Khartoum is trying to achieve through war what it failed to gain by negotiation, writes Graham Usher at the United Nations Not long ago the United Nations prided itself on the peaceful path it had helped lay for the Republic of South Sudan to become the world's newest state on 9 July. Today it is scrambling to prevent the secession being born in war. On 21 May tanks, artillery and thousands of soldiers from Khartoum's Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) overran Abyei, a contested region that lies astride the still-to-be-demarcated internal boundary separating north and south Sudan. Abyei is joined to the north administratively but, due to its dominant African Dinka tribe, allied to the south ethnically and by political allegiance. Muddying things further are the Misseriya nomads, an Arab northern tribe that uses Abyei pasture to graze but has also been enlisted as a militia to fight Khartoum's wars with the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), South Sudan's government-in-waiting. Abyei's fate was supposed to have been decided via a referendum on the day last January when 99 per cent of South Sudanese voted for independence. The poll was shelved due to a dispute between the north and south over whether the Misseriya could vote. Since then the region has become a martial chessboard, with Juba and Khartoum -- and their allied militia -- manoeuvring their men to establish by fiat what they dared not risk by suffrage. Khartoum's President Omar Al-Bashir said tanks were dispatched after SAF patrols were ambushed by "unauthorised forces" in Abyei, code for militia allied to the SPLM. UN peacekeepers in Abyei and Western diplomats say this is true. But Washington also called Al-Bashir's response "wrong, disproportionate and irresponsible". The SPLM called it "a declaration of war". It's starting to look that way. The sheer scale of the invasion not only drove south nearly 50,000 of Abyei's Dinka farmers. According to the UN, SAF soldiers helped ferry in 25,000 Misseriya nomads to irreversibly change the region's demography and political affiliation. If this population transfer remains, Khartoum's seizure of Abyei "was planned as an ethnic cleansing strategy," a UN official told the New York Times on 26 May. You "displace the Dinka residents and bring in the Misseriya, then allow the [shelved] referendum to take place". Khartoum and Misseriya say the charge is "absurd". Yet satellite images show SAF soldiers razing around a third of all civilian shelters in Abyei town and destroying Banton Bridge, a key entry point if Dinka refugees are to return. On 30 May the Times also reported that the SAF had been commanded to attack any southern allied "unauthorised forces" found in the Blue Nile and South Kordofan states, two regions "north" of the internal boundary. Like Abyei these are areas of divided ethnic tribes and loyalty but potentially rich in oil and gas. Unlike Abyei -- where only a handful of SPLA militia were based -- they are home to thousands of fighters who fought alongside the SPLM during Sudan's long civil wars. They won't flee, says Blue Nile Governor Malik Agar. "It's like putting a cat in the corner. They will fight," he told the Times. With a month to go before the south's independence Al-Bashir seems to have adopted a policy of pre-emptive strikes: contested territories are ethnically cleansed of SPLM supporters and/or held as bargaining chips to dictate Khartoum's terms on the two new states' yet to be decided borders, debt relief and oil revenue shares. This at least is the view of some on the UN Security Council. "The government of Sudan may have taken a decision to continue to occupy Abyei for its own political advantage for an indefinite period," said US UN Ambassador Susan Rice, who was in Khartoum as part of a Security Council delegation when Abyei was captured. The council has called on the SAF to withdraw. Washington, which quietly backed Al-Bashir's claims on Abyei, has warned that the ongoing occupation of the area risks all hope of normal relations, including the end of US sanctions on Khartoum and help to relieve Sudan's $38 billion debt. Al-Bashir seems unfazed. Faced with the prospect of losing strategic borderlands to separatists aligned with an emerging South Sudan, he seems ready to incur the wrath of the West in favour of a policy of scorched earth in which Khartoum remains sovereign only by dint of military might. Abyei is now "northern Sudanese land", he said on 24 May. His spokesmen have said the same about the Blue Nile and South Kordofan. How will the SPLM respond? South Sudan's president- in-waiting Salva Kiir has said his people will not go to war over Abyei. There is even less appetite for a fight over the Blue Nile and South Kordofan should things come to that. The SPLM knows any counteroffensive on their part would mean Khartoum's refusal to recognise their soon to be established state. That could engulf South Sudan in civil war and prevent a slew of Arab and African states from recognising its sovereignty. That in turn could mean a failed state at birth, which many South Sudanese believe is Khartoum's real agenda. But while the SPLM for now may accept the humiliation, Khartoum would be foolish to think the same applies to those other restive peoples who stubbornly refuse its rule, whether in Abyei, the Blue Nile, South Kordofan or Darfur.
