From Foreign Policy
THE INSIDE STORY OF A FOREIGN-POLICY FAILURE
Less than three years after independence, South Sudan collapsed into bloody civil war. Could the United States, a crucial backer of the young African state, have prevented the violence?
JUBA, SOUTH SUDAN — A VICIOUS BLOODLETTING WAS ALREADY UNDERWAY BY THE TIME PRESIDENT SALVA KIIR APPEARED ON TELEVISION DRESSED IN MILITARY FATIGUES. IT WAS THE AFTERNOON OF DECEMBER 16, 2013, and the South Sudanese capital had been a war zone for more than 12 hours. Kiir wore an officer’s patrol cap instead of his trademark black Stetson — a gift from John Kerry to replace the one George W. Bush had given him in 2006 — and trudged through his remarks with terse diction. If there had been any hope that he could halt his country from sliding into all-out civil war, the embattled president quashed it with a single rhetorical flourish: After implying that his former vice president, Riek Machar, had attempted a coup, Kiir declared ominously that he would “not allow the incidents of 1991 to repeat themselves again.”
To the outside world, the reference might have seemed cryptic. But in South Sudan, the message was crystal clear: 1991 was the year Machar broke away from the main southern guerilla movement, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), that was fighting against the Sudanese government in Khartoum. The move nearly brought about the SPLA’s demise. Now, Machar was again estranged from the flock and about to mount a new rebellion from the bush. By linking the two events, Kiir was invoking an old and powerful grudge. “It was not in the spirit of reconciliation,” Lam Akol, who led the breakaway SPLA faction with Machar in 1991 and later served as Sudan’s foreign minister, told me. “It was a declaration of war.”
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