abject poverty according to United Nations figures, and literacy rates are less than 28 percent.
Oil production has trickled to a near standstill as a result of fighting between the ethnic Dinka and Nuer.
And the revenues of what little oil it does produce are shared with Sudan, which owns South Sudan’s export pipelines.
An arms embargo, long overdue but still being tweaked by the U.N. Security Council, could curb some of the violence, but the real problem is that there is no real statesmanship within the world’s youngest state.
Sending in more foreign troops to try to diffuse internal ethnic disputes that date back centuries will not help either.
Like any newborn, South Sudan needs nurturing, and it cannot mature if it is forced to continue to function under the shot-gun marriage of its equality corrupt and foreign-imposed leaders, who are far more obsessed with doing away with each other than bothering to help their people.
The only solution for South Sudan is for an externally brokered peace that is totally devoid of foreign interests and which takes into account the complex tapestry of its ethnic fiber.
And, ultimately, that peace accord would have to allow the South Sudanese to find their own path to concrete nationhood.
Thérèse Margolis can be reached at [email protected].
