Maggie Fick's blog

JUBA, Southern Sudan – Six kids to care for, husband’s left town so she’s on her own, it’s over 100 degrees Fahrenheit and at 10 a.m., it seems like it’s already been a long day for Stella, a southern Sudanese woman running a tea and coffee stand in a market on the outskirts of Juba.

As she roasts coffee beans over a charcoal stove, Stella responds with passion to my casual inquiries about Sudan’s upcoming elections, but as my friend Isa translates from Juba Arabic to English for me, I realize Stella is not voicing her enthusiasm for a particular candidate or political ideology; she is angry about her own situation as a single mother trying to make ends meet.

Stella says she wishes she could work for the Government of Southern Sudan, because from her perspective, the people who do work in government are the ones with money. (Isa explains that she probably is referring to work as a cleaner or a tea service person in a government office, given that she is not literate.) As for the elections, she says through my friend’s translation that “there’s no money in the elections.” From our short conversation, this statement seems perfectly logical to me. Her primary concern is supporting her family, and if participating in the elections could help her to do this, she would. I don’t think it is a stretch to posit that Stella’s personal experiences have not given her good reason to view the elections as a vehicle for political and practical change in her country.

I stopped for tea at Stella’s stand because I wanted to ask her about the large campaign poster hanging outside the market entrance. The sheet was painted with red and blue letters that read: “SPLM: New Sudan, Yes We Can.” When I first saw this poster, I was amused by the clever wordplay and reference to President Obama’s campaign. But after talking to Stella – and learning that she was not aware of the meaning of the campaign slogan because she cannot read and no one explained it to her – I better understood the disconnect between the complex arena of Sudanese politics and the basic yet monumental needs of ordinary Sudanese people. The conversation was a reminder of the space between the political wrangling that I often report about and the expectations and priorities of the majority of Sudanese people.

Technorati Tags: Darfur and Southern Sudan Peace Prevention Sudan Election

A definite advantage to being based in Juba for a researcher like me is having access to Sudanese news publications on a daily basis. There are a number of northern Sudanese papers available online in Arabic, in addition to a few popular online Sudan news sources in English (Sudantribune.com and Gurtong.net are good places to start, and see the blog Roving Bandit for some more links to mainly southern-focused sites).

However, the most widely read southern Sudanese papers are not available online. Reading these papers provides an excellent glimpse into the issues that southerners think are important. From op-eds to general news articles, papers like The Citizen (which is printed in Khartoum and flown down to Juba daily, because there is not yet a functioning printing press in Juba) present a southern perspective that is well worth paying attention to. Here are some clips from some local English language daily papers from the past week:

‘We as women, we are happy that [the] Government gave 25% [through the women’s party list procedure passed in the South Sudan Legislative Assembly]. However, still there are opportunities of upgrading it to 50% as long as the attainment of total peace is concerned in Southern Sudan and Sudan in general,’ said Mrs. Jennifer Babel, Chairlady for Women Union in Central Equatoria.
-- “Women call for peace building through gender equity,” (Juba Post, March 11-15)

…raising the problem of the Nile water with countries that share the water should be approached in a quiet and rational manner that takes into account the interest of all parties without discrimination and under the principle that negotiations are the best avenue no matter how great the problems are.
-- “The Nile Water predicament,” (The Ciitzen, March 8)

[In Central Equatoria] 50% in Juba expected Kiir to win because, according to them, power, the army and everything is in the hands of SPLM [the ruling party in the South]. The also believed that Kiir would be President of GoSS with or without elections.
 --Selected results from public opinion poll conducted by Vision Center for Public Opinion Studies on prospects of candidates for the Presidency of the GoSS [360 people were polled in Upper Nile, Western Bahr-al-Ghazal, Jonglei and Central Equatoria states] (The Citizen, March 3)

Some people and political parties are continuously calling for the delay of the coming elections for more preparation and for the participation of the Darfur region. I also ask why not delay the elections if there is the possibility of the participation of Darfur! I also prefer the delay of the elections, but there needs doubling [of] the political efforts to solve the Darfur crisis during that period.
--“New Dawn” column by Ahmed Adam titled “Current political issues,” (Khartoum Monitor, March 6)

A magazine called The Parliamentarian provides yet another perspective. Its Editor-in-Chief is Dr. Julia Aker Duany, a respected southern Sudanese scholar and current under-secretary of the Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs in the Government of Southern Sudan. In her “Editor’s Notes” from the January edition of the magazine, Dr. Duany writes:

One item that I can unequivocally state is that in the Sudan there is never a dull moment…Unlike all of the political punditry online, local, and international media have stated, Sudan has not fallen back into a chaotic war, residing into the depths of a failed state. We are not perfect, by any means, but we are managing our delicate relationship in this experiment called the Comprehensive Peace Agreement.

As the elections approach and the campaign season continues at full swing, I’ll try to post clips from local papers from time to time to highlight the array of opinions from southern Sudanese media on the polls.

Photo: Journalist Nhial Deng at the Juba office of the newspaper The Citizen (Enough/Laura Heaton)

Technorati Tags: Darfur and Southern Sudan Peace Prevention Protection Sudan Election Sudan Now

JUBA, Southern Sudan—East African leaders from seven nations convened in Nairobi, Kenya this week at an extraordinary summit of the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development, or IGAD, to focus on the challenges facing Sudan in the coming months, including implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement and Sudan’s nationwide elections, set to occur next month.

Sudanese civil society activists and opposition politicians have protested the lack of freedom in the electoral process, neighboring governments (namely Eritrea and Egypt) have called for postponement of the polls, and international advocacy groups have declared nearly uniformly that the current political and security climate in Sudan cannot and will not permit free and fair elections. The IGAD summit is a crucial indicator of where Sudan’s neighbors stand, and yesterday’s statements shed light on the position of southern Sudan in the tense run-up to the polls.

Salva Kiir, president of the Government of Southern Sudan and first vice president of the Republic of Sudan, was unequivocal:

The people of southern Sudan attach more importance to the referendum than the elections. For them the right of self-determination is one of their biggest political achievements in the CPA and they will defend it at any cost.

President Kiir also sought to de-link the two major political processes set to occur in the next 10 months: “The conduct of the elections is not a pre-requisite to the conduct of the referendum,” he told the IGAD members.

IGAD has not held a meeting on Sudan since the CPA—which IGAD helped negotiate—was signed in 2005. For this reason, it may be too late for the regional body to seriously assist the Sudanese parties in efforts to make good on the promise of the CPA; it’s an understatement to say that the “democratic transformation of Sudan” called for in the CPA cannot happen overnight. The process needed to start immediately following the signing of the CPA, and yet regional attention and support for the agreement is only coming together at the eleventh hour. The event envisioned as a key exercise in the democratization process is now occurring—after two lengthy delays—in the shadow of the southern referendum, which, as the South’s leader declared yesterday, is undoubtedly the main event for one of the two Sudanese parties to the CPA.

Meanwhile, U.S. Special Envoy Scott Gration noted in an AP interview from Nairobi that while Sudan’s elections won’t be perfect, they “could still ‘reflect the will of the people.’”

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Water is life. This is a common adage in many African societies, particularly among those groups (such as the Tuaregs of the West African Sahel) for whom access to water is extremely difficult. From my experiences in East and West Africa, I’ve found that another phrase also holds true in many places: “politics is life.” As a current resident of Juba, the capital of southern Sudan, I have noticed that politics infiltrates many aspects of life, and that my own enjoyment of “talking politics” is shared by many fellow Juba residents, from elderly men reading newspapers to younger men arguing over a game of cards at a neighborhood bar. (Sudanese women tend to be less often seen discussing politics in public).

Although I can’t claim to understand many of the boisterous conversations I overhear in local languages such as Dinka and Bari and in “Juba Arabic” –  the lingua franca of Juba’s melting pot population from North and South Sudan and many other East African countries –  I do imagine that many of them revolve around the latest political hot topics in Sudan, such as the issue of “independent candidates” contesting in elections in the South.

Politics is life in Juba, because politics is inextricably linked to the fate of southern Sudan – which will be determined, its people hope, in a free and fair self-determination referendum in January 2011. Politics in Sudan is unpredictable, which is why tensions surrounding political exercises such as the April elections and next year’s southern referendum have the potential to ignite into violence before, during, or after these key milestones called for in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that in 2005 brought to a close the bloody civil war between North and South.

As the campaign season heats up, I’ve been asking fellow Juba residents over the past week how they feel about the elections and the politicians competing for their votes. What follows is my own highly unscientific sampling of popular opinion, based on conversations with friends, strangers, and people I happen to be interviewing for my ongoing elections-related research:

“Yes, the campaigning is there but look at it…It is just about telling people, ‘do this, do that,’ not consulting with them.”

“Vision and Mission [the slogan of Salva Kiir, incumbent candidate for the Government of Southern Sudan presidency]…what does this mean? I am not convinced.”

“Freedom means what? It means choosing. That is what the southern Sudanese have the right to do.”

“Yassir [Arman, SPLM candidate for the national presidency] is not experienced enough. I don’t think he can be president of Sudan.”

“SPLM [the ruling party in the South] has a very arrogant culture. These leaders are not living in the reality of this situation today. Things have changed [since the war].” 

“‘New Sudan,’ it failed. It means what?”

“I am more optimistic than I used to be. People are calm, also they are accepting the mistakes of their politicians [in the South]…but maybe this is because [other politicians] want to avoid the blame for their own mistakes.”

"I think Omar needs to continue [as President of Sudan] until we [the South] leave them [the North] in 2011. The politics of that one of the SPLM [Yassir Arman] are confusing."

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JUBA, Southern Sudan  – “So far in southern Sudan we don’t have ruling parties. Who voted for these people [who currently lead the Government of Southern Sudan]?” asked a representative of an opposition party at a political parties’ summit organized by the African Union in Juba on March 1-2. The summit gave parties competing in the upcoming nationwide elections the chance to discuss concerns they have with the electoral process in the South and to engage in discussion with each other and with the South’s ruling party, the SPLM. In several sessions, opposition parties and members of the SPLM who have opted to run as independent candidates were empowered to raise issues directly not only with the African Union High Level Implementation Panel on Sudan, but also with Riek Machar, vice president of the Government of Southern Sudan and a leading member of the SPLM.

Although Machar technically represents one of the political parties competing in the elections, he also represents the southern government, so opposition party members were particularly interested in directing questions at him. Interestingly, one of the sessions focused less on electoral procedures and more on issues concerning the South in general, churning up heated questions of the moment, including rumors of a possible delay of the elections, and concerns that the referendum would subsequently be pushed back. The discussion between opposition members and the GoSS vice president was a fairly open dialogue. Alex de Waal (who is currently working with the African Union High Level Implementation Panel on Sudan) aptly describes the significance of this summit:

The summit meeting was remarkable. It brought the contending party leaders in the south into the same room. Even two weeks ago, the SPLM leadership was insisting that Lam Akol, the leader of SPLM-DC, would not be permitted to campaign in southern Sudan, and there was also acrimony between the SPLM and many independent candidates. The SPLM leadership has not yet agreed to sit around the table with SPLM members who are running as independents, but over the last two days it was ready to discuss at length with all the other political parties putting up candidates in southern Sudan, including Lam Akol’s SPLM-DC. Several of these parties made specific complaints in the meeting, about violations of their freedom to campaign, arrest and detention of their members and agents, and confiscation of their materials. The Vice President of the Government of Southern Sudan, Riek Machar, listened patiently to these points, responded to many, and promised to take up others. Given the polarization that loomed, the cordial atmosphere in the summit was extraordinary.

At the conclusion of the summit, all of the political parties contesting in the elections in southern Sudan – a total of 17 rival groups – signed an Electoral Code of Conduct. To read the Electoral Code of Conduct and the Declaration of Common Commitments (related to broader Sudan issues such as CPA implementation), visit the Making Sense of Sudan blog. Watch Enough Said and Making Sense of Sudan for updates as the AU Panel continues to work with political parties in the South to ensure implementation of the Electoral Code of Conduct and encourage a free and fair electoral process.

It is worth noting that while this initiative is an impressive step in the right direction and that all of the political parties competing in the South should be recognized for the achievement, the elections are less than 50 days away; it is a shame that this and other efforts to encourage and promote a democratic electoral process in Sudan were not undertaken (or permitted by the ruling parties) earlier in this process.

Technorati Tags: Darfur and Southern Sudan Sudan Now

JUBA, Southern Sudan – I don’t think I was the only person in Juba who attended the ruling National Congress Party’s rally to kick off President Omar al-Bashir’s three-day campaign tour of the South simply because I was curious. I initially thought I was one of the only foreigners in the packed bleachers, but I quickly learned that the man sitting next to me was from Zambia and had recently relocated to Juba to work for an organization affiliated with the Baha’i faith. He too was interested in seeing the Bashir rally for himself.

Appearances can always be deceiving, which I am constantly finding to be true as a foreigner trying to make sense of political dynamics and everyday life in southern Sudan. Driving past the cattle market near my house this morning, I noticed young men from the Mundari ethnic group dancing and covered in what appeared to be caked mud. This is not a daily occurrence, and my boda (motorcycle taxi) driver remarked that they were celebrating Bashir’s imminent arrival in the South.

The John Garang Memorial Stadium was packed by 4 p.m. when the rally was set to begin. As I brushed past a South Sudan police officer wielding a stick but no rifle, a flood of veiled girls who came up to my waist entered the stadium gate chanting “Al-Bashir,” trailing a woman leading their chants. Later, these children held posters emblazoned with pictures of a turbaned Bashir and chanted alongside young dancers from the Kuku tribe, a minority group in southern Sudan who live mainly near the Ugandan border. This contrast of cultures, coupled with the asymmetry between heavily armed (northern) Sudanese Armed Forces and the more ragtag-looking southern Sudanese police officers at the rally was a lesson in the enormous complexities of identity in Sudan.

Seated in the bleachers as the announcement of Bashir’s arrival crackled through speakers powered by a generator hooked up to a pickup, I rose with the rest of the crowd to witness his entrance. I had watched Bashir dance with his long cane in videos before, but it was a new experience to see it in person. Instead of wearing a turban or a suit, he wore a brightly colored African print button down shirt. His attire, and the posters papering the stadium that featured the president in a field next to a white bull (the symbol of prosperity in the culture of the South’s majority tribe, the Dinka), suggested that Bashir was feigning an affinity or connection to the South. The disingenuousness of Bashir’s campaign was further confirmed when the only prayer offered before the speeches was a Muslim one, and all of the speeches were delivered in Khartoum Arabic  – a dialect that few southerners in Juba understand well. “Allahu Akbar” was followed by a perfunctory “sawa sawa” (“okay” in Swahili)” by the master of ceremonies in between speeches.

Bashir succeeded in engaging the people gathered in the stadium as he danced on a platform for all to see, perhaps imploring his people to see a different side of the leader whose regime has systematically targeted civilian populations at Sudan’s peripheries for the two decades. Following a speech by a female member of the NCP, the gates to the grassy field were opened; riot police formed a perimeter around the main stage, and around a hundred people walked onto the field. Some held signs – painted pieces of white cloth with writing in Arabic and English. I didn’t recognize the names of some of the opposition groups such as the Sudanese Congress Party, but their slogans were powerful: “Welcome to the New Sudan,” “Down Down NCP,” and “Yes 4 ICC.”

Someone aptly analogized the potential North-South relationship in Sudan following the 2011 southern referendum as “like a divorce when you have kids.” The North and the South are inextricably linked geographically, and its people are equally entangled, with northerners in the South and southerners in the North. Appearances are deceiving in Sudan because there are northerners happily succeeding in their business in Juba and southern politicians with their children studying in Khartoum – just as in the stadium that day, there was a curious mix of resistance, skepticism, even joy and excitement, to Bashir’s arrival.

Technorati Tags: Darfur and Southern Sudan Omar al-Bashir Peace Prevention

JUBA, Southern Sudan – Campaigning for Sudan’s upcoming elections kicked off on February 13, but due to the funding challenges that many opposition parties face – and the logistical challenges that even the two ruling parties (the National Congress Party in Khartoum and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement in Juba) face in organizing campaign efforts – “elections season” has only begun to heat up in recent days.

Juba was abuzz (and slightly on edge) yesterday with the arrival of President Omar al-Bashir, who is making an extremely rare three-day tour of Juba and several towns in Central and Eastern Equatoria states. Lam Akol, the controversial leader of the SPLM-Democratic Change (a so-called “breakaway faction” of the SPLM), also arrived in Juba to try to appeal to southerners in the two-way race for the southern presidency between him and the current president of Southern Sudan, Salva Kiir. (Human Rights Watch recently reported on serious abuses of SPLM-DC members by the ruling SPLM, and the Sudan Tribune reported that the party’s offices in Renk, a town in Akol’s home state of Upper Nile, was ransacked by SPLM members last week.) Finally, Clement Wani Konga, the SPLM’s candidate for the governor of Central Equatoria state (of which Juba is the capital), was out with his supporters yesterday morning, waving to people lining the streets from atop a pickup truck at the head of a large parade and shouting “SPLM Oyee,” a slogan of the party.

There has been a flurry of international attention – and criticism – around Sudan’s twice-delayed polls. Once seen as a cornerstone of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, a central tool in the effort to “democratically transform” Sudan, the elections no longer hold this promise for the majority of Sudanese citizens. International advocacy and research groups like Enough, Human Rights Watch, and International Crisis Group, have sounded the alarm about the dangerous security climate in which the elections are set to occur and emphasized how it is essentially impossible at this stage for the elections to be conducted in a free and fair manner.

But no matter how external actors view the elections, the real issue is how Sudanese citizens feel about the process. Here are a couple snippets from conversations I had with Sudanese citizens who were watching (and sometimes participating) in yesterday’s campaign events (these quotes are anonymous given the sensitive topic):

“These people don’t have the experience yet, because it’s their first time.” – Young southern Sudanese man who grew up as a refugee (having fled Sudan’s civil war) in Uganda and witnessed the 2001 and 2006 elections in Uganda

“It’s bad [the campaign season] because people need to make a living. Why is the market closed? Not because people want to welcome Bashir, but because they fear violence.
Northerners [working in Juba] are easily the victims.” – Lawyer and civil society activist lamenting how merchants, traders, and other Juba residents are already shutting down their stores in fear of political violence surrounding the campaign season; a usually bustling thoroughfare in Juba lined with shops run predominantly by Arab traders and foreign businesspeople was practically boarded up yesterday.

“We want to campaign, but it is a problem of funds.” – Member of a small opposition party, lamenting his party’s inability to hold campaign events throughout southern Sudan due to substantial costs for organizing such efforts.

Campaign billboards and posters all over town trumpet party slogans such as “Freedom-Peace-Prosperity” and catchwords from “Hope and Change” (Yassir Arman evoking President Obama) to “Vision and Mission” (for GoSS President Salva Kiir). However, it’s difficult to imagine how the politicians competing in these elections will be able deliver on their lofty campaign promises as southern Sudan hurtles toward likely independence amid ongoing insecurity throughout the South and high tensions with its northern “partners” in Khartoum over an array of unimplemented provisions in the peace agreement.

N.B. Unfortunately, I have not yet traveled to northern Sudan and am unable to comment on how the electoral process is unfolding there, but I did want to highlight an interesting new political movement in Khartoum called Girifna, which (according to their website www.girifna.com) “literally means ‘we are disgusted’ and metaphorically, ‘we have had enough.’” Hard not to be inspired by these activists and what they are doing against extreme odds.

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Last year saw a sharp increase in the number of lives lost in southern Sudan due to “inter-tribal violence” that affected communities across the South. This year, clashes have continued, but a new trend is evident in violence in Lakes state, a remote area of the South largely populated by sub-clans of the Dinka ethnic group.

The recent violence in Lakes is related to an ongoing civilian disarmament campaign being conducted by the southern army, or SPLA. According to Enough correspondence with SPLA spokesperson Kuol Deim Kuol, the Government of Southern Sudan has instructed the SPLA to systematically confiscate weapons from civilians in the 10 states of southern Sudan. Disarmament is currently underway in seven of the ten states. (According to the SPLA, campaigns have not begun in the three states – Western Bahr El Ghazal, Western Equatoria, and Eastern Equatoria – where the Lord’s Resistance Army currently threatens civilian populations.)

Several major disarmament campaigns in the South since the 2005 signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement have gone badly. More than a thousand people were killed in a 2006 campaign in volatile Jonglei state. Major human rights violations regularly occur when the SPLA forcibly attempts to remove weapons from the hands of civilians who fear leaving their security up to an army who they perceive as either incapable or unwilling to protect them.

The latest example of the failures of disarmament in the South occurred this week in Cueibet County in Lakes state, where civilians reportedly attempted to break into a weapons storage facility to retrieve arms that were taken from them in a disarmament campaign. This incident underscores a basic reality of disarmament attempts in the South: If local populations are not convinced that their security will be guaranteed by their government and its army, they will find a way to hold on to – or recapture – their weapons in order to protect themselves.

In Akot, a town southeast of the Lakes state capital of Rumbek, tensions between a SPLA battalion stationed in the town and the local population erupted into a series of clashes that resulted in the deaths of 17 soldiers and 7 civilians and displaced the town’s entire population (an estimated 3,000 people). Although it is unclear the cause of the Akot clashes, an ongoing disarmament campaign in the state – combined with the history of brutal and deadly SPLA efforts to forcibly disarm local populations in the state – means that underlying tensions between the army and local populations are more likely to spark into serious incidents.

As Sudan’s elections approach, poor relations between the army and local populations through the South (see my colleague Ledio Cakaj’s report on civilian protection failures in Western Equatoria state) could worsen an already tense situation during the polls. One thing is for sure: As Oxfam and other humanitarian NGOs working in the South noted in a recent report, the Government of Southern Sudan needs to “move beyond disarmament” and devise better strategies for improving long-term community security. 

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As Enough’s field researcher in southern Sudan, my main job is to conduct research on the evolving political situation and distill it into analysis that can be used when my Enough colleagues in Washington do advocacy on Capitol Hill or make policy recommendations to the Obama administration. However, I also like to impart stories about everyday life in Sudan, since elections, violence, and political agreements are just some of the elements of the reality of life for southern Sudanese people and for foreigners like me living in the country. Here is a short article I wrote about my motorcycle taxi driver Patrick. This article appeared this week in the Guardian Weekly:

During yet another blisteringly hot afternoon in Juba, the capital of southern Sudan, Patrick and I were bumping along on one of Juba’s potholed roads on his motorcycle taxi. As a lone researcher working for a small Washington-based organisation, I can’t afford a car, but on the back of Patrick’s boda (as motorbikes are known here) I have enjoyed getting to know Patrick and experiencing Juba up close.

As we drove, Patrick told me over his shoulder that his village of ¬Tambura – near southern Sudan’s border with the Central African Republic – “just got network”. In other words, Patrick’s village now has a mobile-phone tower.

Patrick was separated from his ¬parents during Sudan’s 23-year civil war and spent some of his childhood in a refugee camp in northern Uganda. He has not been back to his village for nine years. So for him, the news from Tambura was more than just a sign of development or, in the political science-speak I use as a researcher, of “infrastructure extending to the rural periphery”. It has enabled Patrick to hear his parents’ voices for the first time in almost a decade. He said that both of his parents cried when they heard him.

If I spend too much time speaking with UN officials or socialising with aid worker friends, I can start to think I’m getting a handle on the “situation” in southern Sudan. I know the humanitarian statistics, I know the names of the key politicians and I can rattle off a forecast on the future of southern Sudan after its self-determination referendum set for January 2011.

But then I have a conversation with someone like Patrick and I realise that I have absolutely no idea. I cannot ¬imagine what it would be like not to speak to my parents for nine years. I cannot imagine what it would be like to have to run from war as a child and to fear a return to war again as an adult. I cannot even imagine what it would be like to drive a motorcycle around hot and dusty Juba all day, because I can take shelter in my air-conditioned apartment inside a fortified compound.

The nonchalant way in which Patrick brought up the incredible news of his reconnection to his parents made me wonder about all the other twists and turns of his life. It will take many more boda rides to hear more of his stories, but I am grateful that he shared this happy one with me.

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I wanted to share a music video by southern Sudanese singer Mary Boyoi about Sudan's April elections. The title of the song, 'Elections Jai,' means 'elections are coming' in Juba Arabic, and this video features Mary and other Sudanese singers on the streets of Juba and on the banks of the Nile River raising awareness about the April polls.

Here’s a rough English translation of verse one:

This year 2010
it is a special day
in our history
to elect representative of our people
don't vote for a person because he is your tribe
don't vote for a person because he is your relative
because of you
because of you my land
We should choose a leader who will lead us equally

After watching this video, check the Sudan Tribune for some interesting web-based surveys and public comments on the two looming presidential races: for the Government of National Unity and the Government of Southern Sudan. (Hat-tip: Roving Bandit)

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