Conflict Areas

As part of its Sudan Working Group Series, the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars released today a paper entitled, “Avoiding the Train Wreck in Sudan: U.S. Leverage for Peace,” as part of a two-piece publication examining international engagement in Sudan.

Expectations for what the January referendum will bring are tremendously high among residents of Unity state in South Sudan. While anticipation for the vote has placated a population that has grown increasingly discontent with its government, these grievances have not gone away. If South Sudan receives its independence, the southern ruling party will have to address its people’s expectations or risk popular violence.

Groups from the Lord’s Resistance Army continue to attack civilians throughout central Africa. Attacks against civilians in a remote corner of Bas Uele district in northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo go largely unnoticed. Unlike most areas where the LRA operates, attacks in northern Bas Uele are intended to empty the area—of strategic importance to the LRA’s cross-border movement to the Central African Republic, or CAR—of civilians. The lack of a meaningful military force to challenge the LRA has turned the northern region of Bas Uele into a veritable haven for the brutal rebel group.  

Whether within rebel groups and militias or the Congolese national army, or FARDC, senior commanders continue to benefit from Congo’s lucrative mineral trade. Striking examples of this trend are the staggering lifestyle and investments of some Congolese army officers here in the Kivus. Although official army salaries top out at 90,000 Congolese francs per month, less than $100, many Congolese generals and colonels own gas stations, run minerals exporters or ‘comptoirs’, and new buildings are sprouting up like mushrooms throughout cities of Goma, Bukavu, Butembo, Bunia and Kinshasa.

In less than six months, the people of southern Sudan will vote in a self-determination referendum that is expected to result in the secession of the South roughly a year from now. The dynamics shaping the historic and dramatic changes in Sudan are fluid, yet some of the core issues facing southern Sudan will endure regardless of the outcome of the referendum. Because these issues are likely to be flashpoints for conflict within the South in the years to come, international actors engaged in Sudan must now closely monitor and address them during the pre-referendum period. In her last field dispatch for Enough, southern Sudan field researcher Maggie Fick identifies some of these key, lesser recognized, flashpoints.