Sudan, Somalia, and Territorial Integrity

I didn’t mean to think too hard today, really, what with the cleaning, packing, and preparing that was on my menu. But during lunch I sat down to finish last week’s Economist, and lucky me the “Africa and the Middle East” news section actually had multiple articles about Africa—albeit the part of Africa that’s nearest the Middle East. Still, this is better than usual.

The article included a handy little map. The map pretty well carved Sudan up into four smaller chunks; the article implies that Sudan is barely holding together, and may ultimately descend again into civil war or split up.

And I wondered, what's so wrong with splitting up?
There's more after the jump.


For the most part, the West tends to place a great deal of emphasis on territorial integrity in the Third and Failed worlds. As a general rule this is probably a good idea, and if nothing else serves to keep the nation-state as the dominant concept of governance. There is little doubt that Wilson's doctrine of self-determination is not in all cases appropriate, but Western diplomacy as a rule seems to have gone all the way in the other direction, supporting territorial integrity even in the face of the absurd boundaries of states in many parts of the world (boundaries drawn largely by the West).

Sudan seems to be a perfect example of this. Here is an enormous country with huge potential resource wealth that has nonetheless known few years since independence free from civil war. The civil war in the south of the country ran for two decades, but the ceasefire and peace agreement there didn't bring peace to Sudan, because as the southern rebels left northeastern Sudan they were replaced by, well, northeastern rebels. And Darfur has been seething for years now, though the West only took notice in the last year. The article mentions that the continuing strife in western and, now, eastern Sudan, combined with the death of the south's John Garang, may test the southern ceasefire or lead to renewed hostilities there.

There can be little question that civil war is in all cases bad for a country and bad for its people. This is not to say that countries ought never to split or that civil wars ought never to be fought to cause or prevent that; only that the damage ought to be minimized as best as possible. Uprisings should be crushed swiftly or, if they cannot be, ceasefires and peaceful separations ought to be attempted. Of course this is far easier said than done and I come from a country that had a civil war lasting for five years.

The question, however, is, at what point should the West, of which Sudan is no fan anyway (and vice versa), stop discussing territorial integrity and start thinking along the lines of whether it wouldn't be much better for Sudan and the Sudanese people to break apart. Ah, say the diplomats, this is a slippery slope. Encourage Sudan to break up, and soon you have Indonesia and Nigeria and Congo and dozens of other states aiming to follow suit.

Perhaps. This seems a bit simplistic and alarmist. The West did not encourage the breakup of Yugoslavia, but neither did we step in to force Slovenia and Croatia and Macedonia et all to rejoin the mother country. We did attempt to stop the Serbs from killing members of the other ethnic groups, though we did little enough to stop the other ethnic groups from killing the Serbs or each other. In the aftermath of the Yugoslav breakup, other countries around the world did not get ideas in their heads and suddenly erupt into civil war. Sudan was at war before 1991, and is still at war. And anyway, the West as much as created the country of Kosovo, which is an independent state except in name; despite this, few ethnic groups (even including Iraq's Kurds) suddenly rushed in to ask NATO for aid in achieving their own independence.

But with Africa, of course, the West much prefers to turn away and let things seethe. We messed the place up, and we just can't bear to look at our own rotten history there.

Still, I think the time has come to stop looking at Sudan as the next polyglot dynamo a la India, and start thinking of it as it is: an absurd, dysfunctional country that we can not reasonably expect to pull its citizens out of their wretched existence without being substantially reconfigured. Ultimately, the view of Yugoslavia in the West has become one of, it was a terrific idea, but doomed to fail in the end. Perhaps Sudan is the same thing: it seems like a good idea, a large country with many different resources and enough people to exploit them well, but ultimately it isn't going to work. Perhaps if it were a rich country the various cultural, religious, ethnic, and linguistic quarrels around which the British drew Sudan's borders would be unimportant; but poor people tend to cling to these things as they have so little else to cling to.

Ultimately, we must recognize that, petroleum contracts aside, a country as wrought by civil war as Sudan is never going to be a successful country. It will never get rich, and it will never meet the basic needs of its people. It has not done so at any point in its history and we are fooling ourselves if we think it can do so. No country in history has ever seen its economy grow or its quality of life improve in the midst of full-scale war. That Sudan has continued this trend should not surprise us.

The question then is not one of whether Sudan can get better despite civil strife. Of course it can't. The question is can any of the various pieces of Sudan achieve peace on their own more easily than the whole? Would South Sudan at least have internal peace? Would Darfur? If the northeastern tribes had their own country, would they stop fighting each other? We can't know for sure, but we know two things: a country won't get better in the midst of war, and Sudan is not apparently capable of putting an end to its wars. Doesn't it make sense to support notional independence, if not outright secession, of South Sudan? Couldn't that make both halves more viable?

Across the Ethiopean plateau from Sudan lies the remains of what used to be called Somalia. Most countries of the world and the UN still refer to the open quarrel on the Horn of Africa as "Somalia," and "Somalia" even has a government, though it does not function, most of its members in fact live in Kenya, and it is riven by clan identity much as the original country of Somalia was in the early 1990s.

In the northern part of the former country, a nominal state has arisen called Somaliland. Somaliland has a capital city, a functioning nominally democratic government comprising three branches, prints its own money, and even has diplomatic relations with its neighbors; it has recently struck a deal with Ethiopia to ship Ethiopian goods out from its main port. In contrast to its western neighbor Djibouti, an American client state, Somaliland is democratic and open (granted, Djibouti sets a low standard). The country recently held a reasonably fair election. Yet Somaliland is not recognized by any country on Earth.

Why not? Again, it comes back to the overemphasis on territorial integrity, by the West and many other actors. The UN and the AU (African Union) both support the concept of "Somalia" as it used to exist, despite over a decade of anarchy. Why are we so averse to the idea of Somalia splitting up? The country utterly failed to govern its people or provide for their basic needs, to the point that it descended into anarchy and has failed to recover for, so far, 13 years. You would think that if a group of Somalis succeeded in creating a functioning state in any part of the former country, the world community would raise a great Huzzah and welcome the new state with open arms.

The government of Somaliland recently raided an al-Qaeda cell operating in their territory, killing or apprehending seven terrorists (which is pretty much an entire cell). The much-vaunted government of "Somalia" can't keep peace in its own capital of Muqdisho, to the point that the few reasonable members of that government have removed themselves to another town to govern, but control little outside that town. Yet here Somaliland not only operates and keeps the peace, it is fighting the war on terror on its own. That the West, and indeed the entire world, should feel some need to deny Somaliland recognition is absurd.

The nation-state is on the wane. The insistence on territorial integrity is merely an attempt to keep the concept viable for as long as possible. Ultimately, technology will bring down the entire nation-state order, but for now and for at least a few generations yet, the present order is all we have. Given the results of our insistence on keeping old borders (civil strife, rampant poverty, and no improvements in either), it is time the West and the international community begin recognizing when a state's borders have become untenable, and work to create sound borders so that people can live in some amount of peace and have the opportunity to make something of their lives.