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Tidskriften
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By Horand Knaup
The first impression travelers get
when exiting an airplane here is that they've landed at a construction
site. The new terminal building is but a skeleton, with Chinese
laborers covering vast areas with concrete. Welcome to Juba, the
capital of Southern Sudan! The city still has much to do before
United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and up to 40 heads
of state and government fly to Juba Airport this coming weekend,
an airfield about the size of that in the German town of Paderborn.
On Saturday, July 9, Southern Sudan will proclaim its independence.
The move will strip Sudan, Africa's largest country, of a quarter
of its area -- and the world will get a new country, the youngest
in Africa.
German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle was already here, in the second half of June, for a two-day visit. He wanted to be prepared when Southern Sudan applies to become the 193rd member of the United Nations, where Germany recently assumed the rotating presidency of the Security Council. He wanted to get a feeling for the new government, how it thinks. Now he knows. His meeting with Salva Kiir, who was elected the country's president last year with 93 percent of the vote, gave him a taste of what was to come. Kiir left Westerwelle waiting for over an hour. When he finally arrived to meet his guest, the 60-year-old former guerilla fighter was wearing a black Stetson and patent-leather shoes.
What followed was a one-hour discussion
full of misunderstandings. Westerwelle called for flexibility
on contested issues with the north. In response, Kiir said: "We're
very flexible; it is the north that halted transportation to the
south." Westerwelle brought up the issue of respecting human
rights. Kiir said: "We have been for a long time." Westerwelle
called for the establishment of democratic institutions. "We're
working on our constitution," Kiir said, "and, incidentally,
democracy is in our blood."
Still, the democracy you'll find in Southern Sudan these days
leaves plenty to be desired. Journalists are accused of being
spies, police officers manning roadblocks act as if they were
a law unto themselves, and political life is dominated by Kiir's
party, the Sudan People's Liberation Movement. An incident one
year ago provides a hint as to the form democracy and human rights
here could take. After recruits at a police academy in Rajaf complained
about the training methods, the police chief sent a special forces
unit into the barracks. The troops beat to death at least six
recruits and put dozens in the hospital.
Though the United Nations is supposed to help get the country
established, its soldiers and vehicles are routinely blocked from
entering contested regions. In May, when northern forces marched
into Abyei -- a region rich in natural resources lying along the
Kiir River and which is claimed by both the north and the south
-- and released a flood of refugees, soldiers from Southern Sudan
attacked a UN convoy.
The head of the UN peacekeeping mission in the south is David
Gressly, a 54-year-old American with enough grit to have held
out in Juba since 2004. Gressly still works out of a mobile office
unit parked at the airport. On a large map, he traces the hot
spots in the country. He points to Abyei, the fertile region,
in the middle of the contested border where UN troops from Ethiopia
are providing a buffer between northern and southern adversaries.
Then he pulls his finger farther east to South Kordofan, which
northern forces have been bombing as part of an effort to force
its inhabitants to flee.
A half dozen warlords, veterans of the war of liberation, are now looking to stir up fresh conflicts. They had laid low until the referendum held in early January because they didn't want to hurt the chances of independence, but they never have been truly integrated. Since February, they're back to raiding villages, assaulting barracks, stealing livestock and laying mines. "There are substantial amounts of weapons in the country," says Gressly. When asked where they are coming from, he adds: "Certainly not from the south."
The government in Khartoum is doing
nothing that might contribute to stabilizing the south. And why
should it? The north has debts of some $38 billion (€26 billion)
and the conflict surrounding the country's oil reserves has not
yet been resolved. From the north's perspective, a stable government
in Juba is not helpful. Most of the oil is pumped in the south,
but all of the pipelines run through the north on their way to
the refineries in Port Sudan, on the Red Sea. The proceeds have
long been split, but now, the south is claiming a bigger slice
of the earnings.
For months, the two sides have been negotiating in Addis Adaba,
the capital of nearby Ethiopia. Omar al-Bashir, the president
of the north -- who has a warrant out for his arrest from the
International Criminal Court for suspected war crimes in the Darfur
region -- is threatening to completely block use of the pipelines.
Such a move would spell catastrophe for the south since oil accounts
for 98 percent of its livelihood. The two sides are aiming at
reaching a deal by late summer to settle the debt issue and the
dispute over oil revenues.
Officials in Juba, the future capital of the south, seem unfazed
by such quarrels. In the Ministry for Regional Cooperation, State
Secretary Majok Guandong raves about the more than 40 embassies
scheduled to open around the world by 2013. A clock standing in
the city's main intersection counts down the days and hours until
July 9. And at the monument to John Garang, a champion of independence,
workers are quickly erecting bleachers where guests of honor will
sit on Saturday.
Cleaning crews are sweeping up the
garbage from the streets of Juba with unusual precision and great
zeal. Under normal circumstances, garbage is merely piled up on
the side of the street and burned. But now, the city is even adorned
with a few dozen garbage cans, and trash is being sorted on the
campus of the city's university.
Of course, this is all window dressing. The country's problems
-- including rampant corruption and a low productivity -- remain
unresolved. Before approving the construction of a 10 kilometer
(6.2 mile) paved road, the minister responsible expects to at
least receive a new SUV.
The ministries are predominantly led by men who have much more
experience cleaning weapons than heading efficient administrations.
There is a shortage of everything a functioning state needs: teachers
and schools, doctors and hospitals, bridges and roads.
Seventy percent of the employees of the University of Juba are
simply gone, having fled to Khartoum. Now, there are only 150
professors, assistants and technicians for a student body of 11,000.
"You can't really work under such conditions," says
Leben Moro, a political scientist who is one of the few remaining
instructors. Moro returned to Juba two years ago after finishing
his studies in Cairo. In Egypt, his 10-year-old daughter had been
learning English, French and Arabic. But now Moro can't find any
schools in Juba in which to enroll her.
Moro, a tall, slender man, has an office on the university campus.
Today, like all the offices and stores in the city, his office
will remain closed. The police and military have brought all traffic
and public activities to a standstill as they conduct a frantic
search for weapons.
"We are extremely excited to become independent," Moro
says. "That which we have always dreamed about is now coming
to pass." Still, he also admits to being nervous, as well,
saying he is worried about the "overly high expectations"
of his fellow Southern Sudanese. The government, he is convinced,
will not be able to fulfill them.
URL:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,772691,00.html
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