So, you know that referendum that allowed South Sudan to go its own way? And you know how Khartoum said that it would not intervene to prevent the separation? Well, Omar al-Bashir’s government might have meant it, but they sure were not going to yield the contested terrain of oil-rich Abyei.
And so earlier this week Sudan’s military rolled into Abyei and seized the disputed territory over the objections of much of the global community (including the US) and even some within Sudan’s government. As John Campbell writes over at the Council on Foreign Relations:
This suggests a hardening of the North’s position on Juba and makes an amicable divorce between North and South more difficult. At present, serious fighting in Abyei makes it nearly impossible to address any other issue without first resolving this conflict.
Abyei appears to be descending into chaos and getting worse. And to be clear, whatever sympathy the world might have for South Sudan and reflexive antipathy toward Khartoum, the reality is that there is some legitimacy to Sudan’s claims, albeit not to the use of force to exercise those claims. The world has basically sat back and watched things go awry in Greater Sudan and so we will likely do the same in this situation. But having to struggle for contested territory is not the way South Sudan wants to enter independence.
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