South Sudan Can Almost Taste Freedom

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The
Corner

 






South Sudan Can
Almost Taste Freedom


By Nina Shea


Posted on December 17, 2010 12:33 PM


Sudan’s President Bashir, through an aide, has acknowledged that South Sudan is expected to
vote to secede from the country in a referendum scheduled for January 9, and
says that he is prepared to accept this peacefully.


To the people
of South Sudan (2 million of whom were killed in a rebellion against Khartoum’s
forcible imposition of Islamic law, and another 4 million of whom were driven
from their homes), this is comparable to hearing the announcement of the end to
World War II.


If this is
indeed true, we should all take time to savor and celebrate this victory for
freedom and human rights before we start worrying about the day after — when
tribal warfare, which has been habitually stoked in recent years by Bashir’s
government, may break out, and the reality that the severely underdeveloped and
war-devastated south must stand on its own sets in (see here for
details).


That South
Sudan is the site of 80 percent of the nation’s oil reserves makes the
possibility of a peaceful secession all the more astonishing. It was the Bush
administration that adopted the strategy of ending the North-South conflict
through the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005, and it is the Obama
administration that seems now to have successfully brought it to culmination.
While still holding my breath, I’m daring to think that foreign-policy miracles
may still happen.

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