[Senate Hearing 114-713]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 114-713
INSERT TITLE HERESOUTH SUDAN: OPTIONS IN CRISIS
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HEARING
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED FOURTEENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
INSERT DATE HERE deg.SEPTEMBER 20, 2016
__________
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COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
BOB CORKER, TENNESSEE, Chairman
JAMES E. RISCH, Idaho BENJAMIN L. CARDIN, Maryland
MARCO RUBIO, Florida BARBARA BOXER, California
RON JOHNSON, Wisconsin ROBERT MENENDEZ, New Jersey
JEFF FLAKE, Arizona JEANNE SHAHEEN, New Hampshire
CORY GARDNER, Colorado CHRISTOPHER A. COONS, Delaware
DAVID PERDUE, Georgia TOM UDALL, New Mexico
JOHNNY ISAKSON, Georgia CHRISTOPHER MURPHY, Connecticut
RAND PAUL, Kentucky TIM KAINE, Virginia
JOHN BARRASSO, Wyoming EDWARD J. MARKEY, Massachusetts
Todd Womack, Staff Director
Jessica Lewis, Democratic Staff Director
Rob Strayer, Majority Chief Counsel
Margaret Taylor, Minority Chief Counsel
John Dutton, Chief Clerk
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
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Page
Corker, Hon. Bob, U.S. Senator From Tennessee.................... 1
Cardin, Hon. Benjamin L., U.S. Senator From Maryland............. 3
Madut Jok, Ph.D., Jok, co-founder and executive director, The
Sudd Institute, Los Angeles, CA................................ 4
Prepared statement........................................... 6
Knopf, Hon. Kate Almquist, director, Africa Center for Strategic
Studies, U.S. Department of Defense, Washington, DC............ 9
Prepared statement........................................... 11
Kuol, Luka Biong Deng, Ph.D., global fellow, Peace Research
Institute Oslo, Oslo, Norway................................... 17
Prepared statement........................................... 19
Yeo, Peter, president, Better World Campaign, and vice president,
Public Policy and Advocacy, United Nations Foundation,
Washington, DC................................................. 22
Prepared statement........................................... 24
Additional Material Submitted for the Record
Material Submitted for the Record by Dr. Paul R. Williams,
Rebecca I. Grazier Professor of Law and International
Relations, American University, Washington, DC................. 47
(iii)
SOUTH SUDAN: OPTIONS IN CRISIS
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TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2016
U.S. Senate,
Committee on Foreign Relations,
Washington, DC.
The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:45 p.m., in
Room SD-419, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Bob Corker,
chairman of the committee, presiding.
Present: Senators Corker [presiding], Flake, Gardner,
Cardin, Shaheen, Murphy, and Markey.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. BOB CORKER,
U.S. SENATOR FROM TENNESSEE
The Chairman. The Foreign Relations Committee will come to
order. We thank our witnesses for spending their time with us
and sharing insights that I know will be valuable.
It has been nearly a year since we last discussed the
unwillingness of the South Sudanese officials to govern
responsibly. Despite the significant efforts of the U.S. and
the international community, violent impunity persists.
As this crisis erupted in July, President Kiir's forces
apparently fired on U.S. diplomatic vehicles, shot and injured
a U.N. official, terrorized American and other aid workers, and
executed a South Sudanese journalist.
President Kiir consolidated control after yet another
contrived military action against his former deputy, Riek
Machar. Kiir's recent replacement of Machar with a poorly
supported opposition alternative likely invalidates the unity
government and the August 2015 peace agreement itself.
I think it calls into question what our U.S. commitment
should be with others. I know there is a range of options that
we will explore today as we hear from you.
South Sudan achieved independence in 2011 after a desperate
effort to break free from a violent and oppressive Sudanese
Government. Tragically, South Sudan's leaders followed a
similar repressive path targeting women and children, killing
civilians, and targeting refugees and humanitarians for rape,
torture, and death.
Five years on, South Sudan remains desperately reliant on
international assistance, yet its government persists in
inflaming the circumstances for famine and war. One in five
South Sudanese have fled their homes, and over 1 million
refugees have fled their country to safer places, unbelievably
such as Darfur, which just a few years ago was certainly not
perceived as that.
The international community has long held off imposing
sanctions with vague hope that responsibility will somehow
emerge. The inclination to rob, cheat, and kill has persisted,
as evidenced by recent violent events and legitimate reports of
gross corruption of Kiir, Machar, and their cronies who
continue to divert dwindling resources.
Let me just say an exclamation point here. This has turned
out for both of them to be all about one thing, and that is
money, using their own people against each other, who are being
systematically killed over their desire, each of their desire,
from my perspective, to loot their country and to enrich
themselves personally.
July's violence once again exposed limitations of South
Sudan's U.N. peacekeeping mission, which is unable to meet the
mandate to protect civilians under U.N. protection, including
those being raped yards from their gate.
Again, I don't know how many times we are going to hear of
our peacekeeping efforts falling short. I know this is a unique
circumstance, but I believe the U.N. has been totally feckless
as it relates to addressing this issue. Again, I know these
people are overstretched right now in South Sudan, but it
continues to be a persistent problem with U.N. peacekeeping
troops.
UNMISS is tested and already stretched the limits of
peacekeeping missions, and with the addition of Protection of
Civilians sites and a proposed regional protection force, one
must ask, is this a recipe for failure?
I am interested in hearing today from our distinguished
witnesses how the international community can sustain
humanitarian effort in South Sudan while fundamentally changing
the dynamic with actors in South Sudan, including regional
sanctions.
I welcome our witnesses, two of whom bring a critical on-
the-ground perspective as well as perceptions of international
efforts to date as we consider what is happening and
alternative options.
I want to thank you for being here and turn to our
distinguished ranking member, Ben Cardin.
STATEMENT OF HON. BENJAMIN L. CARDIN,
U.S. SENATOR FROM MARYLAND
Senator Cardin. Chairman Corker, first of all, thank you
very much for convening this hearing.
The question is whether the youngest country in the world
can survive, and I think I am not overstating our concerns. The
hearing we held last December we thought would focus the
different stakeholders into a plan that will allow the people
of South Sudan to have a government that can protect their
interests. Instead, we see a circumstance that was bad last
December get worse, where it has used attacks on the civilian
population as a military tactic.
You mentioned Darfur. And although every circumstance is
different, the human tragedies that we are witnessing in South
Sudan do remind us of what was happening in Darfur. It cannot
continue, and the international community cannot allow these
atrocities to continue forward.
I can give you many examples. The July fighting between the
warring factions, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights
estimates hundreds of civilian deaths, including over 200 raped
civilians by the militaries. International aid workers in the
Terrain compound beaten, shot, and gang raped by government
forces while the national security forces stood by and did
nothing. U.S. Embassy personnel, as you pointed out, being
fired upon by government officials. The government refusing to
allow medical evacuation of wounded peacekeepers. That is so
contrary to any established international protocols or rules.
And then the status of forces agreement of the United
Nations, the use of the Rapid Protection Force, which, Mr.
Chairman, I will tell you I think is critically important for
South Sudan to have the presence of the international body. And
yet the government is restricting what equipment they can take,
what countries they come from, and preventing them from doing
their mission. So how can they operate? How can they do their
work without the government help and support?
And it is a failure of the leaders in the peace process. We
had great hope about the peace process moving forward, and
President Kiir and Vice President Machar, replaced now by Mr.
Deng, none have shown true leadership, and all, I believe, are
complicitous in the atrocities that have taken place.
And then there is no accountability. There is impunity for
these actions. We have seen no effective way in which the
government has held those who have committed these abuses
accountable for their actions.
Last December, I asked whether the peace process was viable
and what the international community plans to do should the
parties abandon it.
The peace agreement, if not dead, is certainly on life
support. The economy is in shambles. Nearly 5 million people
need food aid, which will be difficult to deliver in wake of
the alleged looting of the World Food Program compound and
increasing threats against humanitarian personnel.
Violence continues to flare in various parts of the
country, and the credibility of the South Sudan leaders has
been severely compromised by their attacks on their own
civilians.
You add that all up, if South Sudan is not a failed state,
it is certainly a state which has badly failed its people.
The question is, what can we do to help the people of South
Sudan from the suffering that they are currently being
subjected to?
I look forward to hearing from our witnesses as to how we
can help the people of South Sudan.
The Chairman. Thank you, Senator Cardin.
We will now turn to our witnesses. On the panel today we
will hear from private witnesses representing South Sudan civil
society as well as academic and advocacy institutions.
Our first witness is Jok Madut Jok.
I hope I pronounced that correctly.
Dr. Jok. You got that right.
The Chairman. I am surprised at myself. Thank you.
He is co-founder and executive director of The Institute of
South Sudan and currently a professor at Loyola Marymount
University in Los Angeles, California.
Thanks for traveling that far to be with us.
Our second witness is the Honorable Kate Almquist Knopf,
the director for the Africa Center for Strategic Studies at the
National Defense University and the former assistant
administrator for Africa at USAID.
Thank you.
Our third witness is Dr. Luka Biong Deng Kuol--how did we
do? Again, a surprise--the global fellow of the Peace Research
Institute at Oslo, Norway, as well as a fellow at Rift Valley
Institute, South Sudan.
Thank you for being here.
Our last witness is Mr. Peter Yeo--thank you for that
simplicity--the president of the Better World Campaign and vice
president for public policy and advocacy at the United Nations
Foundation.
We are very fortunate to have all of you here. If you would
just begin your testimony in the order that I introduced you.
Without anybody objecting, your full written testimony will
be entered into the record. So if you can summarize, we would
encourage you to do so in about 5 minutes.
With that, if you would begin, we would appreciate it.
Thank you.
STATEMENT OF JOK MADUT JOK, PH.D., CO-FOUNDER AND EXECUTIVE
DIRECTOR, THE SUDD INSTITUTE, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
Dr. Jok. Thank you very much, Chairman Corker, Ranking
Member Cardin, and committee members. Thank you very much,
indeed, for inviting me here today. I also want to thank the
committee for keeping South Sudan a topic of discussion in
Washington for quite a bit of time now.
The views I express here are my own and not those of The
Sudd Institute, where I am the executive director.
In addressing the crisis of South Sudan, I would like to
shift the discussion slightly away from the focus that has been
put on the contending leaders of South Sudan and try to show a
little bit about what life is like for South Sudanese.
Much of the crisis that is engulfing the country today is
one of two issues, really. The first is the burden of the war
of liberation, which went on for so long and made South Sudan
one of the most destroyed corners of the world since the Second
World War.
There were promises made at the end of the war that the
burden of that war would be offloaded by programs of
government, and that program was not forthcoming. It didn't
happen. There were no programs put in place to manage the
expectations of the South Sudanese.
And the country was born into too much wealth, resources
that fell into the hands of liberators who had really not seen
such an amount of money ever in their lives. And they went on a
shopping spree and did not invest in the future of the country
and the people of the country.
These individuals had undoubtedly done so much to make the
birth of the country possible, but nearly all of them quickly
became disconnected from the realities of everyday citizens.
They did not think that the oil money would ever run out.
And I am talking about those people who are in office today
as well as people who are no longer in office who were party to
that looting and corruption, and siphoning off of national
resources into foreign businesses, and buying of homes and
other kinds of investments outside the country.
Now the second of course is that while we might focus on
the peace agreement and the people who signed this peace
agreement, my reading of the situation is that the country is
becoming undone at the seams. And the conflict that is
engulfing the country, while we are struggling to reconcile the
political-military elite, these leaders are only able to
continue to draw from their supporters to continue this useless
war because of their ability to divide people, and the
divisiveness that removes the political loyalties from issues
and onto personalities, personalities that come from a specific
ethnic background.
And as a result, I say that the situation that I describe
as causing the country to become undone at the seams can be
represented by what is going on since 2007, 2008, where in
Jonglei, for example, and in Eastern Equatoria in Warrap state,
and Lakes, South Sudanese killed each other more than northern
Sudan was able to kill in a single period.
And all of this is because the expectations of the people
were not prioritized by these leaders once they got the
country.
Now I was recently in Wau State and Gogrial State, which is
the home state of the President. I was also in the northern
part of Tonj State. And my assessment of the situation there
was that the recurring sectional warfare that has plagued the
country over the years is continuing to affect people and their
ability to produce crops and to look after their livestock and
to look after their entire livelihood. Even in places that have
not been impacted directly by the violent crises going on in
Juba, these areas are now also drawn into the conflict because
of the inaction at the national level.
On the diplomatic front, there has been no marked progress
since the U.N. Security Council Resolution 2304 to deploy an
additional 4,000 forces. This issue has become a very divisive
issue as well.
The verdict is still out, and I don't think we will ever
get a collective verdict on this. But it seems that South
Sudanese agree that they are not holding their breath on this
issue. Those who are opposing it say that it will not solve the
problems. It will cause division. Those who are supporting it
say that it does not give them confidence that it will protect
their lives, since it will be strictly based in Juba.
So what could the world community do to help South Sudan?
It is my considered position that the country has been on life
support for over 2 decades already. And this has produced two
glaring realities that are usually not discussed with honesty.
First, the international community has always bailed South
Sudan out----
The Chairman. Has always what? I didn't hear that.
Dr. Jok. The international community has always bailed the
leaders of South Sudan from their responsibility to protect the
welfare of their people. They have always had somebody
intervening to help the people.
As a result, the international community assistance,
especially the humanitarian assistance, may be keeping some
people alive, but it has really become an alibi for failure of
the leadership in South Sudan.
The South Sudanese have never really been pushed very hard
against the wall to the point where they have to step back and
say let's think for ourselves.
And so I suggest that the humanitarian aid has contributed
to prolongation of this conflict and to leaders not being able
to really have a program of welfare for their people.
So we should really renew discussion on what to do with the
humanitarian aid. Yes, it has kept some people alive, and there
are people who are living in very miserable conditions right
now who are living because of the international aid. But they
still get killed in the end.
So if the international aid is prolonging conflict, I am
willing to suggest that we rethink this even at the risk of
some people dying.
Finally, I am not suggesting that aid is bad, but aid that
does not show results and does not have massive impact, even
despite the massive investments--the United States Government
has invested close to $11 billion since 2005 in South Sudan.
The Chairman. We have four panelists, if we could come to a
close, that would be helpful.
Dr. Jok. I'll conclude.
[Dr. Jok's prepared statement follows:]
Prepared Statement of Dr. Jok Madut Jok
Chairman Corker, ranking member, and members of the committee,
thank you very much for inviting me here today. I also want to thank
this committee for its steadfast support and focus on keeping
discussions going on within the American government about the crises
facing South Sudan. The views I express here are my own and not those
of the Sudd Institute, where I am the executive director.
In addressing the crises of conflict, failure of political
settlements, the violence that is unnecessarily taking the lives of
South Sudanese and the humanitarian problems that confront a vast
number of South Sudanese, I would like to slightly shift the focus away
from the elite-centered neo-liberal peace-making and onto the level of
what life is like for the ordinary people of South Sudan and how I see
them being best assisted to tackle the violence that is imposed on
them.
Much of the crises confronting South Sudan today, insecurity,
poverty, economic decline, violent political conflicts, disunity along
ethnic or regional fault lines, are really born of two sources. First,
the burdens left behind by the long wars of liberation, which made
South Sudan the most war-devastated corner of the world since the World
War. Second, South Sudan started on the wrong foot at the time of
independence. There were no programs put in place to manage the
expectations of South Sudanese who had suffered so terribly and for so
long. The country was born into too much wealth, resources that fell
into the hands of the liberators who had not seen such wealth before
and who clearly opted to pay themselves and went on a shopping spree,
showing very little willingness or ability to develop programs to lift
the country out of its war time miseries.
These individuals had undoubtedly done so much to make the birth of
their country possible, but nearly all of them quickly became
disconnected from the realities of everyday citizens. They did not
think the oil money would ever run out. These include many people who
held high positions in security agencies, the military and cabinet
portfolios, and who are no longer part of the government today or are
in opposition but were a part of that corrupt system that put the
country on the wrong path from the beginning. They kept making promises
to their people that roads, basic services, security, economic
development and political stability would all accrue, but no clear
programs to give people reason to hope and to be patient. Instead,
South Sudan was plagued by corruption that quickly ushered the country
into a deeply divided society between the small class of new rich and
the vast majority of citizens who had nothing. A very strong
corruption-insecurity nexus developed straight away and South Sudanese
were hammering each along ethnic lines immediately following the end of
north-south war. From Jonglei to Lakes, Warrap to Eastern Equatoria,
more South Sudanese were killed by their own than had been the case at
the hands of the north in a similar period. These were the realities
that catapulted the country onto the path of war that exploded in
December 2013, a war whose triggers had been in the making since 2005.
So while the conflict that has engulfed the country today is
essentially a struggle for power between the politico-military elites
at the center, these leaders are only able to draw everyone into their
senseless war because the country's citizens have long been so deprived
of basic necessities and so pitted against one another along ethnic
lines that so many ordinary people came to think that their survival
rests with giving support, military and otherwise, to their ethnic
leaders. This means that even as the world struggles to reconcile the
leaders and help them sign peace agreements and create power-sharing
arrangements and make plans to develop professional security agencies,
the truth remains that these leaders in essence hijack and appropriate
ordinary people's real grievances and turn them into stepping stones
into public office. The result is that their peace agreements never
really address the question of why people join these wars in the first
place, why these agreements collapse as soon as they are signed. The
answer is that the real grievances at the level of everyday people get
swept away during the political settlements, only for these grievances
to keep brewing, waiting for a few disgruntled politicians or military
leaders who feel excluded from the settlements to return to their
already unhappy constituencies with appeals to fight whoever they
believe has kept them out of power.
This situation is the main reason why there may be a peace
agreement in place and the political leaders might agree to work
together, divide power and resources, especially in Juba and in state
capitals, but never manage to stop violence in the rest of the country.
As we speak, the political arrangements that the SPLM-lead government
in Juba and the various opposition parties that have joined it to form
the Transitional Government of National Unity (TGoNU), are sitting on a
powder keg of turmoil that is bound to explode throughout the country.
For example, Riek Machar is in Khartoum and no one knows what he and
his fighting forces are up to. Most likely, they are planning to resume
the war, as signalled just two days ago by an attack on a town called
Nhialdiu, not so far from Bentiu, the state capital of Unity, which saw
some of the worse episodes of violence in 2014. If Riek is determined
to get his position as First Vice President back, this would plunge the
country, especially the whole of Upper Nile, back in the kinds of
vicious violence we witnessed in 2013-2015. In Equatoria, people
traveling on the road linking Juba to the Uganda border, the country's
life line, have been attacked numerous times, killing people and
destroying property being transported on this road. Other roads in the
region, especially the ones linking Juba to Yei, Morobo, Kaya and on to
Koboko in Uganda, another vital route for the citizens and traders of
this region and the country at large, have also come under attack
numerous times, particularly in the past 2 months. The government has
not been able to assure people that it has the capacity to protect life
and property. The government has not even admitted that it is fighting
widespread rebellion throughout the country.
I was recently in Wau State, Gogrial State, the home state of the
country's president, Salva Kiir Mayardit, and in Tonj State, and my
assessment of the situation there is that the recurrent sectional
warfare that has plagued the region over the years is continuing to
affect people's ability to produce crops and look after their
livestock. Even in places that have not been impacted directly by the
violent crisis between the government and opposition are being impacted
by the broader national crisis. Areas that are not part of the
``current war'' are affected by other types of violence, like ethnic
feuds and crime. In Jonglei, ethnic rivalries and violent
confrontations between the Murle, Dinka and Nuer ethnic groups, have
continued to wreak such havoc in that region that large numbers of the
Dinka sections have continued to flee the area. All these ethnic or
sectional fights are not only making life unbearable in these areas but
are also a sign that the country is becoming undone at the seams. Juba
might be able to consolidate political power and get the best of the
various power contenders, but the country is likely to remain
ungovernable, if it does not disintegrate entirely.
On the diplomatic front, no marked progress has been made since
UNSC resolution 2304 to deploy an additional 4000 regional force to
join the existing UNMISS to protect civilians better. The visit of the
UNSC ambassadors, the threats to impose an arms embargo on the country,
should the government prove uncooperative on the deployment of this
force, and the likelihood that this force would make a difference in
protection of civilians, have been subject of much debate among South
Sudanese and people in the region. There can never be a collective
verdict, as the issue of an intervention force is a very divisive
issue, but both the opponents and supporters of such a force seem to
agree that they are not holding their breaths on two accounts. First,
deployment of the force might not actually come to pass, given that
there is still uncertainty about troop contribution, financing and
agreement on the modalities of deployment. Second, the fact that the
force would be strictly based in Juba does not provide much confidence,
especially among civilians living in all the various embattled
communities throughout the country, that they would feel any benefit
from a force based so far away.
What could the world community do to help the people of South
Sudan? It is my considered position that the country has been on a
life-support for over two decades and this has produced two glaring
realities that hardly anyone has thought of or explore with
seriousness.
First, the international community has always bailed South Sudanese
leaders out of their responsibility for the welfare of their people. In
other words, international assistance, especially the humanitarian
interventions, may be keeping some citizens alive, but will never
amount to a solution to what is essentially a political and social
crisis. So, to keep going with it is to merely keep the country on a
life-support, without any conception as to how long and to what end
this approach should be maintained; or to sever it at the risk of
losing lives of so many people who have come to rely on food aid for
quite sometime.
Second, South Sudanese have never really been pushed tightly
against the wall to the point where they have to think for themselves.
It has always been a story of crisis, followed by a bail out from the
world community, and another crisis, followed by another intervention.
I suggest that there should be a discussion on ways to wean South Sudan
from food aid, not as a punishment to the citizens who are still living
in very disastrous circumstances, but as a challenge to South Sudanese
leaders to come up with their own plan about how they see their country
able to steer its way out of this crisis. It does not make sense that
the country remains with the same programs that have kept the country
from taking responsibility for its own future should be supported by
the global community.
I am not suggesting that aid is bad, but aid that shows very little
impact for the massive investments made is a waste of resources and a
straight jacket for the country. If aid must continue as a way to
maintain a moral posture, if the West must continue to be seen to be
taking responsibility and a mere symbolic gesture from the world
community, then we should at least try to do it differently, not in the
same way we have done it since 1989 when Operation Life-line Sudan was
created. The approach since 2005 has been state-building, strengthening
the institutions of the state, with the hope that the state would then
turn around and take responsibility for the provision of goods and
services. While it is important to build institutions, this is a
process that takes a generation or more. Why should communities living
far away from Juba or other cities be waiting for these goods and
services until such time the state is ready to do it?
A new approach would be to inject aid directly into small
community-run projects, not channeling it through the bureaucracy of
the government. If you take a look around the country, one observes
that community-run projects or those championed by local NGOs, are the
only products of foreign aid that you see all around the countryside.
Peace should not be seen as an act of signing peace agreements between
the elite but more a process of addressing the drivers of conflict at
the level of society, including investing the youth in the country's
success and economy so that they have a future to look forward to, an
investment they would fear to lose if they respond to anyone's war
drums.
If the international community, particularly the American people
and their government, continue to see a crucial role for the U.S. in
stabilizing South Sudan, it would be best to engage with an eye to
challenging the leaders of South Sudan produce their plan so that the
role of outsiders to support a clear project that is well-developed,
addressing the priorities of South Sudan from the perspective of the
people of South Sudan. Such a plan should focus on security, addressing
the massive humanitarian crisis (IDPs, refugees and famine),
stabilizing the economy, including a robust anti-corruption mechanism,
justice and reconciliation and respect for human rights and civic
liberties. It is then and only then would this leadership have a moral
ground for requesting help from the international community. Such help
if, it is well-justified and credible, would only be a support to that
which is a national plan. If the people and government of the United
States are going to continue to stand by the people of South Sudan, as
they have done for many decades, there has to be a seriousness on the
side of U.S. law makers and the executive branch of the government to
put in place strong mechanisms to ensure accountability for U.S.
resources and to ensure that these resources actually make a
measureable difference in the lives of South Sudanese--in Juba and
across the country. Quoting how much money the U.S. has spent on South
Sudan for the last ten years is not sufficient, we must ask what it was
spent on and what are the results.
The Chairman. Thank you so much for being here. I
appreciate it.
Ms. Knopf?
STATEMENT OF HON. KATE ALMQUIST KNOPF, DIRECTOR, AFRICA CENTER
FOR STRATEGIC STUDIES, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, WASHINGTON,
D.C.
Ms. Knopf. Chairman Corker, Ranking Member Cardin, members
of the committee, thank you for convening this hearing and for
inviting me to speak today. The views I express are, of course,
my own and not those of the U.S. Government.
After 2 decades of experience with South Sudan, I remain
firmly convinced that the United States' support for the self-
determination of the people of South Sudan was and still is
necessary for lasting peace for the country.
I am equally convinced, however, that Americans and South
Sudanese alike must acknowledge that South Sudan has failed its
people. It is past time to abandon the myths regarding the
health of South Sudan's political culture, the capacity of its
leaders, and the potential impact of technical interventions
alone from development assistance to peacekeeping. Just as many
of these myths misled us during the interim period, they
continue to underpin U.S. policy today.
Mr. Chairman, as my written testimony discusses these myths
in more detail, I will bypass that now in order to focus on an
alternative way forward for South Sudan.
Suffice it to say, however, that I do not believe that the
agreement signed in August 2015, remains a viable path toward
peace, nor that Salva Kiir and Riek Machar can be part of a
solution to ending the war. They are irredeemably compromised
among broad segments of the population, and they are innately
divisive, rather than unifying.
Let me also underscore that neither Kiir nor Machar can be
excluded while the other remains. The United States' tacit
support for Kiir's removal of Machar from the transitional
government, an effort to isolate him, has unwittingly given
Kiir a blank check to pursue an increasingly militant policy of
Dinka domination. It has also signaled to all those who oppose
Kiir that there is no political pathway to end the war and that
violent overthrow of Kiir's regime is their only means of self-
preservation.
We should not, therefore, underestimate that the already
horrific war could escalate into genocide at any time. Too many
of the warning signs are already there.
My proposal, therefore, is predicated on a clear diagnosis
that South Sudan has failed at great cost to its people and
with increasingly grave implications for regional security,
including the stability of important U.S. partners in the Horn
of Africa.
Mr. Chairman, South Sudan has ceased to perform even the
minimal functions and responsibilities of a sovereign state.
Nearly one-third of the country has been displaced or sought
refuge outside, and at least 200,000 people are sheltering
under the U.N.'s protection inside. Forty percent of the
population faces severe hunger, including pockets of famine.
Sadly, there has been no methodical effort to calculate the
number of civilian deaths caused by South Sudan's war, even
though there are indications that hundreds of thousands of
civilians may have already died.
U.S. policy must be calibrated commensurate to the
magnitude of this challenge. A fundamentally different approach
is needed, one that protects the South Sudan sovereignty and
territorial integrity while empowering the citizens of South
Sudan to take ownership of their future absent the predations
of a morally bankrupt elite.
Mr. Chairman, in light of the absence of any national
unifying political leaders, the only remaining path toward
these objectives is to establish an international transitional
administration under a U.N. and African Union executive mandate
for the country for a finite period of time.
Though seemingly radical, international administration is
not at all unprecedented and has been previously employed to
guide countries out of conflict, including sovereign states.
Cambodia, Kosovo, East Timor are some of the most prominent
examples.
Brokering such a transition will require committed
diplomacy by the United States in close partnership with
African governments, but it would not necessitate an investment
costlier than the current approach, and, in fact, promises a
better chance of success. Like a patient in critical condition,
restoring South Sudan to viability can only be done by putting
the country even more so on external life-support and gradually
withdrawing that assistance over time, as Ambassador Lyman and
I have written.
Since 2005, the United States has, in fact, devoted more
than $11 billion to help South Sudanese secure self-
determination, and there is currently no end in sight. While
these contributions have saved millions of lives of South Sudan
citizens, U.S. taxpayers deserve a better return on that
investment than the catastrophe that we see today.
The U.N. and AU transitional administration could only come
about if Kiir and Machar are induced to renounce any role in
South Sudanese politics, which they will do if presented with a
sufficiently robust package of disincentives for remaining on
the scene.
These would include the credible threat of prosecution by
the International Criminal Court or the hybrid court envisioned
under the current peace agreement, but presently stalled; the
imposition by the U.N. Security Council of time-triggered
travel bans and asset freezes; the imposition of preemptive
contract sanctions to cast a shadow on the validity of oil and
other resource concessions by Kiir's regime; and a
comprehensive U.N. arms embargo, which is long overdue.
Spoilers could be marginalized through a combination of
politics and force, first by leveraging important
constituencies' antipathy against Kiir, Machar, and their
cronies to gain their support for the transitional
administration, and second by deploying a lean and agile peace
intervention force composed of regional states that can combat
hardline elements once they have been politically isolated.
Mr. Chairman, some will inevitably attempt to
mischaracterize U.N. and EU transitional administration as a
violation of South Sudan sovereignty. But given the increasing
threats that South Sudan's dissolution poses to the interests
of its immediate neighbors, the question of whether foreign
governments will intervene militarily is becoming irrelevant.
The more urgent question is what form that intervention will
take.
South Sudan's current trajectory is increasingly
intolerable for its neighbors. Uganda, Ethiopia, Sudan, Kenya,
they are bearing the brunt of the more than 1 million refugees
that have fled South Sudan, stimulating simmering ethnic
rivalries in these states. Interregional tensions abound and
are worsened and worsened by South Sudan's conflict.
The United States, therefore, has two choices: Stand by
while these states back armed opposition groups against Kiir's
increasingly militant and intransigent regime, or undertake
their own unilateral military intervention or otherwise carve
out spheres of influence as South Sudan slips into a deeper
morass. Or we can pursue a strategy that accommodates these
states' legitimate interests while preserving South Sudan
sovereignty and territorial integrity and providing South Sudan
citizens with an opportunity to take ownership of their future.
Mr. Chairman, a diplomatic initiative toward an U.N.-EU
transitional administration can succeed. Such an administration
is, in fact, the only hope that the people of South Sudan have
left to put an end to their unrelenting nightmare.
Thank you again for inviting me here today. I look forward
to your questions.
[Ms. Knopf's prepared statement follows:]
Prepared Statement of Kate Almquist Knopf
Chairman Corker, Ranking Member Cardin, and members of the
committee, thank you for convening this hearing and for the opportunity
to speak to you today. The views I express here are my own; they do not
represent those of the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, the
National Defense University, or the U.S. Department of Defense.
In January 1994, a senior official in the United Nations Department
of Peacekeeping Operations met with the staff of the U.S. mission to
the U.N. in New York. According to a summary of that meeting, which was
later cabled to Washington, the U.N. official warned of a ``potentially
explosive atmosphere'' as a result of the political stalemate between
the parties to a recently signed peace agreement, of the ongoing arming
of the president's forces concurrent with the deployment of an
opposition battalion to the capital, and of the deteriorating economic
situation. Three months later, the downing of President Habyarimana's
plane was the final match that sparked the Rwandan genocide.
While there are of course significant differences between Rwanda in
1994 and South Sudan in 2016, this report sounds eerily familiar in
light of recent developments in Juba, and we should not underestimate
the real possibility that the already horrific war in the world's
newest state could escalate into genocide. Too many of the warning
signs are there: extreme tribal polarization fueling a cycle of
revenge, widespread and systematic attacks against civilians, hate
speech, atrocities intended to dehumanize particular populations, and
targeting of community and tribal leaders, among others.
I first visited South Sudan in 1995 while working for the
international nongovernmental organization World Vision, which provided
humanitarian relief to the areas held by the Sudan People's Liberation
Movement/Army (SPLM/A). Later, I served as the USAID mission director
for Sudan and South Sudan and then the head of USAID's Africa bureau
during some of the crucial years leading up to South Sudan's
independence. For part of this time, I represented the U.S. government
on the international Assessment and Evaluation Commission charged with
overseeing implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement.
Based on my two decades of experience with South Sudan, I remain
firmly convinced that the United States' support for the self-
determination of the people of South Sudan was, and still is, necessary
to bring lasting peace to South Sudan.
I am equally convinced, however, that Americans and South Sudanese
alike must acknowledge that the state of South Sudan has failed its
people and that it is past time to abandon several myths regarding the
health of South Sudan's political culture, the capacity of its leaders,
and the potential impact of technical interventions--from development
assistance to peacekeeping--in a country that has for all intents and
purposes had no meaningful historical experience with governance. Just
as many of those same myths misled us during the interim period, they
continue to underpin U.S. policy today and are increasing rather than
decreasing the likelihood of ever greater atrocities, human suffering,
and regional insecurity.
Mr. Chairman, let me outline some of these myths and then suggest a
more productive way forward for U.S. policy.
The first myth is that power-sharing governments work in South
Sudan. They do not. They have spectacularly failed twice now, and the
escalating violence, the de facto collapse of the August 2015 peace
agreement, and the fighting in Juba in July were as inevitable as they
were predictable. The Transitional Government of National Unity--both
before and even more so after the flight of Riek Machar from Juba in
July--is neither nationally representative nor unifying. It was
premised on divvying up the political and economic spoils of the state,
and it will therefore never be the basis for a transition to a more
secure, peaceful, and sovereign South Sudan. In addition, with the
expulsion of Machar from that transitional government at the end of
July, President Salva Kiir co-opted any meaningful opposition
representation that remained in the government and ensured that
whatever transformative reforms existed in the peace agreement would
not advance.
Beyond the specific flaws of the agreement or the senseless game of
musical chairs over who holds which position in a national government
that exists only in name, the more fundamental fact is that war and
conflict do not persist in South Sudan because of an imbalance of
political power that can be rectified by putting the right individuals
on either end of a see-saw. War and conflict persist in South Sudan
because there is a complete deficit of legitimate power and legitimate
institutions.
To a degree nearly unrivaled in Africa, South Sudan has no
nationally unifying political figures with credibility or a
constituency beyond their own tribe--or in most cases, beyond even a
segment of a sub-clan of their tribe. There is no national identity in
most of the country--something that South Sudanese leaders since
independence have invested very little effort to redress. Instead, the
regime in Juba consists only of a loose network of individuals with
varying degrees of coercive force at their disposal but no political
center of gravity. The country's one unifying political force--the
Sudan People's Liberation Movement, which was the vanguard of South
Sudan's struggle for independence--has imploded as a result of its
leaders' competition over power and resources.
South Sudan also suffers from an acute lack of institutions. As the
African Union's Commission of Inquiry led by former president of
Nigeria Olusegun Obasanjo concluded in 2014, ``the crisis in South
Sudan is primarily attributable to the inability of relevant
institutions to mediate and manage conflicts, which spilt out into the
army, and subsequently the general population . [U]nlike many African
states, South Sudan lacked any institutions when it attained
independence.'' The Commission further found that previous state-
building initiatives in South Sudan, which had focused on capacity-
building, appear to ``have failed,'' a conclusion, it notes, that was
not arrived at solely by foreigners but was in keeping with the results
of a comprehensive review commissioned by Kiir's office before the
outbreak of the war in December 2013.
Under these conditions, ending the war in South Sudan will require
not merely balancing or dispersing power but a viable framework to
inject power, authority, and legitimacy into South Sudanese politics
and South Sudanese institutions over the long term.
The second myth is that Kiir and Machar are part of the solution to
South Sudan's war. They are not. They are in fact key drivers of the
conflict. Kiir and Machar have sat together in government twice and
have disastrously failed their country on both occasions. The reports
of the AU Commission of Inquiry and several U.N. bodies have provided
ample evidence of their complicity in war crimes and crimes against
humanity. They and their inner circles, including the chief of general
staff, Paul Malong, are irredeemably compromised among broad segments
of the population and are innately divisive rather than unifying. Peace
and stability in South Sudan will only come if and when Kiir, Machar,
and those closest to them are excluded from the political life and
governance of the country.
Let me underscore, however, that neither Kiir nor Machar can be
excluded while the other remains. The United States' tacit support for
Kiir's removal of Machar from the transitional government and effort to
isolate Machar has unwittingly given Kiir a blank check to pursue an
increasingly militant policy of Dinka domination. It has also signaled
to all those who oppose Kiir-Nuer, Shilluk, and Equatorian alike--that
there is no political pathway to end the war and that violent overthrow
of Kiir's regime, which they already view as responsible for ethnic
cleansing, is their only means of self-preservation. This policy has
accelerated rather than defused the centrifugal forces that are tearing
at the social fabric of the country. Kiir displays no concern for the
repeated threats of sanction that are never realized; he and his
government are clearly pursuing an ethno-nationalist agenda. It is not
subtle, and they have not been deterred.
I have known Salva Kiir for many years, and I worked closely with
him during the interim period of the implementation of the
Comprehensive Peace Agreement. Initially, he helped steer his
traumatized country through its turbulent early years of autonomous
rule, including the critical moments after the death of Dr. John Garang
that threatened to plunge South Sudan into civil war. But nearly three
years of war have shown that he was never able to make the transition
from soldier to statesman.
No man who arms youth militia to perpetrate a scorched earth
campaign against civilians or who sends amphibious vehicles into swamps
to hunt down women and children who have fled from violence or who
orders attack helicopters to shell villages or U.N. protection of
civilian sites can play any part in leading South Sudan to the future
its people deserve. The international community recognized the
sovereignty of South Sudan on its Independence Day on July 9, 2011.
This sovereignty is vested in the people of South Sudan, however, not
in Salva Kiir, not in his hand-picked ministers and advisers, and not
in his tribe.
There is also no evidence to suggest that the replacement of Riek
Machar with Taban Deng Gai will result in the Kiir regime voluntarily
changing course to act in the interests of its people rather than
against them. To the contrary and despite repeated promises and
commitments to do otherwise, Kiir is not only pursuing full-scale armed
conflict against civilian populations deemed to be supportive of the
opposition, his government continues to increase obstruction of life-
saving humanitarian aid and peacekeeping operations and to close
political space by intimidating and harassing local and international
journalists, civil society representatives, aid workers, and foreign
diplomats alike. Unthinkable, brutal assaults, rapes, and even
assassinations are commonplace. Indeed, Kiir's regime demonstrates
regularly that it has learned the worst lessons from Khartoum--to buy
time, to obfuscate and deny the gravity of the humanitarian and human
rights crisis, to take three steps back and then a half step forward,
confusing the international community and deferring any consequences.
The third myth is that a peacekeeping operation deployed without a
workable political arrangement can succeed in bringing peace. It
cannot. Since the war in South Sudan began in 2013, the number of U.N.
peacekeepers has nearly doubled, the mandate of the force has been
strengthened to include the most robust authorities necessary to
protect civilians, and yet the scope and scale of the war has expanded
unabatedly. Even if the government agrees to the deployment of the
4,000 troops envisioned under the regional protection force, which it
has signaled time and again it will not do, another increase in force
levels or mandate adjustments is not likely to be any more successful
when the political arrangements that the force is designed to support
have collapsed.
Moreover, deploying the regional protection force in the current
zero-sum political context presents a dangerous dilemma. The force will
inevitably be called upon either to side with the government against
the opposition or with the opposition against the government, thereby
aligning the U.N. with one tribe against another in a tribal war. For
example, if the government perpetrates further attacks against the U.N.
protection of civilian sites, which it has characterized as strongholds
of Nuer rebels, should the protection force engage the government
militarily in its capital? This is a government that has already
characterized the protection force as a violation of its sovereignty
and as ``invaders,'' that flagrantly violates the existing U.N. status
of forces agreement on a daily basis, and that maintains at least
25,000 uniformed SPLA in Juba, in addition to plain clothes national
security personnel. Conversely, if opposition forces attack Juba, as
Equatorian militia have done at the city's outskirts in just the last
two weeks, should the protection force fight them in concert with the
Dinka-dominated government?
The fourth myth is that piecemeal, technical investments--financial
bailouts, security sector reforms, disarmament and demobilization
programs, or development initiatives--are sufficient for confronting
South Sudan's systemic failure as a nation state. An economic package
without an accountable and functional government or a peacekeeping
mission when there is no peace to keep, or security sector reform when
the military is run by war criminals is unlikely to yield dividends for
the people of South Sudan.
Mr. Chairman, the fact that South Sudan's collapse ranks among one
of the most severe humanitarian and security challenges in the world
today is perhaps hard to comprehend at a time when multiple crises
compete for international attention. Yet the scale and scope of this
war is nearly unparalleled.
Last week, South Sudan became one of only four countries with more
than one million refugees, alongside Syria, Afghanistan, and Somalia.
This is in addition to the 1.7 million people who are internally
displaced, including at least 200,000 sheltering under the U.N.'s
protection. Forty percent of the population faces severe hunger;
250,000 children are severely malnourished; and there is famine in
parts of Northern Bahr el Ghazal state and likely elsewhere. A study
undertaken by the South Sudan Law Society last year based on the
Harvard trauma questionnaire concluded that the incident rate of post-
traumatic stress disorder in South Sudan equaled that of post-genocide
Rwanda and Cambodia.
Sadly, there has been no methodical effort to calculate the number
of civilian deaths caused by South Sudan's war, even though there are
indications that a comparable number of civilians may have been killed
in South Sudan in nearly three years of war as in Syria, a country with
twice the population enduring a war that has ground on for twice as
long.
In Syria, three-quarters of the estimated half million deaths are
combatants, whereas the war in South Sudan disproportionately affects
civilians. The only estimate of deaths in South Sudan thus far placed
the total at 50,000 in November 2014, less than a year after the war
began.\1\ Without a more accurate estimate of the rising death toll in
South Sudan, regional and international responses fail to appreciate
the full severity of the crisis and underestimate the urgency of the
response needed.
South Sudan is not on the brink of state failure. South Sudan is
not in the process of failing. South Sudan has failed, at great cost to
its people and with increasingly grave implications for regional
security, including the stability of important U.S. partners in the
Horn of Africa. South Sudan has ceased to perform even the minimal
functions and responsibilities of a sovereign state. The government
exercises no monopoly over coercive power, and its ability to deliver
public services, provide basic security, and administer justice is
virtually nonexistent. While the Kiir regime may claim legal
sovereignty, in practice domestic sovereignty is entirely contested and
discredited.\2\
U.S. policy must be calibrated commensurate to the magnitude of
this challenge, which will require a different approach that accounts
for South Sudan's unique political realities. Such a strategy must have
two objectives: First, protect South Sudan's sovereignty and
territorial integrity and, second, empower the citizens of South Sudan
to take ownership of their future absent the predations of a bankrupt
elite.
Mr. Chairman, given the extreme degree of South Sudan's state
failure, the only remaining path toward these objectives is to
establish an international transitional administration under a U.N. and
African Union executive mandate for the country for a finite period of
time.
Though seemingly radical, international administration is not
unprecedented and has been previously employed to guide other
countries, including sovereign states, out of conflict. Cambodia,
Kosovo, and East Timor are some of the most prominent examples. While
it will realistically take at least ten to fifteen years for South
Sudanese to develop a new vision for their state as well as the
institutions to manage politics nonviolently, it is more sensible to
plan for this duration at the outset than drift into an accumulation of
one-year peacekeeping mandates over decades, as has been done in the
eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, Darfur, and elsewhere.
Brokering such a transition will require committed diplomacy by the
United States in close partnership with African governments. But it
would not necessitate an investment costlier than the current
approach--in assistance dollars or in political capital--and in fact
promises a better chance of success. Like a patient in critical
condition, restoring South Sudan to viability can only be done by
putting the country on external ``life support'' and gradually
withdrawing assistance over time.
A calculation of all State Department and USAID assistance to South
Sudan from fiscal year 2005 to 2016 shows that the United States alone
has devoted more than $11 billion in humanitarian, peacekeeping/
security sector, and transition and reconstruction assistance to help
the South Sudanese secure self-determination. And Secretary Kerry's
announcement last month of an additional $140 million dollars in
humanitarian aid shows that this trajectory is set to continue. While
U.S. contributions have unquestionably saved millions of lives, South
Sudan's citizens--and U.S. taxpayers--deserve a better return on that
investment than the humanitarian and security catastrophe we see today.
A U.N. and AU transitional administration could restore order and
public security, provide basic governance, administer essential public
services, and rebuild the economy. Vitally, it would also provide the
time and space to establish the political and constitutional framework
for the return to full sovereignty. Elections--which under the current
polarized circumstances can only be expected to drive further
conflict--would be delayed until after reconciliation, accountability,
and national dialogue processes culminate in a new permanent
constitution, thereby removing the prospect of a winner-takes-all
electoral process overshadowing crucial political, security, and
institutional reforms.
The depth of the country's economic collapse--the state is entirely
bankrupt and inflation hit 661% percent last month--will require a
substantial donor assistance effort. However, macro-economic
stabilization is unrealistic with the current regime in power. The same
elite that has compromised South Sudan's sovereignty is responsible for
squandering tens of billions of dollars in oil revenue since 2005, and
there is no evidence to suggest they would improve their financial
management practices in the future.
Under a U.N. and AU transitional administration, however, the World
Bank could manage South Sudan's oil revenues in a transparent and
accountable manner to partially fund service delivery to the South
Sudanese. Major donors and international financial institutions such as
the IMF would be reassured by the accountability and transparency
mechanisms governing the delivery of non-humanitarian assistance under
the transitional administration. This would in turn bolster confidence
that donor resources are supporting national strategies to meet the
needs of South Sudan's citizens and unblock generous aid packages that
provide additional incentives to South Sudanese constituencies to
support the transition. Any services the people of South Sudan receive
today are already being provided by the international community. A U.N.
and AU transitional administration would remove the political and
security impediments to these operations.
Even more critically, a transitional administration would provide
space for the kind of genuine national dialogue process prescribed by
the AU Commission of Inquiry, ``to provide a forum for dialogue,
inquiry, and to record the multiple, often competing narratives about
South Sudan's history and conflicts; to construct a common narrative
around which a new South Sudan can orient its future; to uncover and
document the history of victimization and to recommend appropriate
responses,'' including through a truth and reconciliation commission.
It would also allow for an internal discussion on the structure of the
state.
Opposition to a U.N. and AU transitional administration could be
mitigated through a combination of politics and force by (1)
negotiating Kiir and Machar's renunciation of a role in South Sudanese
politics; (2) leveraging important constituencies' frustration with
Kiir, Machar, and their cronies to gain these constituencies support
for the transitional administration; and (3) deploying a lean and agile
peace intervention force--composed of regional states--to combat and
deter the remaining spoilers once they have been politically isolated.
Kiir and Machar can be peacefully excluded from South Sudan's
political and economic life if they see the walls closing in on them
and are offered a pathway that ensures their physical safety outside
the country. This will require a sufficiently robust package of
disincentives for their opposition to the transitional administration.
Such a package could include the credible threat of prosecution by the
ICC or the Hybrid Court envisioned (but stalled) under the current
peace agreement, the imposition by the U.N. Security Council of time-
triggered travel bans and asset freezes, pre-emptive contract sanctions
to cast a shadow on the validity of oil and other resource concessions
by Kiir's regime, and a comprehensive U.N. arms embargo, which is long
overdue.
The exclusion of Kiir and Machar from the transition would defuse
much of the impetus to continue the war or to oppose a transitional
U.N. and AU administration among the Nuer, Dinka, and other forces
fighting for revenge, retribution, or in self-defense. U.N. and AU
administration would also provide assurances to all sides that they
would not be excluded and therefore could participate in the national
political process.
Some powerful individuals, including Kiir and Machar's core
partisans and family members, would still of course have an incentive
to obstruct the transitional administration in pursuit of personal or
narrowly tribal ambitions. As the most instrumental and consistent
supporter of South Sudan's independence, the United States could assist
with marginalizing these potential spoilers in three important ways.
First, by harnessing the significant concern among senior SPLA
officials and other national security actors that the continuation of
the war will inevitably lead to direct military intervention by
neighboring states; the carving up of the country as happened in
eastern DRC; and consequently an open-ended loss of sovereignty to
persuade them that the U.N. and AU administration is the least bad
option. Additionally, many of these actors would welcome the
opportunity to build a professional, inclusive national army and police
force afforded by a U.N. and AU administration. Second, by mobilizing
individuals and tribal constituencies that have been alienated by
Kiir's policy to promote Dinka territorial dominance in contested areas
through his 28 states decree. Third, by deploying a peace intervention
mission with credible coercive force.
Mr. Chairman, attempts to mischaracterize the U.N. and AU
transitional administration as a violation of South Sudan's sovereignty
or an attempt at neocolonialism are inevitable, particularly from the
most hardline Dinka elements in the country who benefit--financially
and politically--from the current situation. These elements have
already mounted a concerted effort to block the Regional Protection
Force as an alleged violation of sovereignty, which has raised the
stakes for international involvement in South Sudan without raising the
likelihood of significant political or security gains for its people.
Given the increasing threats that South Sudan's dissolution poses to
the interests of its immediate neighbors, however, the question of
whether foreign governments will intervene militarily is becoming
irrelevant. The more urgent question is what form that intervention
will take.
Uganda, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Kenya are bearing the brunt of the
more than one million refugees that have fled South Sudan. Over 370,000
South Sudanese have sought refuge in Uganda, 100,000 since July 8th
alone, and Ethiopia now hosts another 290,000. The refugees' presence
has stimulated simmering ethnic rivalries in these states. For
instance, communal fighting broke out on Ethiopia's side of the border
with South Sudan in early 2016, and Ethiopian troops deployed into
South Sudan's Jonglei state in April 2016 following a particularly
brazen incursion into Ethiopia's Gambella state by a South Sudanese
tribal militia. Intraregional tensions--such as the long-standing
rivalry between Sudan and Uganda and the competition for regional
hegemony between Uganda and Ethiopia--abound, and both worsen and are
worsened by South Sudan's conflict.
The United States therefore has two choices: We can stand by while
these states make facts on the ground by backing armed opposition
groups against Kiir's increasingly militant and intransigent regime,
taking unilateral military intervention against civilian populations it
wishes to subjugate, or otherwise carving out spheres of influence as
South Sudan slips away into a deeper morass. A policy that helps Kiir
to consolidate his position will not address the security concerns of
South Sudan's neighbors over the long term, thereby making this
trajectory more likely.
Or, in partnership with neighboring governments, the United States
could pursue a strategy that accommodates their legitimate interests
while at the same time preserving South Sudan's sovereignty and
territorial integrity and providing South Sudan's citizens with an
opportunity to take ownership of their future.
For Uganda, the credible security architecture of a U.N. and AU
administration would provide a buffer against the extension of Sudanese
influence, the prevention of which is a core Ugandan strategic
interest, as well as prevent a security vacuum that could be exploited
by the Lord's Resistance Army or extremist groups. The return to a more
stable security environment--particularly in the Greater Equatoria
region, which is more turbulent than at any time during the civil war
with Khartoum and lies along Uganda's border--would also revive
opportunities for Ugandan commercial activity.
By reducing insecurity and mitigating conflict drivers, an
effective U.N. and AU transitional administration would stem the flow
of South Sudanese refugees into Ethiopia and would ultimately
facilitate their return home. This would ease the strain on the limited
resources of an Ethiopia struggling to cope with a severe drought and
lessen ethnic conflicts in eastern Ethiopia caused by the refugees'
presence at a time of increasing ethnic unrest in other parts of the
country.
An international transitional administration would provide Sudan
with increased and more regular oil production at a time when its
economy is struggling and provide a new impetus for breaking the
stalemate between Sudan and Sudanese armed opposition groups that have
received support from Juba. A U.N. and AU administration would also
serve Kenyan interests by stabilizing the long-standing commercial ties
between South Sudan and Kenya, where much South Sudanese wealth is
held, and by mitigating the possible exploitation by extremist groups
of a security vacuum in South Sudan.
Mr. Chairman, a diplomatic initiative toward a U.N. and AU
transitional administration can succeed. Such a transitional
administration is in fact the only hope that the people of South Sudan
have left to put an end to their unrelenting nightmare. The alternative
is to flounder from one tactical step to another--conferring legitimacy
on individuals who have long since lost it among their own citizens--
while the state for which the South Sudanese people fought so bravely
dies five years after its birth.
Thank you again for inviting me here today. I look forward to your
questions.
----------
Notes:
1. In the one part of South Sudan where a statistically rigorous study
has been conducted as a proof of concept, the conservative
estimate enumerated 7,165 civilians deaths by violence in just
five counties in one state during a 12-month period between
2014 and 2015--twice the number of civilians killed in all of
Yemen in the first 12 months of that country's civil war.
2. The legal basis for Kiir's role as president of South Sudan is
highly questionable. He was elected as president in 2010, prior
to South Sudan's independence, and the elections scheduled for
2015 was postponed as a result of the war, which itself was
sparked over an internal party dispute centered on the
electoral contest. Kiir's term was extended to 2017 by a
national assembly from which the opposition was excluded.
The Chairman. Thank you very much.
Dr. Kuol?
STATEMENT OF LUKA BIONG DENG KUOL, PH.D., GLOBAL FELLOW, PEACE
RESEARCH INSTITUTE OSLO, OSLO, NORWAY
Dr. Kuol. Yes, Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. I am so
delighted to have the opportunity again to make a statement
before your committee.
I hope I can make sense of the complex situation and to
paint what the future holds for South Sudan.
I want to reiterate that the peace agreement that was
signed, although it is in bad health, remains the only viable
option of putting South Sudan on the track of peace. Any other
option, in my view, is a recipe for more human suffering and
loss of innocent lives.
It is an agreement that has been unanimously approved by
the parliament. It is facilitated by the IGAD, as well as by
the African Union, TROIKA, including the U.S. Government, and
the international community. It is an agreement that enjoys the
unanimous support of the member states of the Security Council.
Indeed, as you rightly put it, the eruption of conflict in
July 2016 showed that this agreement lacks political will,
particularly from a small group of elements, anti-peace-
agreement, that are actually championing the opposition to the
peace and driving an agenda of violence, and to benefit
themselves from this violence.
In the case of the Government of South Sudan, these
elements use not only political rhetoric and sentiment against
the friends of South Sudan, but they have been exploiting
public initiatives during the war to benefit themselves. I hope
that the U.N. panel of experts on Sudan will take out the link
between these elements and how they benefit from this war.
These anti-peace elements also actually are not respecting
the President of the Republic, their own President, producing
contrary statements about the President's reconciliatory
positions.
Then the question is how can we reengineer the political
will. A few suggestions.
The U.S. should aim at assembling the supporters of peace,
winning over the undecided in the government, and isolating the
anti elements both in the government and in opposition.
The SPLM-IO opposition is divided after the appointment of
Taban Deng as the new First Vice President. Although we are
seeing some positive signs that they are working together and
developing a new spirit for the full implementation of this
agreement, yet the U.S. Government through the Joint Monitoring
and Evaluation Commission should abide by this provision of the
agreement and work toward maintaining stability and unity among
the warring parties. It is in the interest of the people of
South Sudan and the peace that the parties to the agreement
must be united.
Also, the United Nations Mission in South Sudan, UNMIS,
plays a very important role. Despite its shortcomings, South
Sudan is better off with the presence of the United Nations
Mission in South Sudan. However, it needs to consolidate its
mandate and to work effectively with the transitional
government to fully implement this peace agreement.
The deployment of regional forces is one of the ways of
strengthening this mandate of the United Nations mission. And
with the consent of the Government of South Sudan, we should
expedite the deployment of these forces.
After the cooperation that was shown by the government and
the President himself to the Security Council, I think the U.S.
Government should start now building a new relationship with
the government in order to commit themselves for implementing
the peace agreement.
Yes, it is true that peace is in bad health. What if it
fails? The violent conflict will continue more human suffering.
Currently, the SPLM opposition seems to be planning for the
option of war if peace is declared dead. But even Dr. Lam Akol,
who was championing the nonviolent opposition, is left with
nothing but to opt out from this nonviolent opposition.
So what can the international community do?
First, we should not expect the international community to
be watching, but they should act in order to prevent the
eruption of new violence in South Sudan. The recent IGAD
initiative of deployment of these U.N. forces, of regional
forces, and the consent of the Government of South Sudan, is a
very important step to rescue this peace agreement from
collapsing.
And with these efforts, with the U.S. Government, I think--
maybe I disagree with Kate, not in terms of direction, but in
terms of whether this proposal is currently an option, given
the international community is focusing on the implementation
of the peace agreement. But it should be an option that we
should be keeping in our minds, if worse comes to worse.
On the other hand, the prospect that the international
community might at a certain point have to intervene should
encourage the parties to the agreement to implement it, because
that threat is very important.
But equally important, I think, even with political will,
we need robust technical and financial support to sustain the
commitment and make this peace attractive and have the
dividends of peace. But we need people to work together.
And in this regard, the recent legislation to facilitate
the return of qualified South Sudanese diaspora is a positive
and good step, and should be encouraged.
Now on the political reforms, who to supervise it, I know
there is a lot of debate. We have the options of either the two
leaders to supervise the political reforms. This is provided
for in the peace agreement; or either of them to step down; or
the third, two of them.
But, Mr. Chairman, I know you cannot do this one without
the consent of these people because the peace agreement and
these two leaders, they should be included, to be held
responsible to implement this peace agreement because these are
the options available ahead of us. Failing to do that, then we
can talk about other options.
Or if possible, the international community, through its
diplomatic leverage, to convince either of them or two of them
to give way for new leaders to come, but with the consent of
the political parties.
I think there is that opportunity with the region. Like
what Kate said, we can use the region in order to do the same.
Let me conclude by saying that people of South Sudan are
great people, and I think from the civil war, they may rise up
from ashes of civil war to pursue the God-given potential to
build the country. Thank you.
[Dr. Kuol's prepared statement follows:]
Prepared Statement of Luka Biong Deng Kuol, Ph.D.
introduction
I am extremely honoured again for this timely opportunity today to
make this statement before your committee. Last April, I had
opportunity to make testimony on the South Sudan's Prospects for Peace
before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs,
Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health and Human Rights. Since that time
things have changed considerably. I was optimistic that things will
improve and that South Sudan will be on the right track in implementing
peace agreement. Unfortunately I was wrong as violent conflict erupted
again in July 2016, many innocent lives were lost, thousands fled the
country and took refugee in the neighbouring countries, the economy at
the verge of collapse, and peace agreement is not at all in good
health. I hope I will be right this time to make sense of this complex
situation and to paint what future holds for South Sudan.
I will address the four issues in the order I have been asked by
the committee: first, on the viability of the Peace Agreement; second,
on international and regional administration of South Sudan; third, on
accountability and reconciliation; and fourth, on sustainable political
reforms.
viability of peace agreement and the role of international community
I want first to reiterate affront that the peace agreement,
although it is in bad health, remains the only viable option of putting
South Sudan on track of peace and stability. Any other option will be a
recipe for more loss of innocent lives and human suffering. It is an
agreement wanted by the people of South Sudan as it has been
unanimously approved by the national parliament of South Sudan without
reservations. It is a peace agreement that came as a result of
concerted efforts of the region (IGAD), African Union, TROIKA and
International community represented United Nations Security Council. It
is a peace agreement supported and endorsed unanimously by the
permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.
However, the eruption of violent conflict in July 2016 shows that
the peace agreement was backed by an incomplete political will. The
real challenge now is how to nurture the real political will to support
peace agreement as the best and the only hope for the people of Sudan.
There are elements both in government and opposition that are against
peace and they are the ones igniting violence and influencing public
opinion against the friends of South Sudan such as the region, AU, U.N.
and Troika countries.
The voices of these elements became very clear in government as
they started even undermining the reconciliatory positions of President
of South Sudan towards friends of South Sudan as clearly stated in his
recent speech in the parliament and his meeting in Juba with members of
the U.N. Security Council. These elements are driven more by wartime
vendettas and narrow self-interest. They have actively encouraged
conflict ever since. When the big tent collapsed along the old dividing
lines it became obvious that the Government of South Sudan includes
some officials who are working hard to implement the Agreement; some
who are undecided; and others who are against the peace because it
doesn't serve their agenda. In terms of achieving the much-needed
environment of political will, the challenge is to strengthen the
supporters of peace, win over the undecided and isolate the anti-peace
elements.
The recent atrocities being committed in Juba by unknown armed men,
including against foreigners, their actions were seen as a deviation
from the SPLA's history and its code of conduct. Why has military
discipline changed for the worst since the independence? Mean speech by
unscrupulous politicians that casts the international community as an
enemy of South Sudan is misleading the soldiers and stirring up anger
in the social media. These anti-peace elements in the government are
the ones need to be targeted with specific sanctions that may limit
their influence.
It is a fact that the SPLM-IO is divided and Gen. Taban Deng has
been appointed as a new First Vice President to act in the position of
Dr Riek until he returns back to Juba. There are early signs that
suggest that President Salva and his new First Vice President are
working in harmony and with new spirit towards the full implementation
of peace agreement. Despite such progress, the international community
should abide by the terms, provisions and institutions provided for
resolving differences in the peace agreement. It is within the interest
of peace to see the parties to the peace agreement united rather than
divided and they should be helped to remain united. The Joint
Monitoring and Evaluation Commission (JMEC) is the only institution
mandated to resolve differences in the peace agreement and members of
JMEC including U.S. are expected to support the smooth function of
JMEC. The current difference in SPLM-IO can only be resolved through
JMEC or SPLM-IO itself rather than through individual members of JEMC.
Also smooth implementation of peace agreement rests with the role
to be played by United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS). There
are concerns about the role of UNMISS in discharging its mandate under
Chapter VII of protection of civilians as many including U.N. reports
have clearly shown its underperformance since the eruption of violent
conflict in December 2013 and recently in July 2016. Besides its
inability to protect civilians, UNMISS even failed to protect U.N.'s
properties as the warehouses of World Food Programme (WFP) full with
food items were looted in daylight in Juba.
Despite this underperformance of UNMISS, the counterfactual
question remains what would have been the situation in South Sudan with
these violent conflicts without the presence of UNMISS? What would have
been the fate of thousands of people who took refuge in PoC? Is the
performance of UNMISS different from other missions with similar
mandate in other countries? What would be the level of knowledge and
awareness of international community about gross human rights abuses
and atrocities committed by the warring parties? With these questions
and despite its shortcomings, South Sudan is better with the presence
of UNMISS. However, there is a need to strengthen its mandate and to
perform differently for building peace.
The deployment of the Regional Protection Forces is one of the ways
of strengthening the mandate of UNMISS. The way these Regional
Protection Forces was initially presented as ``intervention forces''
created anxiety and serious and right concerns about the sovereignty of
their state. As well articulated recently by the U.S. Secretary of
State that the Regional Protection Forces are only to complement the
sovereign authority of South Sudan rather than taking it away. This is
the message that is needed to be passed to the authorities in Juba and
people of South Sudan by the international community and to silence the
voices of anti-peace in the government. Also the cooperation of the
Government and people of South Sudan should be secured based on the
fact that these Regional Protection Forces are not an effort to
undermine sovereignty, but rather to consolidate security, in order to
facilitate development for the country. It is in that sense a
reinforcement of sovereignty, but must be undertaken with local
understanding and support. The commitment that was given by the
President in Juba to the members of U.N. Security Council may not be
respected if these anti-peace elements remain in their influential
public positions.
international administration of south sudan
During my congressional testimony last April, I posed a fundamental
question of what if the parties failed to implement the peace
agreement? The clear and straight answer is that parties will scale up
violent conflict. Currently, SPLM-IO seems to be planning for the
option of war if peace agreement is dead. Even some of the political
leaders such as Dr Lam Akol who championed the non-violent opposition
seems to be left with no option but to abandon the peaceful means given
the unhealthy status of peace agreement to which he anchored his non-
violent opposition. Also other national voices for peace will be pushed
to the extreme of violence as the only way of bringing change in South
Sudan.
While it is natural that the international community cannot be
watching such unfolding human suffering caused by the acts of elites
who are not interested and have no political will to implement peace
agreement, it is important that any action in lieu of peace needs to be
carefully assessed within the context of South Sudan, regional
dimensions and international context. The international administration
of South Sudan relies on few assumptions that the region and
international community will be united and have a consensus over such
option and that people of South Sudan, if not all of them, will accept
it as the best option for putting their country on the path of peace
and stability.
It is a fact that the region is divided with each country guided by
its narrow and incompatible strategic interests and even some of them
such as Sudan may be ready to support the opposition parties in waging
war against Juba. So IGAD and even more difficult the AU may not reach
a consensus on the international and regional administration of South
Sudan. One is not sure how the international community, particularly
UNSC, will reach consensus on the international and regional
administration of South Sudan; given the fact that the members of UNSC
are unable to reach a consensus even on arms embargo. The people of
South Sudan and particularly the anti-peace elements in the government
may see such international administration as targeting certain ethnic
groups and may use such option as a way of mobilizing themselves
against such administration and that may result in violent
confrontation and more human suffering.
On the basis of these facts, the option of international
administration should be seen as the cost of non-implementation of
peace agreement and as effective way of encouraging the parties to the
full implementation of peace agreement and to encourage them to have
the necessary political will to implement the peace agreement. Besides
this threat of international administration of South Sudan, the parties
to peace agreement should be encouraged diplomatically to isolate the
anti-peace elements or to impose targeted sanctions on these elements.
accountability and reconciliation
The peace agreement is very clear on these two issues as different
mechanisms have been provided for how they should be implemented. Also
the African Union Commission of Inquiry on South Sudan has come up with
specific suggestions of how to achieve justice, accountability and
reconciliation. The role of international community is to see the full
implementations of the provisions related to accountability and
reconciliation. There is no doubt that both accountability and
reconciliation require a stable political environment and that can
begin from the bottom up building on local institutions to popularize
the Agreement, mobilize the people and launch the constitutional
process framed in the Agreement. Accountability and reconciliation can
extend upward at a time when there is no risk to the Agreement.
the sustainable political reforms
As I mentioned in my testimony last April that the peace agreement
has provided unprecedented and detailed reforms that are better than
those provided in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA). If these
reforms are fully implemented, South Sudan will not be the same again.
However, there are challenges of who to oversee the implementation
of these reforms. Although peace agreement is very clear that the
principals of the peace agreement (President Salva Kiir and Dr Riak
Machar) are to oversee these reforms, there are voices calling
otherwise. In fact there are three options: first is the peace
agreement option of President Salva Kiir and Dr Riek Machar as
principals to the Agreement; the second is for one to step down; and
the third is that both step aside to give others a chance to oversee
these reforms. Despite the fact that President Salva and Dr Riak Machar
are unlikely to work together after the recent violent conflict in July
2016, there is no option that can be imposed on them. Given the fact
that peace agreement is a win-win situation, the two principals should
be encouraged to work together as did Dr John Garang and President
Bashir and later on President Salva and President Bashir to implement
the CPA. If international community can use its diplomatic leverage to
convince either of the principals or both principals to give way
voluntarily with necessary exit packages and guarantees that may
provide a new leadership to champion the political reforms in South
Sudan.
Besides, the option of who to supervise these reforms, The United
States Government is an honorable friend of South Sudan and your help
is needed now more than ever. The challenge is to continue the
political, economic and security reforms that began in earnest with the
CPA, but were diverted upon independence by a convergence of factors.
The U.S. can mobilize the region and the international community to
support this continuing process of reform and to make peace agreement
attractive by providing peace dividends. USAID's work across all
sectors and areas of South Sudan, including in agriculture, needs to be
deepened, and that is why Secretary Kerry's pledge of an additional
funding for those purposes is most important. Financial and technical
assistance can be conditioned on these reforms, and sanctions should
only be targeted at those who are against the peace.
conclusions
In conclusion, I reiterate that the best option for the government
and people of the United States of America is to support the full
implementation of peace agreement and to make the cost of non-
implementation very high by targeting anti-peace elements with specific
sanctions that will limit their influence in public affairs. Also, the
U.S. can still help diplomatically, financially and technically, to:
implement the Agreement, with necessary political reforms,
support core functions of the Transitional Government of Unity,
with targeted assistance in areas of finance and management,
plan for long-term development and better donor coordination,
particularly in areas of infrastructure and agriculture,
and, most importantly, implement security sector and economic
reforms.
Thank you for allowing me to share with you my optimism and
concerns about the prospects of peace and security in South Sudan. I
strong believe that the people of South Sudan will one day rise up to
their expectations and God-given potentials and to put their country on
the path of peace and prosperity with the usual support of their
friends; the people of the United States of American and their
government.
The Chairman. Thank you, sir.
Mr. Yeo?
STATEMENT OF PETER YEO, PRESIDENT, BETTER WORLD CAMPAIGN, AND
VICE PRESIDENT, PUBLIC POLICY AND ADVOCACY, UNITED NATIONS
FOUNDATION, WASHINGTON, D.C.
Mr. Yeo. Thank you, Chairman Corker and Ranking Member
Cardin and members of the committee. Thank you for the
opportunity to testify before you today regarding South Sudan.
I will focus today on the role that the U.N. Mission in
South Sudan plays in protecting civilians at a level
unprecedented in human history, and my belief that the U.N.
mission should have taken more action to protect civilians
during the fighting last July.
Last November, I traveled to South Sudan with a
congressional delegation to meet with U.N. peacekeepers,
including visits to the largest U.N. civilian protection sites
in Bentiu and Juba.
The U.N. Mission in South Sudan, which began in 2011,
remains the thin blue line protecting many South Sudanese
civilians from government troops and a myriad of other heavily
armed militias intent on harming them. As Congressmen Capuano
and Higgins noted in their op-ed shortly after the delegation's
return, there are almost 200,000 civilians in the six U.N.
peacekeeping bases, and many of them would not be alive today
if not for the U.N.'s presence.
The U.N. did not anticipate protecting 200,000 civilians
when the mission was created 5 years ago. But when conflict
erupted in December 2013 and civilians rushed into U.N. sites
to avoid attack by troops and militias, the U.N. moved to
protect them at a scale unprecedented in U.N. history and
informed by the tragedies in Rwanda and Srebrenica.
When I visited in November, I met a young woman who had
just arrived at the Bentiu camp gate looking for protection
only the U.N. could provide. She had left her burned-out
village with her two children, twin baby girls, after her
husband was killed and she had survived a gang rape by
government forces. Unfortunately, only one of her daughters
lived through the arduous 80-mile journey.
For the past 3 years, the U.N. mission has been severely
limited in its ability to carry out its mandate. The South
Sudanese Government has repeatedly violated its status of
forces agreement, which guarantees free movement to U.N.
peacekeepers.
With the violent attacks on U.N. Protection of Civilians
sites by government soldiers in Malakal in February, Bentiu in
April, and Juba in July, the government has now moved from
being a partner to a predator.
At times, the U.N. Mission in South Sudan has failed to
protect civilians, and it is imperative that it learns from its
mistakes.
In February, at the Malakal U.N. base where over 40,000
South Sudanese still reside, at least 30 camp residents were
killed before U.N. peacekeepers adequately responded. The
recent attacks in July by government soldiers on international
aid workers and South Sudanese civilians were also
unconscionable. Those responsible for those horrendous crimes
must be punished.
U.N. peacekeepers should have done more to protect the
civilians in Juba both at the Hotel Terrain and for the women
leaving the camp in search of food. They did not.
The U.N. is conducting an independent inquiry, headed by
Major General Patrick Cammaert from the Netherlands as we
speak, which will result in a report with recommendations.
It is worth noting several factors which contributed to the
U.N. mission's inability to protect in these circumstances.
While the dirt road between U.N. House and Hotel Terrain is
only a kilometer--I drove it in November--it was ground central
for the fighting between government soldiers and opposition.
Hundreds of soldiers lined the road along with government
tanks, and government attack helicopters hovering above U.N.
House firing into the nearby opposition base. U.N. peacekeepers
were working to protect the 35,000 South Sudanese civilians
inside the two Protection of Civilians sites located at U.N.
House, which had been hit by more than 200 rounds during the
fighting.
Furthermore, the Chinese battalion's quick reaction force
was responding to soldiers who were severely injured by
government attacks the previous day, two of whom later died.
Given the U.N.'s extremely limited medevac capabilities,
the government's belligerence toward the mission, and the
worsening security situation, some U.N. peacekeepers believe
that they would have been left to bleed to death if they had to
fight their way to the Hotel Terrain.
As the U.N. conducts its inquiry, the U.N. mission, troop-
contributing countries, and the Security Council must consider
some important questions to resolve key issues: Is the mission
willing and able to engage in active combat against the
government, the U.N.'s host in South Sudan, to protect
civilians? What are the implications of large-scale active
combat between the U.N. and the SPLA to the long-term future of
the mission and its ability to protect civilians? Can the
Security Council finally move toward an arms embargo?
The possible deployment of 4,000 new U.N. peacekeepers
could be a positive development in an otherwise bleak
landscape. If the government continues to place severe
restrictions on the mission, then the new troops may not have
an impact on security in Juba.
Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Cardin, members of the
committee, these are, indeed, dark days for innocent civilians
in South Sudan. Those who have already been attacked and the
hundreds of thousands still in need of protection. The U.N.
mission, troop-contributing countries, and the Security Council
must thoroughly review the mission, its mandates, military
capacities, command-and-control structure, and rules of
engagement to ensure that it can best protect civilians.
All global players must continue to press the Government of
South Sudan, in fact, all warring parties, to stop the killing
of civilians and return to partnership with the United Nations.
Thank you.
[Mr. Yeo's prepared statement follows:]
Prepared Statement of Mr. Peter Yeo
Chairman Corker, Ranking Member Cardin, thank you for the
opportunity to testify before the committee today regarding South
Sudan. I serve as President of the Better World Campaign and Vice
President for Public Policy and Advocacy at the United Nations
Foundation.
My statement today will focus on the role that the U.N. Mission in
South Sudan (or UNMISS) plays in protecting civilians--at a level
unprecedented in U.N. history--and my belief that the U.N. Mission
should have taken more action to protect civilians during the fighting
last July.
Last November, I traveled to South Sudan with a congressional
delegation to meet with U.N. peacekeepers, including visits to the
large U.N. civilian protection sites in Bentiu and Juba.
The U.N. Mission in South Sudan, which began in 2011, operates
throughout the country, tasked with a range of vital responsibilities.
Mission personnel report on human rights violations and child
recruitment into the military, educate civilians about gender-based
violence and ending child marriage, and provide security for the
delivery of vital humanitarian assistance. On the humanitarian front
specifically, in a country where six million people need assistance,
which is half the population, the U.N. and NGO partners have reached
three million this year and aim to reach another two million by year's
end.
Most notably, UNMISS remains the thin blue line protecting many
South Sudanese civilians from government troops and a myriad of other
heavily armed militias intent on harming them. As Congressmen Michael
Capuano (D-MA) and Brian Higgins (D-NY) noted in an op-ed published
shortly after their trip to the country last year, ``There are almost
200,000 civilians in the six U.N. peacekeeping bases and many of them
would not be alive today if not for the U.N.'s presence.''
The U.N. did not anticipate protecting 200,000 civilians when the
mission was created five years ago. But when conflict erupted in
December 2013, and civilians rushed into U.N. sites to avoid attack by
troops and militias, the U.N. moved to protect them at a scale
unprecedented in U.N. history and informed by the tragedies in Rwanda
and Srebrenica.
While in South Sudan, I met a young woman who had just arrived at
the Bentiu camp gate looking for protection only the U.N. could
provide. She had left her burned-out village with her two children--
twin baby girls--after her husband was killed and she had survived a
gang rape by government forces. Unfortunately, only one of her
daughters lived through the 80-mile journey.
For the past three years, the U.N. Mission has been severely
limited in its ability to carry out its mandate. The South Sudanese
government, as I will detail later, has repeatedly violated the Status
of Forces Agreement, which guarantees free movement to U.N.
peacekeepers. With the violent attacks on U.N. Protection of Civilian
sites by government soldiers in Malakal in February, Bentiu in April,
and Juba in July, the government has now moved from partner to
predator.
At times, the U.N. Mission in South Sudan has failed to protect
civilians, and it is imperative that it learns from its mistakes. In
February, during an attack at the Malakal U.N. base, where over 40,000
South Sudanese reside, at least 30 camp residents were killed before
U.N. peacekeepers finally responded. An internal U.N. review of the
incident found that peacekeeping forces failed to respond to the
violence through a ``combination of inaction, abandonment of post, and
refusal to engage.'' The U.N. Mission has accepted responsibility for
its failure in Malakal after this investigation, and steps are being
taken to resolve command and control issues, a major element in the
mission's inability to protect.
The recent attacks in July by government soldiers on international
aid workers and South Sudanese civilians were also unconscionable.
Those responsible for these horrendous crimes must be punished. U.N.
peacekeepers should have done more to protect civilians in Juba--both
at the Hotel Terrain and for the women leaving the U.N. bases in search
of food. In light of these circumstances, the U.N. rightly announced
that it would launch an independent investigation--headed by Major
General Patrick Cammaert from the Netherlands--to assess the mission's
actions and offer recommendations.
Nevertheless, it is also important to contextualize the actions of
the peacekeepers in terms of the challenges and obstacles they faced.
First and foremost, it must be noted that there was heavy fighting in
the immediate vicinity of the main U.N. base in Juba between July 8 th
and July 11th, due to the presence of a large SPLA-IO cantonment site
and an SPLA base in the area. SPLA armored personnel carriers, tanks,
and several hundred troops were positioned on the road outside of the
U.N.'s gates, making it difficult for peacekeeping troops to leave.
Moreover, during the fighting the U.N. base and POC site were struck by
more than 200 rounds of ammunition, including tank shells, mortars, and
RPGs.
This government fire led to casualties among South Sudanese
civilians and U.N. personnel alike. On July 10th, an RPG struck an
armored vehicle inside the POC site, seriously injuring six Chinese
peacekeepers. Since the clinic at the main U.N. base did not have a
surgical team present or the capability to perform blood transfusions,
the wounded needed to be evacuated to a Level II trauma center located
10 miles away at another U.N. base in Juba's Thongping neighborhood.
Unfortunately, for nearly 22 hours after the incident, the South
Sudanese government refused to provide the mission with the necessary
assurances that its troops would not be fired upon if they tried to
evacuate their fellow soldiers. As a result of these delays, two of the
wounded peacekeepers died from their injuries. As reported by Matt
Wells of the Centers for Civilians in Conflict, the mission's inability
to ensure medevac for wounded personnel due to obstruction by South
Sudanese officials contributed to a lack of willingness among
peacekeeping troops to leave the base or engage forcefully.
Specifically, in the case of the Terrain Hotel, some U.N. peacekeepers
understandably believed that they would be left to bleed to death if
they had to fight their way to it.
To be sure, the fighting outside the camp and concerns over medical
care and evacuation are not solely responsible for peacekeepers'
inability or unwillingness to protect civilians. There were serious
inadequacies with UNMISS's response in July irrespective of the medevac
problem. Nevertheless, it is an important element of the situation to
understand.
Overall, while there are changes the mission must adopt to reduce
the chance of this happening again, there are also larger issues at
play here as well as a broader set of changes that must be adopted,
involving not only the mission but also troop contributing countries,
the United States, the South Sudanese government, and the U.N. Security
Council.
accountability for civilian protection failures
With regards to the February attack in Malakal, the U.N. Secretary-
General established a board of inquiry to examine the circumstances
surrounding the incident. Their final report, released in early August,
found serious deficiencies in the peacekeepers' response to the
massacre, and made a number of recommendations for corrective action.
These include, among other things, the need for better command and
control and accountability for underperformance, including the possible
repatriation of peacekeeping commanders and/or entire military units
found to have demonstrated a lack of will to implement their mandate.
At this stage, the U.N. should act swiftly to fully implement this
recommendation. Repatriation of peacekeeping military contingent
commanders and units has been an important element of the Secretary-
General and Security Council's effort to address sexual exploitation
and abuse within peacekeeping; it should also be a pillar of any policy
regarding individuals or units that do not honor their mandate to
protect civilians. Moving forward, poorly performing individuals or
units should be withdrawn if the situation warrants. The Security
Council must ensure that the U.N. Secretariat follows through, as
accountability will help restore civilians' trust in UNMISS.
troop contributing country participation
The level of willingness on the part of peacekeeping commanders and
individual personnel to actually risk their lives in implementing a
mission's civilian protection mandate is a crucial component of
peacekeeper performance. According to George Washington University
professor Paul Williams, an expert on African peacekeeping operations,
civilian protection ``is a very hard ask of troop and police
contributing countries, many of whom will not want to die for the U.N.
in South Sudan.'' This gets to the heart of what happened in Malakal
and Juba, where as noted, U.N. peacekeeping troops stand accused of
failing to implement their Security Council mandate, namely, protecting
civilians who are under imminent threat of violence.
While there are tens of thousands of troops who serve bravely and
admirably under extremely difficult circumstances, many Troop
Contributing Countries (TCCs)--no matter where they're from--are risk-
averse when it comes to the safety of their own personnel, regardless
of the directives handed down by mission leadership, the Department of
Peacekeeping Operations, or the Security Council. For example, during
the July outbreak of fighting in Juba, the United Kingdom, Germany, and
Sweden evacuated a dozen nationals serving as part of UNMISS without
even consulting the U.N.--a move that, according to a U.N. memo,
affected the peacekeeping mission's operations and dealt a ``serious
blow to the morale'' of the force. This is to say nothing of the U.S.,
which--in the wake of the Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia in 1993--
withdrew almost entirely from providing uniformed personnel to U.N.
peacekeeping missions. The fact is, no amount of training, force
enablers, or field experience can be effective in the absence of
willingness on the part of peacekeeping troops themselves and officials
in their home countries to fully carry out the responsibilities laid
out in any given mission's mandate.
That being said, one underlying issue that the attack in July
exposed is the medical and casualty evacuation limitations faced by the
missions, which has contributed to TCC unwillingness to venture beyond
their bases or conduct more dangerous patrols. In the case of the
fighting in July, while there were air assets and road convoys
available, the South Sudanese government refused to provide the mission
with necessary assurances that its troops would not be fired upon if
they tried to evacuate wounded personnel.
But there is also a larger issue of UNMISS and other U.N.
peacekeeping missions having limited air assets for medevac and
casevac. As has been documented, U.N. missions have lacked vital air
assets like helicopters.
Last year in advance of the Leaders' Summit on Peacekeeping--
convened by President Obama and held at the United Nations--I wrote an
op-ed which noted that the inability to ensure that wounded personnel
can be quickly evacuated is understandably leading some peacekeepers to
be risk-averse in their projection of force, inhibiting longer-range
patrols and undermining civilian protection. It also leads to troop
contributing countries being reluctant to put their personnel in harm's
way. It has been made clear to me in trips to U.N. missions that
peacekeepers place fundamental importance on every effort being made to
get them immediate medical care, and that the inability to do so is
highly detrimental to soldiers' morale.
Medical and casualty evacuation is an area where the United States
could assist missions, by either deploying U.S. specialist military
contingents to U.N. peacekeeping operations in support roles with air
and medical assets, or via existing National Guard Partnership
Programs. It would be inconceivable for U.S. troops to conduct patrols
without medical or casualty evacuation capability and it should not be
the case for U.N. soldiers either. Enhanced medevac and casevac
capabilities would send peacekeepers a message of support and increase
the likelihood that Troop Contributing Countries would back robust
engagement by their personnel.
obstruction by the south sudanese government
Since the outbreak of civil war three years ago, the Government of
South Sudan has gone to extraordinary lengths to restrict UNMISS's
freedom of movement. As Samantha Power noted during a visit to South
Sudan by Security Council Ambassadors in early September, ``The number
one obstacle for the peacekeepers fulfilling their mandate has been the
severe restrictions on their movements.'' To be clear, the Status of
Forces Agreement (SOFA) signed by UNMISS and the South Sudanese
government gives peacekeepers the right to move and patrol throughout
the country unhindered. In practice, however, the government routinely
violates these understandings, putting up roadblocks to impede U.N.
patrols, requiring the mission to obtain permission to fly its own
helicopters or risk these aircraft coming under fire, and harassing,
intimidating, or even physically assaulting UNMISS civilian staff. In
addition to movement restrictions, the South Sudanese government has
repeatedly rejected requests from UNMISS to bring in certain types of
technology that could improve the ability of peacekeepers to project
force, including surveillance drones, communications equipment, and
some weapons. These obstructions have seriously hampered the mission's
day-to-day operations and placed the safety of U.N. personnel at
unnecessary risk.
On August 12th, in response to the July violence, the Security
Council voted to deploy a 4,000-soldier Regional Protection Force (RPF)
to help stabilize Juba. The Force, which will be under the command of
UNMISS, is tasked with protecting major lines of communication and
transport into and out of the capital, securing the airport and other
key facilities, and taking robust action to ``promptly and effectively
engage an actor that is credibly found to be preparing attacks, or
engages in attacks, against United Nations protection of civilians
sites, other United Nations premises, United Nations personnel,
international and national humanitarian actors, or civilians.''
While more troops are certainly needed to help secure the capital,
it is doubtful they will have much of an impact absent a fundamental
change in posture by the government towards the mission more generally.
Since the adoption in August of Security Council Resolution 2304
authorizing the RPF, South Sudanese authorities have made a series of
contradictory statements, at first rejecting the force as a colonial
intrusion, then agreeing to its deployment during the Security Council
visit earlier this month.
Since then, however, South Sudan has placed a number of problematic
conditions on its acceptance of the RPF, stating that the government
should be able to determine the number of troops deployed, the
countries allowed to contribute to the force, and the types of weapons
they are able to bring. These statements raise serious questions about
whether, once on the ground, the RPF will be subject to the same
obstruction tactics as the rest of UNMISS.
As a result, the international community must urgently prioritize
efforts to combat this long-running pattern of intransigence on the
part of the Government of South Sudan. As a first order of business,
the Security Council must be more willing than it has been in the past
to forcefully and publicly condemn the Government for violations of the
SOFA--their collective silence only emboldens the government to
continue its obstruction. The Council should make clear that attacks on
U.N. peacekeepers and humanitarian personnel--70 have been killed to
date--constitute war crimes, and it should name and shame those who
carry out these illegal acts. In addition, UNMISS leadership itself
needs to do a better job of regularly reporting when peacekeeping troop
movements are blocked or soldiers are targeted. Such transparency
measures are critical to assuring peacekeepers that they enjoy the full
backing of the international community as they seek to implement their
mandate.
In addition, the Security Council, U.N. Mission and Troop
Contributing Countries must be prepared for the challenging
implications stemming from a more forceful policy towards the South
Sudanese government i.e. Is the mission willing and able to engage in
active combat with the government--the U.N.'s host in South Sudan--to
protect civilians? What are the implications of large-scale, active
combat between the U.N. and the SPLA to the long-term future of the
mission? Will the Security Council finally move forward with an arms
embargo?
arms embargo and targeted sanctions
Since its independence in 2011, the U.S. and its international
partners have prioritized productive relationships with the country's
leadership but that has failed to deliver the anticipated dividends.
Consequently, it is critical that the Security Council take action
against the South Sudanese government to incentivize cooperation with
the international community. First and foremost, the Council should
heed repeated calls made over the last several years by U.N. Secretary-
General Ban Ki-moon, other senior U.N. officials, and numerous civil
society organizations, and establish a long overdue arms embargo on
South Sudan. This type of measure could help shore up the peacekeeping
force, which, as it stands, is severely outgunned by the parties to the
conflict, particularly the South Sudanese government. Indeed, a recent
article published by IRIN quoted an unnamed U.N. official as stating
that, ``The firepower in the hands of the SPLA thanks to the absence of
an arms embargo is overwhelming in terms of its superiority to what the
mission has.'' The article went on to note that, ``According to recent
analysis carried out by the Small Arms Survey, an embargo would in
particular impact the fearsome Mi-24 attack helicopters the government
has in its inventory, as the foreign contractors that keep them flying
would be outlawed.'' Earlier this month, a report put out by a U.N.
Panel of Experts bolstered this argument, concluding that, ``the
continued influx of weapons.contributes to spreading instability and
the continuation of the conflict.'' In addition to an arms embargo, the
Security Council should consider expanding the list of individuals
subject to targeted sanctions--namely asset freezes and travel bans--to
include Salva Kiir, Riek Machar, and other high-ranking South Sudanese
officials responsible for the violence.
While it is highly unlikely that imposition of an arms embargo or
targeted sanctions alone would be sufficient to end the conflict, they
could help reduce the flow of critical resources that have allowed both
parties to act with virtual impunity. At the very least, they would
send a strong signal that the international community has lost patience
with Kiir and Machar, and expects them to return in earnest to the
negotiating table and cooperate fully with the peacekeeping mission.
conclusion
Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Cardin, these are indeed dark days for
innocent civilians in South Sudan--those who have already been attacked
and the hundreds of thousands still in need of protection. The U.N.
Mission, the United States, Troop Contributing Countries, and the
Security Council must thoroughly review the mission--its mandate,
military capacities, command and control structure, and rules of
engagement--to ensure that it can best protect civilians. All global
players must continue to pressure the Government of South Sudan--in
fact all warring parties--to stop the killings of civilians, and return
to a partnership with the U.N.
The Chairman. Thank you.
And thank all of you for that great testimony.
I want to commend the ranking member on an excellent op-ed
that was just published on this very topic and defer to him now
on questions.
Senator Cardin. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I thank all four of you for your insight. You certainly
raised a lot of questions as to how we can be effective.
One thing is clear to me. We will not abandon the people of
South Sudan. They are in critical need, and they need the
international community.
But it does raise whether our aid program, whether the U.N.
peacekeepers, are effective or not. I am all for peacekeepers.
I am all for humanitarian assistance and good governance
assistance. But if it is not carrying out its purpose, then we
have to look for other means to accomplish those ends.
Imposing sanctions may very well be needed, including arms
embargoes and governance issues. So we will look at all these
issues.
Quite frankly, I agree with you. The circumstances are
challenging. I am not sure that they are that complex. You have
corrupt leaders in a corrupt country where they are more
concerned about themselves than their people. You have leaders
who are committing war crimes.
When you use your civilian as military tactics, that is a
war crime. When you allow your military to gang rape civilian
populations, that is a war crime.
I appreciate, ``We should threaten to hold them
accountable.'' No, we shouldn't. We should hold them
accountable. Too many times, we said we are going to hold
perpetrators accountable, and we have not held them
accountable.
So the current leadership needs to be held accountable,
because it is impossible for me to believe this type of conduct
is taking place without the President or Vice President fully
complicitous in these operations.
So culpability needs to be accounted for, and we need to
move forward.
Now, several of you mentioned looking for a new governance
structure and imposing an arms embargo. I would like to perhaps
drill down a little bit on an arms embargo and what impact it
would have as a practical matter. But I also want to get into
the governance issues, imposing some type of a trusteeship to
the country.
The historic examples normally follow international forces
or a country--East Timor, if I am correct. I think Australia
went in originally and then the U.N. came in later. Certainly,
in Kosovo, NATO was actively engaged before the governance
structure.
We don't have that capacity in South Sudan, so I am not
exactly sure how you get to that point where you could have an
effectively controlled U.N. trusteeship of sorts imposed.
So I would just ask, briefly, if you could respond to
whether a U.N.-imposed arms embargo could effectively change
the equation here, whether it is realistic to expect that we
could impose a governance structure, considering the current
status on the ground, and whether there are any other
significant changes in strategy that we should be considering
in order to protect the people of South Sudan.
You can just start. I can't pronounce your names as well as
the chairman.
Dr. Jok. Thank you very much. My position on the arms
embargo or any kind of sanction is that having listened and
read the pulse of South Sudanese politics for many years, I
feel that it would be very, very divisive and not just divisive
between the political leaders, those in government who are
opposing and those opposition are for it, but also among the
population, in the sense that those who are supporting it would
be seen as the ones who are selling the country to the
international community. There is a lot of anti-intervention
rhetoric rising in South Sudan, all across South Sudan.
So I think it would inflame those differences much further.
Especially if it is something that the government is opposed
to, the government can always rally people behind it and say
those people over there are selling our country.
Ms. Knopf. Thank you very much for the question.
I do think an arms embargo is necessary, can be effective.
It is long, long, long, long overdue, the fact that either
side, any side--there are more than two at this point in the
conflict--can continue to procure weapons. We know, in fact,
that the government most particularly is procuring heavy
weapons, including jets, since the formation of the
Transitional Government of National Unity and that they are
using these heavy weapons against their civilian population.
So the fact that we would even discuss any more
peacekeepers in that scenario where we are not also stopping
them from procuring weapons seems completely disconnected.
A second point on the effectiveness of an arms embargo,
there are not that many points of entry in South Sudan where
you can bring in truly heavy equipment and munitions. Yes,
small arms and light weapons can move across the border. It is
very porous. That we won't have a good chance at monitoring and
probably stopping very much of. But this other kind of
procurement that is going on, there aren't that many airstrips
that can handle that level of equipment. The roads don't exist
outside the one that the United States helped to build, for the
most part, from Uganda into Juba.
So it is not as complicated as it might seem in other
places, and it has been done effectively in Cote d'Ivoire and
other circumstances.
Thirdly, in an arms embargo, it is necessary as a signal to
all the parties and to the people of South Sudan that the
international community, the United States, we find this
conflict utterly beyond the pale morally. There is no right
side here, and no one should be continuing to arm themselves to
pursue violence as a means toward their political ends.
And so I do think it is an important part of the overall
calculus that gets us to a place where we could then discuss an
alternate form of governance for South Sudan. A trusteeship, an
international transitional administration, can't be imposed on
South Sudan. That is not what I am suggesting. I do think that
is beyond any realm of possibility, or usefulness, frankly.
But I do think that the people of South Sudan, they want to
be fed. They want to be able to feed themselves, more
importantly. They want to go about their lives the way they do,
whether that is fishing, herding, going to a business in the
city, whatever that is. They don't have the daily safety and
security to do that. They don't have any services from their
government to support and enable their livelihoods.
And an international administration would, in fact, make it
easier for the international assistance that already does
provide most of that assistance that exists.
Senator Cardin. I know my time is up. I would just make the
observation that I agree with your assessment, but if the
leaders are not going to agree to it, it is hard to mobilize
the people in the current political security situation in the
country to be able to get the people effectively to encourage
international action for a trusteeship. So I just think it is
going to be very challenging to bring that about.
Ms. Knopf. Senator Cardin, it is going to take more than
sanctioning six individuals. That is what we have done so far.
Senator Cardin. I agree with that.
Thank you.
The Chairman. Senator Shaheen?
Senator Shaheen. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I want to make sure I understood what each of you were
saying.
As I understood Dr. Kuol--am I pronouncing your name
correctly?
Dr. Kuol. Yes.
Senator Shaheen. You argued that the peace agreement was
still viable. As I understood everybody else on the panel, you
all disagree with that. Is that correct?
Mr. Yeo. Yes, I believe that is correct.
Senator Shaheen. And I understood the rest of you
correctly?
Dr. Jok. I am saying that there is room for South Sudanese
leaders to be pushed to come up with a program that would steer
their country out of this crisis.
Senator Shaheen. Under the current agreement?
Dr. Jok. Under the current agreement, yes.
Senator Shaheen. I didn't understand you to say that.
The Chairman. If I could, how would you push them? It just
sounds----
Dr. Jok. Okay. So already the country is now broke, right?
And they are relying on foreign aid to feed their people.
Continuation of this support can be predicated on them coming
up with a program, which is a national, homegrown program that
will help the country get out of this. Then what they will do
is ask for support, which will be based on producing the
credible prioritized program that says by year one, we will
have achieved this, by year two, we will have achieved this, so
that what they are doing is actually their own plan.
What the international community is doing as supporting
that plan, after the international community has verified it
and investigated it and found it credible and implementable.
The Chairman. Thank you for letting me intervene there.
Senator Shaheen. Thank you. It is still not clear how we
achieve that.
Maybe it is through what you suggested, Ms. Knopf, which is
the transitional administration. You suggested that in order
for that to be successful, it would have to be supported by the
U.N. and African Union. Is there support at the U.N. and the AU
to do that?
Ms. Knopf. It is currently not under discussion at the U.N.
and the AU. It is a proposal that has been made publicly now by
Ambassador Lyman, the former special envoy, and myself in an
op-ed in July after the outbreak of this fighting.
There are private discussions taking place about it, and I
do think there is support that can be found within the region
and that it is not outside the realm of possibility for both
regional, and certainly it is not outside of precedent for the
U.N. Security Council to do this, to help a country out of
conflict.
Senator Shaheen. Mr. Yeo, you are agreeing with that?
Mr. Yeo. I agree. At the moment, the discussion at the
Security Council is around stabilizing the situation in South
Sudan through the deployment of this regional protection force,
which has some upsides and some significant downsides if it
still has to operate under the same conditions that are facing
U.N. peacekeepers in South Sudan.
But I do think that if the regional protection force is not
agreed to by the Government of South Sudan and there are not
any other type of meaningful steps moving forward in terms of
the peace process, then the Security Council will indeed have
to consider whether there should be discussion around moving
toward the next step, which is toward more of a protectorate.
Senator Shaheen. I understood you to say that the special
envoy, as well as yourself, is arguing for that. Is there
anyone at the Security Council at the U.N. who is arguing for
that? Is that the position of the United States and our policy
to try to make that happen?
Ms. Knopf. Just to be clear, the former special envoy, not
a sitting official. And it is not the policy of the United
States to push for this at this time.
Senator Shaheen. What is the policy of the United States at
this time?
Mr. Yeo. As I said, at the moment, the administration
continues to focus on trying to move forward with this
stabilization effort through the regional protection force and
then ultimately trying to move all of the political parties
back toward a negotiated solution. But I would think that it is
important to ask the State Department and the U.N. mission
directly as to what they realistically see are next steps.
The Security Council will next consider this in mid-
October. At the moment, the Secretary General of the U.N., Ban
Ki-moon, is awaiting a report from the former President of
Botswana, who has been tasked to put together a report on how
to deploy this regional protection force.
As you know, the Security Council went to South Sudan. They
got an agreement from the government to deploy 4,000 new
troops. And since then, there have been extensive discussions
about where the troops are going to come from and how they are
going to be armed and what their mission will be.
So there is a report due to the Secretary General, and the
Security Council will consider this again in mid-October.
Senator Shaheen. And is it fair to say that approach is not
working?
Mr. Yeo. From my perspective, I do not believe the approach
is working.
Senator Shaheen. Does anybody think it is, on the panel?
Dr. Jok. We haven't seen much progress since, because, as
the timeline that he has described, there is no report that
says, yes, this has been achieved. What was supposed to happen
after the visit of the Security Council ambassadors was for a
negotiation of the modalities of implementation of deployment,
but that has not happened yet.
Dr. Kuol. Maybe just let me, I just want to make a
counterfactual statement. Your point is very valid.
I think most important is what can we do rather than what
we intend to do. This I believe--how shaky is this peace
agreement? It is something that we should invest in. It is
something we can do.
That is why I focus on this element, anti-peace. If the
U.S. Government, through its influence, to have sanctions on
these few elements, I think we are likely to see the
difference.
Senator Shaheen. But there's disagreement among your panel
members as to whether that is in fact what might happen. As I
understand the other members of the panel, they don't agree
with that.
Dr. Kuol. But equal important, given the option of having
what other options--I just want to give you an example of the
U.N. Security Council.
I was working on Abyei, and I pursued it from The Hague to
wherever until I reached New York. No consensus. Even among the
people of Abyei, they conducted their own referendum. Look at
what happened to Crimea. Russia refusing even to accept the
referendum of the people of Abyei while they accepted the one
of Crimea.
It is a very clear difference--that may not move. That is
why I believe the U.S. Government has a chance of doing through
its own what they can be able to do.
One of them is the issue of sanctions on these individuals.
As of now, people are not even hearing what you can be able to
do because if you talk about something very big, the region
must have consensus we cannot have.
The Sudan Government has its own interests to finish the
Government of South Sudan. You cannot have a consensus in the
region. If you go to the Security Council, you may not get it.
Even the sanctions, an arms embargo is so difficult to
build a consensus, even some people committing, violating, the
agreement, not even an action to impose sanctions. That
consensus is not there.
Senator Shaheen. I know my time is up, Mr. Chairman, but
can I just ask, what happens if the international community
leaves entirely?
Mr. Yeo. Well, I can address the specific issue of the U.N.
mission. As I said, there are 200,000 civilians currently being
protected by U.N. peacekeepers in South Sudan. If the mission
there were to leave, then those 200,000 would be very much at
risk in terms of their personal security, either from the
government or from other militias that are heavily armed
throughout the country. And certainly, if the U.N. mission were
to wind down, we would need a plan to make sure that those
200,000 civilians have a place to go, so that they would not be
killed as the peacekeepers left the country.
Senator Shaheen. Does everybody agree with that, basically?
Ms. Knopf. Certainly that there are some individuals
receiving protection from the international presence at the
moment. But I think to Jok's point in his statement, there is a
very serious question as to, are we, in the long-term,
prolonging the situation by Band-Aid approaches, right?
So while some people's lives are being saved, and we don't
want to minimize that, we really, on every metric, the
situation in South Sudan has deteriorated. And it continues to
deteriorate.
Since the signing of the peace agreement, since 9 months
later the formation of the transitional government, since
several months after that, the First Vice President was
replaced by the other First Vice President, nothing improves
the situation. It continues to get worse.
And so we have a choice to stay where we are on the path
that is not seemingly effective, move toward a path that I am
suggesting, or the alternative is that we pull back and we let
the conflict take its course at pretty significant cost to the
people of South Sudan, but maybe in the longer run then will be
forced to come back around to some other solution that helps
restore South Sudan to viability. Or it will be Eastern Congo
or Somalia for a long, long time.
Senator Shaheen. Thank you.
The Chairman. Senator Murphy.
Senator Murphy. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you all for some really great testimony. I think you
can hear us trying to divine the differences between the four
of your recommendations. To a certain extent, it seems to come
down to what mix of carrots and sticks we are trying to use to
change behavior.
Dr. Jok, I think you heard some pushback from the chairman
on this notion that things will change if we just apply
conditionality to aid. A lot of people would suggest that that
is essentially the policy that we have tried so far, that we
have put in almost $2 billion worth of aid, we have attached
conditions on it. We never give that away for free. And yet we
are still in a state of spiraling crisis.
So if you could just maybe specifically respond to some of
the things that Ms. Knopf was saying, in that she is
recommending this is the moment in which you have to use more
sticks, or at least a lot of sticks, in addition to carrots
here.
You suggested that maybe the arms embargo is not the right
move. But what are the roles for a message of consequence
versus a message of conditionality attached to aid? And speak
to our reluctance to support that path forward, given that it
hasn't worked so well in the past.
Dr. Jok. Thank you, sir.
I think the idea that the international community pulling
away from South Sudan as a way to force them to think for
themselves, there are avenues to it. One is that the government
is engaged in discussion with the IMF right now, because
without any international financial assistance, that government
is not going to have the capacity to deliver anything. There is
no money in the country whatsoever.
So in that discussion, where the government might get some
financial assistance, a loan or what have you, it should
definitely be put through to the government that you can only
get it if you do X, Y, and Z.
Senator Murphy. But haven't we done that?
Dr. Jok. Not really. You might have done it in terms of
direct assistance to the government, into the bureaucracy of
the government. But the flow of money into humanitarian aid is
still benefiting the government, the country as a whole.
And so one way you might push that conditionality without
compromising the lives of South Sudanese is actually to inject
that aid directly into projects run by South Sudanese, probably
South Sudanese Americans, the programs that many South Sudanese
Americans have created, schools and hospitals and many kinds of
local projects. And if money was injected directly into those
programs, and these are the programs that you see in the
countryside all over South Sudan. These are programs that are
showing results, and money doesn't get wasted through the
government bureaucracy, doesn't get stolen because it goes
directly into the projects. So that might be a balance.
Senator Murphy. The threat of withdrawing humanitarian aid
is only so good as the concern that leaders show for the people
who are receiving the benefit of that aid. There is not a lot
of evidence to suggest that the leaders today are persuaded to
change their behavior in order to effectuate better living
conditions for the people of South Sudan.
Ms. Knopf, can I just ask you to talk about what happens on
the other side of the transitional government that you are
recommending?
You have thrown some cold water in your testimony on the
possibility of power-sharing, and maybe power-sharing doesn't
work today, but won't there have to be some power-sharing
agreement on the other side of a transitional international
government? How do you get around the inevitability of
different elements being part of a government coming on the
backside of what you are recommending?
Ms. Knopf. Sure. I think the point for me, the critical
thing about international transitional administration, is that
we would be borrowing both capacity and borrowing legitimacy in
terms of delivering services, administering basic public
governance for the people of South Sudan, which is at a very,
very low level right now. Again, most South Sudanese are just
trying to survive.
So we are trying to stabilize that situation, create some
space for the economy to come back for daily safety and
security to exist for the people of South Sudan, and then
critically for several important processes to take place, a
constitutional process where the people of South Sudan can
participate in a dialogue and a conversation on what they want
from their government. That has never happened. It has never
happened. And so what the state should look like on the other
end of a transitional administration should come from the
people of South Sudan, and what they want from the central
government, what they want from state and more local level
government.
And by taking the competition over the prize of the
presidency, and the very few resources that one gets by winning
that prize at the moment, take that off the table for a long
breathing space, 10 to 15 years, and reconciliation and
accountability have to happen. This conversation and a
constitutional process has to happen, while an advisory
committee of South Sudanese, of course, have to be part of the
overall advice of the country and the technical administration
of it. But the efforts and the focus need to be on these other
processes.
Senator Murphy. Ten to 15 years is what you're
recommending?
Ms. Knopf. Absolutely, yes.
Senator Murphy. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Just to pursue that a little further, first of all, I
appreciate everyone's testimony today.
But how do you get a government that is enriching itself
presently, how in the world do you get people to agree? I mean,
this is the way they want things currently. They are doing it
with armed forces and genocide and rape.
So how do you just impose some kind of transitional
government? It seems nice but undoable.
Ms. Knopf. So I don't think we can impose it without
sending much tougher messages to the leadership of South Sudan
and putting hard constraints on their behavior, which we have
not done. We haven't done that.
We have targeted sanctions on six individuals of medium
significance, shall we say. And for the rest of them, they all
continue to prey upon their country at will.
This is a government now that we need to think about, like
we thought about Khartoum with Darfur, like we think about
other countries where the government preys on its people. That
is what it does.
It is not a partner for development assistance. We should
not be supporting IMF financial bailout packages for them. We
should not be entertaining anything that we would in a normal
development relationship.
I was the first USAID mission director for Sudan and South
Sudan when we reopened the mission of the United States in
2005, 2006, after the signing of the comprehensive peace
agreement. Everything that we used to fight against Khartoum
for the people of South Sudan, this government is now doing
against its own people, and we are not sending clear signals
and messages back to them.
So of course they will resist, but we have to change their
calculus, and we have to put something that is attractive and
what the people of South Sudan, I think, ultimately want. They
want the space to resume their lives.
So it does require a pretty fundamental change in approach
to get from here to there. We can't do it from where we are
right now.
The Chairman. How would you assess the U.S. role right now
in South Sudan and whether our role there today is constructive
or destructive?
Ms. Knopf. I think that the United States is a critical
partner for South Sudan. We truly have been, as you well know.
And this Congress has supported over the years the $11 billion
of assistance, the political support to get to the
comprehensive peace agreement for self-determination for the
people of South Sudan, on and on and on. And ongoing aid levels
are still significant.
The Chairman. But in your earlier comments, you were
talking about withdrawing.
Ms. Knopf. I do think that we have crossed a lot of
redlines lately. The attacks on the Terrain compound, on aid
workers, on journalists, South Sudanese and American and others
alike, beyond the pale, completely outrageous, never mind all
the other harassment and obstruction that this government is
placing on the aid operation. I truly find it astonishing that
we tolerate that level----
The Chairman. How would us withdrawing our Ambassador from
the country affect things on the ground?
Ms. Knopf. I think Jok and others could answer, but I think
that would send a very significant message.
The Chairman. Would that be a positive message?
Ms. Knopf. I think, in my view, things are so bad and the
situation can get so much worse that we need to send every
difficult message that we can think to send at this point, but
it has to be in the context of an overall policy to back that
up.
So just withdrawing the Ambassador as a one-off piece of
policy does not necessarily improve the situation. But if we
undertake to send a clear message to President Kiir, to his
current advisers and leadership, to the leadership of the
opposition, that this situation cannot and will not be
tolerated, then that message could well be advanced by
withdrawing the Ambassador.
Mr. Yeo. And I think any type of discussion of the
withdrawal of the Ambassador has to be done in the context of
the key players, both in the Security Council and in the
region, so that there is an effective approach toward the next
step in terms of South Sudan, as opposed to withdrawing
American leadership in terms of resolving this very difficult
situation.
I would just agree that everything that we do in terms of
our own diplomatic presence has to be done in close
coordination with other key players in the region and as part
of a broader American strategy as to what is the next step in
terms of our approach toward resolving this horrendous
situation in South Sudan.
I would just note that at every possible stage in terms of
the humanitarian aid situation, the government continues to
throw up massive hurdles to the delivery of aid to its own
people. There are 1.4 million, 1.6 million people that have
been displaced from their homes in South Sudan, and their
primary lifeline is U.N. humanitarian assistance. And the
government at every stage makes it difficult through rules and
regulations and other procedures to actually deliver this aid.
So this is something that really needs to be considered as
part of a broader strategy in our next step with South Sudan.
The Chairman. Senator Cardin defined a war criminal
earlier, and it seemed that the entire panel agreed that the
leadership there now, by definition, they are war criminals.
Does the panel agree with that a hundred percent?
Dr. Kuol. Let me--I will come back to this peace agreement.
The Chairman. Let me just ask you that question first.
Is the current President of South Sudan, by definition, a
war criminal?
Dr. Kuol. That is what is provided in--because it is--there
is a commission of inquiry, African Union Commission of
Inquiry. That is the basis upon which you can have evidence,
and that is why it needs to be implemented.
And the commission came out with a very clear
recommendation about this hybrid court. This hybrid court will
use the evidence provided by the commission, as well as the
human rights reports. It is on the basis of that that now you
can talk about the issues of who is to be brought to justice.
Ms. Knopf. The African Union Commission of Inquiry, led by
former Nigerian President Obasanjo, did find that President
Salva Kiir and Riek Machar are both guilty of war crimes and
crimes against humanity. And one of the steps that that report
recommends that has not been acted upon is the establishment of
hybrid court that would then look at all the perpetrators and
decide who should be prosecuted for what.
Dr. Jok. There is no question that horrible things have
been done and that somebody has to account for them. And the
only judgment we can make can only be based on the
investigation to assign blame, because right now blame can be
assigned generally to SPLA or to opposition armies, but those
are not human persons to be held accountable. We have to pin
some of these things on individuals, and that can only be done
through these investigations.
Mr. Yeo. I would just associate myself with Kate's remarks
that this determination has already been made. When you look at
the specific issue of, for instance, what happened to the South
Sudanese soldiers that actually conducted the attacks on the
innocent civilians at the Terrain compound, but also outside
the peacekeeping camp, they have yet to be punished in a
meaningful way.
So we know that at the highest levels in the Government of
South Sudan, there is unwillingness to move forward with
meaningful justice, even when presented with overwhelming
evidence of crimes.
The Chairman. Dr. Kuol, earlier in your testimony, you were
saying we need to encourage the leadership along. It seems
inconsistent. I mean, you have people who are conducting on
both sides war crimes against the populations that show an
affinity to the other leadership in opposite directions. It is
hard for me to see how that is a path forward that makes a lot
of sense.
Let me ask it maybe in a different way. So we represent the
American people, and I know we have all these aspirational
discussions about the international community and the United
Nations, but the people that we represent are the people here
in our own country. I don't know, I would assume audiences
tuning in from across America having someone advocate that we
continue to support people who are conducting genocide and mass
rape and other kinds of things against their people,
encouraging them along, they would have some issue with that.
Again, at the same time, not to be offensive, the
imposition upon people who are not willing for some kind of
transitional government or neo-trusteeship government also
sounds somewhat far-fetched, no offense.
I just don't see a solution here that makes a great deal of
sense. But you still think we ought to encourage them along on
the peace process?
Dr. Kuol. Let me go back to the issues of the peace
agreement generally in the world. It is usually an agreement
between the elites.
The Chairman. Elites.
Dr. Kuol. Elites. Power-sharing of elites. It is a fact of
the matter. These very elites in most cases participated in
war.
Look for the comprehensive peace agreement. It was signed
by the Sudan Government, Bashir, and the SPLA, but there was no
other option except that they have to work together in order to
implement the peace agreement, the comprehensive peace
agreement.
So I see the fact that some of these leaders who actually
participated in war becoming the makers of peace, depending on
what leverage that we have on them, because at the moment the
other option is, can we do without them? That is the question.
Because if we do without them, it would be the easiest way. But
if you cannot, the peace agreement, in fact, is providing the
issues of accountability and justice.
That is why there is this hybrid court even in the peace
agreement. The problem is what we do in order to influence
these leaders.
I want to build on what Kate said also on this issue of the
leverage you can have in the region. These two leaders, if you
have all these accounts of what they had committed, it is high
time the region exert diplomatic pressure on them based on the
facts on the table so that they can give way for new people to
come. Otherwise, when we say we cannot impose anything on them,
but you cannot even use violence in order to remove them, and
the only possible option for us then is this peace agreement
that we can exploit first to bring justice to expose them and
to make sure that they are known and the people they know, that
there are internal dynamics of making them accountable.
Senator Cardin. Mr. Chairman, I would just observe I think
the chances of the current leaders in South Sudan holding the
perpetrators of atrocities accountable, including themselves,
is close to zero. And I think that is the reality.
You can have all the findings. It is going to be more and
more challenging as time goes by to have the necessary
documentation preserved for accountability. There is going to
be more and more pressure to try to work out some
accommodations with existing leaders, and they are not going to
be interested in holding their leaders accountable for the
atrocities that they have committed.
And it is also very clear, it has been documented not just
by the commission you are referring to, but by so many first-
party accounts of what happened and who was there, who watched
it, who allowed these atrocities to take place, that this was
condoned by the leadership of South Sudan.
So I thought your suggestion, recalling our Ambassador for
that type of conduct, would be an appropriate response to show
that we don't want to have a mission headed by an Ambassador
where there is impunity for that type of conduct. I think that
is just one aspect of this.
I said earlier we don't want to abandon the people of South
Sudan. I think the U.N. mission, which is the most active
international effort, that we really need to work to see
whether we can get the cooperation so the mission can do its
work in South Sudan.
Obviously, if they cannot do it safely, then we have to
look at plan B, and we have to look at removing the mission and
safely protecting the people who are currently under the
protectorate. But I think it is important, if we can get that
mission effectively operating in South Sudan.
I think we also have to empower and protect the civil
societies who are providing most of the humanitarian aid and we
have to support that strongly because we know their intentions
are to help the people and not just to divert the resources for
their own gain. So I think there are things that can be done.
But fundamentally, I have lost confidence in the peace
process. I think Senator Shaheen's question, I really don't
think this peace process can go forward. I think we are going
to have to look at a restart here. I don't believe the current
leaders are capable of bringing their country into peace.
We haven't talked about, I think it is Mr. Deng, the new
Vice President who, as I understand it, has no constituency, is
part of corruption that has been pretty well-documented, and is
terribly unpopular. If I am right on those assumptions, I don't
see how he is a healing force to try to bring together the type
of respect for the process.
So I think in all those areas, we need to really rethink
where we are.
One thing is also clear to me, Mr. Chairman, continuing the
current policies without change makes little sense. I am for
protecting as many people as we possibly can. But long term, we
are not doing a service if we don't have a game plan for the
country to be viable.
I personally believe an arms embargo is something that
should been a long time ago, and I really do think the United
States should pursue that, and I hope that we can be somewhat
helpful with our delegation to see whether we can move that
along a little bit further.
On a personal note, if I might, one of our staff people,
Mr. Chairman, this is her last meeting with us, Janelle
Johnson. She has been here for 3 years doing great work and is
moving on to the U.S. Holocaust Museum. We would like to wish
her the best. [Applause.]
The Chairman. Thank you and best wishes. It is an
outstanding organization, and I know you will make it even
better than it is. Thank you for your service here.
I am going to ask a couple more questions. I know we had a
lot going on, and please don't feel like you need to stay.
I don't want to give the impression that I think
withdrawing our Ambassador is the solution. I realize there has
to be follow-ons that go with that.
And I will say there have been numbers of people that, as
we talk about an arms embargo, believe that much of it will
still flow into the country from Uganda. That doesn't mean that
it is not something that should be taken up.
I think about U.S. foreign policy. We have been really
involved in the creation of South Sudan. We have had a long
history. Jack Danforth was highly involved and then people came
on behind. I remember one of my first trips to Sudan and
Darfur, this was really the focus, the future of South Sudan
and how the central bank, how all this was going to be set up,
and how they were going to get oil out of the country. They
were landlocked, how they were going to negotiate a transport
agreement through Sudan itself.
But just to step back, since all of you are experts in this
area, we haven't had, and this is through different
administrations over 15 or 16 years, we just haven't had a lot
of foreign policy successes. It is not a partisan statement. We
just have not, as a Nation.
I am just wondering, I know we have some critical issues
that need to be dealt with here. You all shed a lot of light on
it. We are going to talk further and probably enlist your help
in some areas.
But just stepping back 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 feet, we have
been highly involved here--highly involved--through every step
of the way, the vote, the peace process, and we have chaos on
our hands. We have people who are being harmed greatly right
now by brutal people who are very self-serving.
Can you shed some light just on some observations, in this
particular focused area, just some observations about our
leadership and some of the things that we might think about
differently as we move through troubled areas like this?
Mr. Yeo. Do you mean foreign policy generally?
The Chairman. As it relates to just here. That would take
days, I think. Just on Sudan itself, South Sudan.
Mr. Yeo. Yes, I would say that what happened in terms of
the successes in terms of moving Liberia forward and Timor-
Leste are important messages as we think about moving forward
with South Sudan. In both cases there was a focus on making
sure that the regional players were willing to be leaders to
resolve the situation in terms of a country on the border.
So we need regional players, as they have been, to continue
to step up in a meaningful way.
Second of all, the Security Council ends up becoming the
most important place to coordinate global policy and approaches
toward sanctions, common issues relating to peacekeeping. And
when you think about all of these countries moving out of Civil
War, it is a role of the humanitarian actors and development
actors moving together.
So multilateral approaches combined with bilateral aid is
going to be ultimately essential.
Whatever the political approach is determined to move South
Sudan from point A to point B, eventually we will have to cross
the bridge of meaningful work with them on the humanitarian and
development space. And the Security Council together with
coordination mechanisms that are effective between the
bilateral donors have enormous potential to make sure the money
is effectively spent and done in a transparent way and, most
importantly, actually have measurable results over a long
period of time.
At the moment, we don't have that for South Sudan because
we are in a humanitarian phase where, at the moment, we are
just trying to keep people alive.
But over 5 to 10 years, if we can find a political
settlement, these types of coordination mechanisms on bilateral
aid together with multilateral approaches have great potential
to move the needle.
Ms. Knopf. I have spent a fair bit of time thinking about
this, having worked very closely with Senator Danforth, with
all of our envoys during the last administration, and being on
the ground myself as the AID director and as the U.S.
representative on the Assessment and Evaluation Commission in
the early years of the CPA implementation.
A couple of things. One, I think it was an incredible
victory for the South Sudanese people that the longest running
civil war in Africa ended, and that was the war between the
north and south that cost more than 2 million lives, displaced
more than 4 million people. It was a really tremendous thing to
bring that to closure.
There is a lot of second-guessing. Should we have supported
self-determination? Isn't this worse? It is not worse. It is
very bad. It is pretty terrible for the people of South Sudan,
and it can still get worse. But they deserve the chance at
self-determination, and they do not deserve to be held hostage
now to the leadership that has misused this moment.
So I think in reflecting on how we got from there to where
we are now, we did miss some things along the way in terms of
the United States and the international support. We missed that
there needed to be a glide path after independence to full
statehood.
The Chairman. And that seems to be a problem we continue to
repeat over and over again. Is that not correct?
Ms. Knopf. I think in other places, we have done it. That
is why there are some precedents for the international
transitional administration. We have done it in whole and in
part. We did it differently in Liberia. We did it differently
in Namibia. We did it differently in East Timor. We did it
differently in Kosovo. We did it differently in Bosnia.
Each circumstance does have its own peculiarities and own
solutions, and there are problems and challenges with each of
them. But that shouldn't stop us from trying something that is
more effective for the people of South Sudan now going forward.
And we did miss that for South Sudan. We focused during 6
years of an interim period on getting to a referendum and
seeing if that would really come to pass. It was not a sure
thing. It was not a sure thing when the CPA was signed in 2005.
So much of that 6-year interim period was spent on the
critical benchmarks of the CPA that would get us to the
referendum and then get to the actual independence of the
country. It was a divorce agreement between the north and the
south. It was not focused on a social contract in South Sudan
itself on what is the relationship between the state and its
citizens.
And it missed the point that Jok made at the beginning of
his testimony about the liberation struggle and leadership
coming out of that, and a lot of resources on the table very
quickly. And with no history of governance and institutions to
put the checks and balances in place to constrain the impulse
to use those resources for other ends, that is where we are
today.
The Chairman. The Sudanese view?
Dr. Kuol. Let me focus on the U.S. because I have been in
the peace agreement with CPA, how it was negotiated. We did
some work with the NDI, the National Democratic Institute, a
focus group discussion to see the feeling of people toward the
people of the U.S. and the others.
To tell you the truth, it has been a consistent feeling of
the people of South Sudan how they really have a very strong
feeling toward the people of the United States.
It was reflected very well, especially President Bush had
shown a personal attachment to the people of South Sudan. At
that level, I think we reached the people of South Sudan. And
it is still remaining in the minds of people.
That is why it is very important for us to know how people
of South Sudan feel toward the people of the United States.
That could imply also the foreign policy, as to what level it
reaches the heart of the people of South Sudan.
The second thing we did some work on the evaluation of
Operation Lifeline in Sudan.
Operation Lifeline was the one managed during the war. This
Operation Lifeline Sudan, to a certain degree, contributed a
lot. The international community showed solidarity with the
people South Sudan. And even the independence of South Sudan, I
could say U.S. Government played a very important role.
What we missed is this issue assumed having an independent
country, everything would be smooth. We did not dig inside into
the dynamics of how South Sudan would govern itself. Maybe the
perception was in such a way, these are the people--indeed, the
people of South Sudan, they show a civility when they conducted
their referendum. These are great people that are misled by
their leaders.
That is why some of us have been saying, as part of the
whole thing, that Africa, what they need is the liberation of
the liberator because you need to liberate Africa from the
liberators themselves because the liberators, when they come
in, it is called the liberation curse.
This is something I think we miss in the process, if we
ourselves in the government miss that point.
The Chairman. Do you want to close us out, Dr. Jok?
Maybe not. I don't know. Senator Flake and Senator Markey
may have questions. But go ahead.
Dr. Jok. I think one additional observation from what has
been said, and that is the focus was very strong on building
the institutions of South Sudan, building the state. Much of
the U.N. aid has gone to building the state, building the
institutions, so that the state is strong enough to be able to
turn around and offer services to its people.
What was missed was that--that state-building was a
vertical process. What was missed what might be called a
horizontal nation-building process so that the people of South
Sudan develop more affinity with their nation rather than with
their ethnic groups.
So have people who have not graduated from their
citizenship in their tribes into citizenship in the nation. And
that was something that could have been done. The U.S. could
have had a two-step project of state-building and nation-
building, so that people have expressed loyalty to their state,
to their country, rather than to various ethnicities.
The other, of course, is accountability for U.S. money in
South Sudan. We could have kept track of what the money has
produced for South Sudanese, something tangible to be shown.
Like now the road from Juba to Nimule is the one big visible
thing that has been done.
So a lot of U.S. money has been wasted in giving contracts
to subcontractors, and a lot of that money has very little to
show that is tangible. I think there could have been a way for
the U.S. to be able to say $11 billion in 10 years, this is
what we have shown for it, this is what we can show for it,
this is what was wasted. So that there is accountability both
within the administration of USAID as well as the Government of
South Sudan.
The Chairman. Senator Flake?
Senator Markey?
Senator Markey. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Dr. Jok, can you talk a little bit about climate change,
deforestation, famine in South Sudan? Can you talk a little bit
about that and what that impact is on the people but also on
the ability to resolve the conflict?
Dr. Jok. Thank you, sir.
There is definite evidence of degradation of the
environment. It is very noticeable that the rain pattern has
changed. You might still get the same amount of rain, but it is
concentrated and not as spread throughout the year as it used
to be.
When I was a herd boy, I knew some of the plants that grew
on my grazing terrain. Those plants are no longer there, so
there is clear evidence that population movements, displacement
of people, and new agricultural programs, extensive slash-and-
burn agriculture, and the increase in the number of cattle,
have definitely had a major impact on the environment.
Senator Markey. So what can international partners do in
order to ensure there is protection of the natural resources
within South Sudan? Is there any role for the international
partners on that issue?
Dr. Jok. Certainly, there is a role, especially on the
extractive industries to be made more responsible in terms of
how they extract oil particularly. The oil areas have been
devastated by oil production.
Senator Markey. By deforestation?
Dr. Jok. No, the oil production itself has polluted the
area.
Senator Markey. Yes.
Dr. Jok. So in that area, there are things that the
international community can do to ensure that the oil companies
are doing it responsibly.
Deforestation is also a function of livelihoods changing.
Senator Markey. Which international companies are in South
Sudan and not protecting the environment while they drill for
oil?
Dr. Jok. At the moment, it is all Asian companies. You have
the Chinese CNPC, and you have Malaysian companies, and you
have Indian companies.
Senator Markey. So should we be attempting to put pressure
on the Chinese companies, the Chinese oil companies, to act in
a more responsible fashion?
Dr. Jok. Yes, there our processes in place already. There
is a Natural Resources Management Act in place in South Sudan,
which could be supported to ensure that oil companies do what
they say they are going to do.
Those can be supported so they are implemented. At the
moment, you pass legislation and make it into law, but it does
not get implemented for whatever reasons. That is the problem.
So I think working together with the government, with the
oil companies to ensure that the legislation that has been
passed have been implemented would be the way to go.
Senator Markey. Okay, is South Sudan close to a widespread
famine? Is there a risk that that could break out?
Ms. Knopf. Yes. Yes, it is. It is very close. Forty percent
of the population is already at a severe level of food
insecurity from the way that food insecurity is classified and
studied by technical experts, that is considered. A large part
of the country is at what they call a Level 4. Level 5 is
famine. There are already pockets of famine of Level 5 food
insecurity in South Sudan, including in Northern Bahr el
Ghazal, which notably is the home area of the chief of general
staff of the Army. So even in his home area, people can't eat
and they are fleeing north to Darfur, as you pointed out in
your opening statement.
In fact, we don't fully know the level and extent of the
crisis because the government blocks access and the government
blocks some of the data from being released to appreciate the
severity of the crisis.
Senator Markey. Well, just 2 months ago, it is reported
that government soldiers looted the World Food Program's main
warehouse in Juba and just took all the food that was there.
Tell us what that says about the government, what it says about
the situation there, and how the government itself was
exacerbating the famine, the hunger, amongst its own people.
Mr. Yeo. Indeed, that is correct. The World Food Program
warehouse was raided. The food was taken. As a result, there
was insufficient food to feed the civilians inside the
Protection of Civilians sites that are being run by the United
Nations and are protecting in Juba alone 35,000 civilians.
Women actually had to leave the sites to get food for their
families because of what happened with the government taking
the food. And in fact, it is a statement that the government is
solely interested in making sure that its troops are fully fed
and that, in fact, the civilians who depend upon the World Food
Program are not receiving the assistance they should be
providing.
And it is more than just stealing the food out of the
warehouse. In fact, they erect barriers throughout the country
that make it difficult at times for the World Food Program to
not only deliver the food that it wishes to deliver, but to
monitor the delivery in a way that it should be monitored.
So it is a very difficult and challenging situation for
humanitarians, including the World Food Program, which
continues, despite these challenges, to do their best to try to
deliver food to up to 40 percent of the population in the
entire country.
Senator Markey. Well, that is incredible. Thank you.
Thank you all for everything that you are doing.
The Chairman. Thank you.
My staff was sharing with me that enough food was taken to
feed 250,000 people for 3 months. You say 1 month, a period of
time.
So listen, thank you all for being here and discussing this
harrowing topic with us. We appreciate it. And the record will
remain open until the close of business Friday. If you would
fairly promptly answer questions that will come to you, we
would appreciate it.
The Chairman. Again, thank you for your testimony and for
your interest in this issue.
With that, the meeting is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 4:26 p.m., the hearing was adjourned.]
Additional Material Submitted for the Record
Material Submitted for the Record by Dr. Paul R. Williams, Rebecca I.
Grazier Professor of Law and International Relations, American
University, Washington, DC \1\
introduction
Given the ongoing conflict and perceived state failure in South
Sudan, experts and members of the international community have proposed
the establishment of an international trusteeship in South Sudan.
Princeton Lyman, former American Special Envoy for Sudan and South
Sudan, recommended that the United Nations (U.N.) and the African Union
(A.U.) establish and administer an executive mandate over South
Sudan.\2\ Hank Cohen, the former Assistant Secretary of State for
Africa, has similarly called for the ``intensive U.N. tutelage'' of
South Sudan until it is prepared for self-governance.\3\ Additionally,
the former Secretary-General of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement,
Pagan Amum, has advocated for a direct intervention from the
international community to prevent South Sudan from ``collapsing.'' \4\
In light of these recommendations, this paper examines the history of
U.N. trusteeships, provides an overview of neo-trusteeship approaches,
and examines the feasibility of and core considerations in creating
such a mechanism in South Sudan.
Although different terms have been used, the current calls for an
international administration in South Sudan amount to the establishment
of a neo-trusteeship. A neo-trusteeship is a governing arrangement that
involves the transfer of some or all sovereign powers to a trustee with
the goal of creating institutions capable of administering the state
and providing services to citizens. At the end of the trusteeship,
powers are returned to the state. Neo-trusteeships have been utilized
in a number of post-conflict and transitional settings in the past 25
years, including in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosnia), Kosovo, East
Timor, Cambodia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. These contemporary examples
provide insight into best (and sometimes worst) practices in
establishing and implementing neo-trusteeships. In general, neo-
trusteeships are more effective when the trustee is provided sufficient
power to effectively govern the state, when clear benchmarks are
established for the return of powers to the state, and when a robust
peacekeeping presence is authorized to establish conditions conducive
to institutional development.
A neo-trusteeship could be introduced in South Sudan in three ways:
(1) by a U.N. Security Council Resolution under Chapter VII of the U.N.
Charter; (2) by negotiating a neo-trusteeship as part of the peace
process; (3) or as a complementary effort to a regional peacekeeping
force. Establishing a neo-trusteeship in South Sudan requires full and
thorough consideration of the conditions necessary to promote
government support for the establishment of a neo-trusteeship, the
resources required to establish a secure environment in which
institutions can be developed, the powers necessary for the trustee to
effectively develop these institutions, and the strategy for the return
of powers to local officials.
the history of u.n. trusteeships
Neo-trusteeships are the contemporary iteration of the U.N.
Trusteeship Council system. The U.N. Trusteeship Council was created in
1945 to facilitate the transitions of post-colonial territories to
self-rule.\5\ The creation of the U.N. Trusteeship Council was rooted
in the desire to further international peace and security; promote
economic, social, and political advancement; and enhance respect for
human rights.\6\ The Council focused on ensuring that ``there [was] a
peaceful and orderly means of achieving the difficult transition from
backward and subject status to self-government or independence, to
political and economic self-reliance.'' \7\In this system, a trustee
exercised sovereignty over a territory for a limited period of time for
the ultimate benefit of the population of that territory.\8\ Under
Article 77 of the U.N. Charter, the U.N. Trusteeship Council was
empowered to create a trusteeship when: (1) a colonial state
voluntarily relinquished its control over a territory; (2) a territory
was already under a League of Nations' mandate; or (3) a territory was
taken from a state defeated during World War II.\9\ Following the
closure of its final trusteeship in Palau in 1994, the U.N. Trusteeship
Council ceased all activity and remains inactive today.\10\
Although the era of the U.N. Trusteeship Council has come to a
close, the international community continues to utilize a variety of
contemporary manifestations of that trusteeship system, which fall
broadly under the category of ``neo-trusteeships.'' In contrast to the
uniform approach developed under the U.N. Trusteeship system, no formal
framework or practice exists for these modern approaches, which are
generally developed ad hoc.\11\
While neo-trusteeships continue to be a method used to create
functioning political institutions and to establish the conditions
necessary for peace and security, these modern approaches can be highly
controversial, particularly given the varying degrees of success
experienced. Amid this debate, this paper does not address the validity
of neo-trusteeships as a general approach. Rather, this paper is
focused on providing an overview of how neo-trusteeships operate, while
identifying the factors that have contributed and hampered the ability
of neo-trusteeships to achieve their goals.
contemporary examples of neo-trusteeships
Neo-trusteeships are typically designed with the intent to support
the development of democratic institutions based on the unique context
in each state. This has resulted in considerable diversity in their
form and structures. As policymakers consider how a potential neo-
trusteeship could be structured in South Sudan, lessons can be drawn
from the experiences of previous neo-trusteeships as described in this
section.
Bosnia & Herzegovina
The Dayton Peace Agreement, which ended the conflict between
Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats in Bosnia & Herzegovina in 1995,
established a neo-trusteeship administered by an internationally-
appointed High Representative. The High Representative was authorized
to oversee and coordinate the efforts of parties working to implement
the peace agreement, provide technical assistance to Bosnian efforts to
implement the agreement, and resolve disputes among the parties over
implementation.\12\ Peacekeeping support was first provided by the
NATO-led International Force (IFOR) and subsequently by the
Stabilization Force (SFOR). Following several years of limited
implementation of the peace agreement, the High Representative
reinterpreted its powers to play a more direct role in Bosnian
governance and to further Bosnia's development.\13\ The result was a
broad neo-trusteeship that maintained significant sovereign powers,
including promulgation of laws and removal of officials. These
increased powers allowed the High Representative to overcome several
major political roadblocks in post-conflict governance in Bosnia, but
have had limited effect in pressuring Bosnian authorities to fully
implement key components of the Dayton Peace Accords, including the
passage of a new constitution. The Bosnian neo-trusteeship has operated
largely without benchmarks for evaluating Bosnia's progress in assuming
governance powers and determining when the neo-trusteeship would end,
leading to significant criticism from domestic and international
observers.
Kosovo
The United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) was established by the
U.N. Security Council in 1999 following a military intervention by the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to halt ethnic cleansing of
Albanians by Serbian militias and the Yugoslav National Army in
Kosovo.\14\ At the time UNMIK was established, Kosovo was an autonomous
province within Serbia. The goal of the neo-trusteeship was to restore
order and provide its citizens with institutions capable of self-
government and autonomous rule pending a political settlement to the
conflict. The NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFOR) provided peace keeping
support. The foundational document of UNMIK provided for an interim
international administration of Kosovo until the status of Kosovo was
determined and self-governing institutions were established.\15\ The
transfer of power to Kosovo institutions was not subject to a defined
timeline, but rather was subject to the fulfillment of certain
conditions.\16\ Kosovo is frequently recognized as one of the most
effective instances of a political trusteeship.\17\ It received strong
support from the majority Albanian population of Kosovo, which
bolstering its legitimacy and increased the capacity for dialogue among
the parties to the conflict.\18\
East Timor
A neo-trusteeship in East Timor was installed following the
outbreak of armed conflict after voters resoundingly supported a
referendum on independence from Indonesia. Australian-led peacekeeping
troops of the International Force of East Timor (INTERFET) ended the
violence and restored basic law and order to the state. The U.N.
Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) was subsequently
established through a U.N. Security Council resolution with the consent
of Indonesian officials. There was no formal consent from East Timorese
leaders who were under the governing authority of Indonesia. However,
high voter turnout and support for independence in the referendum
indicated that most East Timorese supported U.N. involvement.\19\ The
purpose of UNTAET was to act as an ``integrated, multidimensional
peacekeeping operation fully responsible for the administration of East
Timor during its transition to independence.'' \20\ To achieve this
purpose, UNTAET was given a relatively extensive mandate, which
included both political administration and peacekeeping.\21\ Under
UNTAET's supervision, local institutions were developed in East Timor,
including an elected Constituent Assembly, Council of Ministers, and
President.\22\ UNTAET exercised this UNSC-mandated authority until East
Timor's independence in May 2002. Similar to Kosovo, the intervention
in East Timor was largely considered a success by the international
community.\23\ The powers granted to UNTAET exceeded those granted to
many other neo-trusteeships, which provided UNTAET considerable
authority in fulfilling its mandate and developing institutions. UNTAET
has been criticized, however, for its significant international
presence, which is thought to have limited its efforts to build the
capacity of local officials.
Cambodia
The United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC)
implemented the neo-trusteeship in Cambodia. Following the conflict in
Cambodia and the subsequent peace settlement, the primary goal of UNTAC
was to assume internal administration of the country during its
transition to an elected government to create the conditions in which
peaceful national elections could be conducted.\24\ UNTAC's
institution-strengthening efforts included managing foreign affairs,
defense, security, finance, and communications.\25\ In addition, UNTAC-
supervised elections resulted in a widely supported government.
Although UNTAC's mandate was far smaller than the robust mandates of
UNMIK and UNTAET, its efforts have largely been deemed successful.\26\
Cambodia's post-conflict elections were conducted peacefully, and the
government that resulted from the elections assumed power over a
relatively stable, functioning state.
Iraq and Afghanistan
Neo-trusteeships have been used to facilitate the development of
democratic governments in Afghanistan and Iraq following the removal
from power of the Taliban and the regime of Saddam Hussein by U.S.-led
military coalitions. In Afghanistan, the Bonn Agreement outlined the
role of the United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary
General in the Afghani administration, which included: ``monitor[ing]
and assist[ing] in the implementation of all aspects of [the Bonn]
agreement''; ``advis[ing] the Interim Authority in establishing a
politically neutral environment conducive to the holding of the
Emergency Loya Jirga in free and fair conditions''; attending the
meetings of transitional authorities; facilitating the resolution of
disputes or disagreement among transitional authorities; and
investigating human rights violations and recommending corrective
actions.\27\ The U.N. was supported by a NATO-led International
Security Force (ISAF), whose mandate was to maintain security in Kabul
and in surrounding regions, while also supporting the free movement of
U.N. personnel and the implementation of the Bonn Agreement.\28\
In Iraq, the U.S. established the Coalition Provisional Authority
in 2003 to administer the state. Through Coalition Provisional
Authority Regulation 1, the Authority enumerated its mandate, which
include restoring security to the state and facilitating conditions
appropriate for the Iraqi people to govern the state through Iraqi-led
institutions.\29\ To do so, the Authority assumed full executive,
legislative, and judicial authority over the state. Coalition forces
also assumed the power to restore security of the state and assist in
carrying out the policies of the Authority.\30\ As the Authority handed
off power to local institutions, the U.N. assumed many of its roles in
supporting the development of Iraqi institutions through the United
Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq.
Afghanistan and Iraq are complicated instances of neo-trusteeships.
Both required a heavy military component to establish the neo-
trusteeship and to maintain an environment that enabled the neo-
trusteeship to effectively operate, particularly in Iraq where the neo-
trusteeship has been plagued with security complications.\31\
Nonetheless, these instances of neo-trusteeships provide valuable
insight into the challenges that emerge in administrating a neo-
trusteeship when an extensive and sustained military force is required.
elements of a neo-trusteeship
While there is great diversity in the goals, structure, and powers
of neo-trusteeships, several common elements exist among them. These
include: (1) the need for a legal basis establishing the neo-
trusteeship; (2) selection of the trustee; (3) powers granted to the
trustee; (4) accountability mechanisms for the trustee; and (5) a
process for terminating the trusteeship and returning powers to the
host state.
Legal Basis for Neo-Trusteeships
Neo-trusteeships have been established through peace agreements,
declarations, and U.N. Security Council Resolutions. Regardless of the
legal basis, neo-trusteeships typically receive recognition, if not
authorization, from the U.N. Security Council. In Bosnia and
Afghanistan, for instance, the neo-trusteeship was formalized and
received the consent of state leaders through peace agreements that
established the structure of each state's transitional administration.
These agreements subsequently received support from the U.N. Security
Council through Security Council Resolutions providing peacekeeping
support through member-led military coalitions.
The neo-trusteeship in Iraq was imposed through a declaration
following the removal of the regime of Saddam Hussein. When General
Franks, as Commander of the Coalition Forces, declared Iraq's
liberation, he announced the creation of the Coalition Provisional
Authority (CPA). The CPA served, in effect, as the acting government
pending the Iraqi people's creation of a new government. General Franks
was the initial head of the CPA.\32\ While the legal framework under
which the CPA was initially created is unclear, the declaration that
established the CPA was subsequently recognized by U.N. Security
Council Resolution 1483.\33\ Based on the declaration and Resolution
1483, the U.S.-led CPA issued CPA Regulation 1, which established its
powers to administer Iraq.\34\
Neo-trusteeships authorized by the U.N. Security Council Resolution
have been used to overcome impasses in political negotiations or when
the infrastructure of the state has been destroyed by the conflict. In
Cambodia, for instance, UNTAC was established by U.N. Security Council
Resolution 745 in agreement with Cambodian officials as a compromise
after negotiations on interim power-sharing arrangements failed.\35\
Similarly, in Kosovo, UNMIK was established through Security Council
Resolution 1244 to put an end to the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and to
allow political negotiations between the warring parties to
continue.\36\ In East Timor, UNTAET was established by U.N. Security
Council Resolution to address the critical need to restore East Timor's
institutional infrastructure in the aftermath of the conflict. Basic
rule of law was restored by INTERFET, which subsequently handed off its
operations to UNTAET.\37\
Selection of the Trustee
The selection of the trustee is critical to the success of the neo-
trusteeship. To effectively fulfill the trustee's mandate, the trustee
must build and maintain the confidence of the local population in its
authority, decision-making processes, and long-term vision for building
the state. If the trustee does not have the confidence of the local
population, the trustee's decisions are less likely to receive public
support, which may negatively impact the trustee's efforts.
Most neo-trusteeships have been administered by a special
representative appointed by the United Nations or an international
coalition of states supporting the implementation of the trusteeship or
peace agreement. In states where the trustee has played a positive role
in ending the conflict or providing protection to civilians, the
trustee has received support from the local population. For instance,
when UNMIK assumed the administration of Kosovo, the intervention was
welcomed by the public, who had a positive opinion of the U.N. as
result of the U.N.'s role in halting the ethnic cleansing of Kosovar
Albanians. This public trust increased the public's respect for UNMIK's
decisions among Kosovo's majority Albanian population.
Similarly, the identity of the trustee can be critical to the
effectiveness of a neo-trusteeship. For instance, part of the success
of UNTAC is attributed to its administrator, Yasushi Akashi, a Japanese
diplomat. As a regional actor and diplomat, he understood the cultural
norms and how best to pursue consensus among the parties. At the same
time, he did not hesitate to push back on the political actors and the
U.N. when needed.\38\ Based in part on the administrator's popularity,
UNTAC was able to forge an alliance with the Cambodian people that
enabled it to ``overcome the intrigues of their faction leaders and
deliver an opportunity to them to break free from the prolonged cycle
of fear and coercion.''
Powers Granted to the Neo-Trusteeship
While state practice varies in the scope of powers granted to the
trustee, two models emerge: (1) neo-trusteeships in which complete
sovereignty is transferred to the trustee; and (2) neo-trusteeships in
which only certain powers are transferred to the trustee. In the second
model, sovereignty is retained by local institutions, rather than by
the trustee. The invitation for assistance may be revoked at any time,
and the sovereign is empowered to transfer either part or all of its
sovereign powers to another actor. These powers may be transferred
either for a set period of time or until certain conditions exist.\40\
These two models have been blended in recent trusteeships, and the
results of these blended frameworks have been mixed.\41\ These mixed
results have led some analysts to conclude that in cases where
substantial intervention is necessary, the neo-trusteeship's
effectiveness may be enhanced by placing full sovereignty clearly with
the trustee for a temporary period of time.\42\ For instance, UNMIK's
mandate provides for full authority over ``basic civilian
administrative functions where and as long as required.'' \43\
Similarly, UNTAC is judged to be most effective in the areas where it
had the greatest degree of independence and control.\44\
Even when broad powers are granted to the neo-trusteeship, however,
the administration can benefit from explicit limitations on its power.
For instance, UNTAET was ``endowed with overall responsibility for the
administration of East Timor and [was] empowered to exercise all
legislative and executive authority, including the administration of
justice.'' \45\ UNTAET's authority was extensive, exceeding that of
other neo-trusteeships, including UNMIK.\46\ While its far-reaching
powers allowed UNTAET to promote conditions conducive to East Timor's
political development, the extent of these powers also led to suspicion
of the U.N.'s motives. Although the public was initially supportive of
the intervention, the lack of clarity regarding the limitations of the
U.N.'s authority under international law, the U.N.'s obligations to
respect human rights, and the conditions upon which the trusteeship
would terminate resulted in significant domestic and international
criticism of the trusteeship.\47\
Neo-trusteeships can assume a range of powers depending on their
mandate and the scope of their powers. These powers can range from
observation, technical advice, and dispute resolution to more robust
powers such as institution building, promulgating legislation, and
removing officials. More robust powers provide the trustee with more
control over the day-to-day administration of the state.
Monitoring Implementation of Peace Agreements
A neo-trusteeship can be empowered to oversee and monitor the
implementation of political aspects of peace agreements. For instance,
in Bosnia, the High Representative was initially vested with the powers
to oversee implementation of the civilian aspects of the Dayton Peace
Agreement. These powers included promoting the parties' compliance with
the terms of the agreement, coordinating the activities of Bosnia
institutions to promote the implementation of the agreement while
respecting their autonomy, and facilitating ``the resolution of any
difficulties arising in connection with civil implementation'' of the
agreement.\48\
Providing Technical Advice and Assistance
Neo-trusteeships may also be empowered to provide technical
assistance to local authorities in the implementation of the peace
agreement or in day-to-day governance. For instance, the Bonn Agreement
provided that the Special Representative of the Secretary General would
advise Afghan transitional authorities in promoting an environment
conducive to effective decision making and facilitating disputes that
arose among them. Similarly, the High Representative in Bosnia was
mandated to advise officials on how best to implement the Dayton Peace
Agreement and to resolve disputes arising among officials.
Creating Institutions and Promoting Democracy
In situations where the state's infrastructure has been largely
destroyed by the conflict, the neo-trusteeship may also support the
creation of institutions of democratic governance. For instance, in
East Timor, the U.N. trusteeship developed local institutions,
including an elected Constituent Assembly, Council of Ministers, and
President.\49\ Similarly, UNMIK was mandated to provide an interim
administration for Kosovo while ``establishing and overseeing the
development of provisional democratic self-governing institutions to
ensure conditions for peaceful and normal life for all inhabitants of
Kosovo.''
In addition, the trusteeship is often simultaneously responsible
for promoting democracy through initiatives such as long-term mentoring
programs to rebuild civil society and institutional capacity-building
measures.\51\ Particularly in host states that were previously under
repressive regimes that stifled civil society, these parallel efforts
are essential in ensuring a functioning democracy.
State practice indicates that neo-trusteeships are most effective
in installing democratic institutions when there is a coordinated,
actionable, and timely plan for instituting reforms. Swift,
coordinated, and transparent action decreases the likelihood that
criminal elements or remnants of the previous regime will influence the
new system, thereby hindering the development of institutions. For
instance, UNTAC in Cambodia is frequently criticized for acting too
slowly in assuming control and implementing necessary reforms in key
areas of civil administration.\52\ These delays in implementation left
UNTAC unable to deal with corruption and the intimidation by political
figures.\53\ Further, UNTAC's administration did not fully consider or
address institutions at the provincial level. As a result, UNTAC
struggled to provide oversight to sub-national institutions where
provincial governors and civil servants proved to be ``very
independent-minded.'' \54\
Conducting Democratic Elections
Conducting elections is often an important power of the neo-
trusteeship, as it represents the reconstitution of a local government
in the wake of a conflict. For that reason, it is often one of the
final duties of the trustee. For instance, elections were the
cornerstone of the neo-trusteeship in Cambodia.\55\ UNTAC was
established for an 18-month period, and it needed to complete elections
and transfer power to the newly elected government before the end of
that period.\56\ In May 1993, almost the exact date provided for in its
initial timetable,\57\ UNTAC supervised Cambodian national elections.
Over 4.2 million Cambodians (90% of those registered) participated in
the UNTAC-supervised elections that were declared to be free and
fair.\58\
Incubating the Rule of Law
The powers of several neo-trusteeships have included establishing
and promoting rule of law in their mandates. This power is not often
specifically outlined within the trustee's mandate, but is instead
generally accepted to be a part of the creation of effective governance
institutions. For instance, as part of their broader mandate to develop
institutions of local self-governance, both UNTAET and UNMIK were
charged with establishing institutions to uphold the rule of law,
including judicial institutions, police, and prison services.\59\
Similarly, in Bosnia, following a failed attempt at judicial reform,
the High Representative instituted a process of judicial vetting
through which all sitting judges and prosecutors were asked to resign
and reapply for their positions.\60\
Exercising Legislative and Constitutional Authority
A neo-trusteeship can be vested with broad legislative and
constitutional powers, including the power to repeal and enact
legislation. For instance, UNMIK's mandate provided for full authority
to govern Kosovo, including the power to amend or repeal any previously
existing laws that were not compatible with the mandate of UNMIK.\61\
Similarly, the reinterpreted powers of the High Representative in
Bosnia permitted the High Representative to pass, repeal, or amend
legislation. These powers have allowed the High Representative to
overcome several significant political roadblocks in the implementation
of the Dayton Peace Accords, including passing the Law on
Citizenship.\62\ Following deadlock in the Bosnian Parliament, this law
was signed into force by the High Representative.\63\ The neo-
trusteeship in Bosnia also annulled several existing laws, standardized
Bosnian legislation with EU standards, and established the Bosnian
state courts.\64\
Removing Political Officials
A neo-trusteeship may also be empowered to remove political
officials and bar these individuals from seeking future office.
Following the reinterpretation of the High Representative's mandate in
Bosnia, the High Representative was provided with the ability to
exercise power over legislative and executive functions, including the
authority to remove local officials under certain circumstances.\65\
While these powers have been exercised on only a limited basis, they
provide the High Representative considerable authority to address
political spoilers.
Implementing Economic Reforms
Neo-trusteeship can also be empowered to undergo a range of
economic reforms, including promoting economic reconstruction and
development. For instance, UNTAC was responsible for the rehabilitation
of Cambodia's essential infrastructure and the commencement of economic
reconstruction and development. However, UNTAC initially paid little
attention to the economy or the financial impact of its mission on the
country, which lead to high inflation rates.\66\ Amid a serious budget
deficit, UNTAC belatedly committed to careful monitoring and handling
of the economic situation and appointed an Economic Adviser.\67\
Despite this initial hurdle, UNTAC jumpstarted the reconstruction and
rehabilitation of Cambodia's infrastructure, approving 51 development
projects during its tenure.\68\
Accountability Mechanisms
Even when the trustee is granted full sovereignty over the state,
the trustee is a fiduciary that is accountable to the population of the
host state.\69\ When exercising its powers, the trustee must therefore
be able to justify any changes that it makes to preexisting laws and
institutions as benefitting the population.\70\ Judicial review and
internal complaint systems are mechanisms that can ensure the
accountability of a neo-trusteeship.\71\ The trusteeship in Kosovo
established an internal complaint and accountability mechanism designed
to provide transparency and accountability to Kosovo citizens. To
support the implementation of the UNMIK mandate, UNMIK established a
Human Rights Advisory Panel to consider complaints from Kosovo citizens
related to alleged human rights violations committed by UNMIK.\72\
Termination of the Trusteeship
A clearly defined exit strategy promotes the likelihood of a
successful neo-trusteeship and stronger relationships between the
trustee and the host state. An exit strategy may be delineated in the
initial trusteeship agreement, which may specify a finite period of
time for the neo-trusteeship. This finite period may promote confidence
in the host state population that the neo-trusteeship will end, and
that power will be handed to host state officials. However, to be
effective, such a time period must be reasonable to accomplish the
goals of the trusteeship. If the time period is too short, the neo-
trusteeship may not bring about the desired result--a sustainable,
self-governing host state. Alternatively, the initial trusteeship
agreement may establish a series of benchmarks that must be attained
before the trusteeship ends and power is handed over to host state
officials.\73\ Such a model may permit the trusteeship to continue if
the state is not prepared for self-governance when the trusteeship is
anticipated to end. However, state officials may be less likely to
agree to an arrangement that does not have a pre-determined end date
out of concern that powers may never be handed over.
For instance, the neo-trusteeship in Bosnia has operated largely
without benchmarks for evaluating Bosnia's progress in assuming
governance powers and determining when the neo-trusteeship would end.
The Dayton Peace Agreement provided no end date for the High
Representative's term and listed no benchmarks for handing powers over
to Bosnian officials.\74\ As the neo-trusteeship continues into its 21
year, and progress toward full implementation of the Agreement and EU
membership for Bosnia has been limited, both domestic and international
observers have criticized the High Representative as lacking an
effective exit strategy.
Exit benchmarks can address political development, economic
development, and security infrastructure development.\75\ Political
benchmarks that may be used to assess the appropriateness of
transferring sovereignty back to the host state include:
The existence of political parties capable of competing with
each other; demonstrated capacity to hold peaceful and fair
elections; demonstrated capacity of political institutions,
such as an executive, ministries, and an assembly, to make
decisions and carry them out; the existence of a rule of law,
including functioning courts, reasonable access to those
courts, reasonable promptness in making decisions, and the
capacity to decide controversies that might paralyze the
government or impair its implementation of decisions consistent
with basic individual rights in private arrangements; and
demonstrated capacity of institutions of a civil society,
including a free press, universities, and voluntary
associations and legal and accounting professions capable of
holding political actors accountable.\76\
In addition, a number of economic indicators may serve as
benchmarks for a transition of sovereignty back to the host state.
These include the establishment of basic infrastructure such as
transportation and telecommunications systems, the existence of dispute
resolution mechanisms, the ability to channel investment funds into the
state, and the development of a national business strategy.\77\
Finally, benchmarks for security are also necessary to ensure that the
crimes perpetrated by former regimes do not reoccur and physical
security is provided for all segments of the local population.\78\
These benchmarks may include the establishment of a police or security
force trained to uphold the law and respect the rights of all citizens
and the establishment of a functional and effective system of criminal
justice that will provide accountability for crimes committed.
Peacekeeping Support
To provide a stable environment where the trustee can create the
foundation for democracy and related reforms, neo-trusteeships
typically require a robust and sustained peacekeeping presence.\79\
Similar to the neo-trusteeship arrangement, a peacekeeping force can
maintain a range of powers depending on the political and security
context, from peacekeeping to policing to engaging combatants. This
presence can be provided by the U.N. or by a regional organization such
as NATO or the AU. For instance, UNTAET's mandate included both civil
and peacekeeping authority. The secure environment created by the
peacekeeping troops was central to UNTAET being able to achieve its
goals, particularly given the extent of the destruction of East Timor's
infrastructure resulting from the post-referendum violence.\80\ By
contrast, NATO forces led the security presence in Kosovo.\81\ A
multinational Kosovo Force (KFOR) entered Kosovo following a series of
aerial bombardments that put an end to violence occurring in 1999. The
50,000-strong force provided security to the Kosovar population of
roughly 2 million inhabitants and created conditions that allowed UNMIK
to be established on the ground.\82\ KFOR presence in Kosovo continues
today, although its troop presence has significantly diminished, and it
has delegated significant police and security powers to Kosovo
authorities.\83\
In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the U.N., in partnership
with the AU, implemented an additional mechanism for addressing
instability in the eastern DRC--the Force Intervention Brigade.\84\ The
Force Intervention Brigade, which fell under the authority of the
United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic
Republic of Congo (MONUSCO), was mandated to work closely with the
Congolese army to not only protect civilians, but also to directly
address the security challenges facing the eastern DRC, including
``neutralizing rebel groups.'' \85\ This is the first such initiative
by a U.N. peacekeeping force, one that has been lauded by the members
of the international community as reinvigorating the efforts of MONUSCO
and the reputation of U.N. peacekeeping missions.\86\ In fulfilling
this mandate, the Force Intervention Brigade worked collaboratively
with the DRC army, which allowed the Force Intervention Brigade to
fulfill a dual function of combatting rebel groups and strengthening
the capacity of the DRC army.\87\ The DRC consented to this
collaborative effort as part of its commitment to continued security
sector reform.\88\
The Force Intervention Brigade has been credited with making
progress in returning key strategic towns to the control of the DRC
government and disarming rebel groups such as M23.\89\ However, the
expanded mandate of the Force Intervention Brigade was not universally
welcomed by U.N. member states and humanitarian organizations, who
expressed concern that the increased mandate of U.N. peacekeeping
troops would put their soldiers and employees at greater risk of being
targeted by combatants.\90\
common traits of successful neo-trusteeships
Several common themes emerge when evaluating the conditions
necessary for a successful neo-trusteeship. First, developing a full
and thorough understanding of the needs of the host state is critical
to ensuring that the neo-trusteeship has the full mandate and
supporting powers to administer the state. As the instance of Bosnia
demonstrates, if the trustee lacks the mandate to support institutional
development in a state where institutions are weak and the political
will of officials to reform them is low, the neo-trusteeship is
unlikely to make significant progress in strengthening the state.
Second, the selection of a trustee should be conducted with due regard
for public opinion concerning both the implementing organization and
its leadership. If public confidence in the trustee is low, then the
trustee's work will become considerably more difficult. Third, the
powers transferred to the trustee must be sufficient to allow the
trustee to not only administer the state but also to overcome obstacles
and challenges to institutional development. The neo-trusteeships in
Kosovo and East Timor are typically considered to be successful because
each maintained broad powers to govern the state and fulfill their
mandate. Fourth, to gain the confidence of the local population and to
administer the neo-trusteeship transparently, the trustee should
consider its exit strategy and benchmarks for returning power to local
authorities. UNTAC's success in Cambodia can be attributed to the clear
benchmarks set for its success--which included a democratically elected
government--and a measurable timeframe for returning power to the
state. By contrast, the lack of measurable benchmarks and an exit
strategy resulted in suspicion of the trustee's motives in East Timor
and Bosnia. Fifth, transparent, accountable administration of the neo-
trusteeship can play a critical role in building public confidence in
the trustee's work. In Kosovo, for instance, the Human Rights Advisory
Panel provided accountability to UNMIK's work by allowing Kosovo
citizens to challenge the trustee's decisions in administering the
territory.
Finally, state practice indicates that successful neo-trusteeships
require an environment conducive to the creation of new institutions.
Two key factors play into this: consent of local officials and the
local population to the neo-trusteeship and the presence of a robust
peacekeeping force. Consent of local officials to the neo-trusteeship
promotes acceptance of the administration and supports a positive
public perception of the trustee, facilitating the trustee's work and
building public buy-in to the process. Further, almost every
contemporary neo-trusteeship has been supported by a peacekeeping or
stabilization force that establishes and maintains some basic rule of
law. The mandate of this force may differ depending on the needs of the
state, from peacekeeping to policing to engaging criminal elements, but
should maintain sufficient powers to address obstacles arising from the
neo-trusteeship and the stability of the state.
neo-trusteeship in south sudan
Following a period of considerable political and economic
instability, experts and members of the international community have
called for the establishment of a neo-trusteeship in South Sudan, in
one form or another. The current government of South Sudan has failed
to develop institutions capable of providing effective services to
citizens or of improving the state's economic situation. Further,
infighting among South Sudanese officials has resulted in increasing
violence, ongoing human rights violations, and a severe humanitarian
disaster.
The implementation of a neo-trusteeship in South Sudan could
address these failures and fill the current governance gaps. At a
minimum, the intervention of a peacekeeping force, such as the one
called for by U.N. Security Council Resolution 2304, could provide the
necessary stability to bring peace to the state and improve the
economic situation.\91\ A neo-trusteeship could act where South Sudan
is currently failing to perform, including creating a stable economy,
establishing the rule of law, and building political institutions. As
the capacity of South Sudanese institutions increases over time, these
powers would be transferred back to the state.
However, the establishment of a neo-trusteeship in South Sudan may
also face significant challenges. South Sudanese government officials
have strongly opposed any effort that might compromise their
sovereignty, including the peacekeeping force provided for in Security
Council Resolution 2304. Suspicion of U.N. motives in South Sudan may
also limit public acceptance of a neo-trusteeship. In addition, South
Sudan's fighting groups have increasingly splintered since Riek
Machar's departure, and regional and local conflicts have continued
unabated. Combined with limited infrastructure and difficult terrain,
these dynamics would make establishing a secure environment outside of
Juba difficult and highly costly. Endemic corruption and patronage
systems within South Sudan would present further challenges in
establishing the rule of law.
Developing the Framework for a Neo-Trusteeship in South Sudan
In considering whether a neo-trusteeship would support the
development of a successful South Sudan, policymakers may evaluate a
number of core considerations in the implementation of such a
mechanism, drawing on lessons learned from previous neo-trusteeship
arrangements. Key considerations in developing a framework for how to
structure a neo-trusteeship in South Sudan include:
Process for establishing a neo-trusteeship: The process for
establishing a neo-trusteeship may determine the degree of legitimacy
it receives from officials and members of the public. As discussed
above, neo-trusteeships may be established by U.N. Security Council
Resolution, with or without the consent of the host state, or through a
negotiated agreement. A Security Council Resolution will establish a
clear mandate for the neo-trusteeship, particularly if South Sudan
gives its consent to the trusteeship. If the state does not consent to
the trusteeship, however, the trustee may face difficulties, if not
outright opposition, in assuming power. A negotiated agreement may
provide more public legitimacy to the trusteeship as it requires the
consent of the officials in power.
Form of the neo-trusteeship: The form of the trusteeship is
typically determined by the goal to be accomplished and the needs of
the state. Trusteeships that provide the most power to the trustee are
typically most effective in states where the governing infrastructure
is limited or has been destroyed by the conflict, as was the case in
Kosovo and East Timor. Trusteeships that serve a more advisory role are
more effective in states where institutions exist, but have not fully
developed the capacity to exercise their authority and would benefit
from oversight and collaboration with the trustee. Both types of
trusteeships may establish benchmarks and a timeframe for the
incremental return of powers to the host state government.
Powers delegated to the trustee: Along with consideration of the
form of the neo-trusteeship, state practice indicates that careful
consideration of the powers delegated to the trustee may be
determinative of its success. Decision makers may consider whether a
possible neo-trusteeship will be complete, providing all governance
power (legislative and executive) to the trustee, or partial, splitting
governance powers between the trustee and local institutions.\92\ A
complete delegation of governance power may promote the smooth
implementation of institutional reform or formation, as in East Timor.
However, a complete delegation of governance power may be difficult to
negotiate with a host state that holds some degree of sovereign power
over its territory, as it will require sitting officials to transfer
their authority to the trustee. In addition, policymakers may consider
who would maintain the governance powers of sub-national institutions.
Trustee: The trustee who assumes power over a neo-trusteeship in
South Sudan will be of considerable importance to its legitimacy in the
eyes of South Sudanese citizens. Public acceptance of the trustee is
critical to allowing the trustee to fully and effectively assume power
over the host state, as in Kosovo. If the trustee is seen by the public
as biased or not able to act in the best interest of the state, then
the neo-trusteeship is less likely to have the confidence of the
public. At present, there is widespread suspicion of the U.N. in South
Sudan--this may considerably affect the acceptance of a U.N.-led neo-
trusteeship.
Relationship with local institutions: State practice indicates that
neo-trusteeships are more effective when institutions are formed before
local participation begins.\93\ As such, decision-makers may benefit
from considering whether the installation and development of state
institutions under the guidance of the neo-trusteeship will precede
popular, local participation in decision-making.
Oversight and accountability mechanism: Transparent oversight and
accountability mechanisms can bolster the legitimacy and acceptance of
a neo-trusteeship by providing a means of recourse for citizens when
they feel their rights have been violated. These mechanisms may be
similar to the Human Rights Advisory Panel established by UNMIK in
Kosovo, which had the power to receive, investigate, and adjudicate
citizen complaints against UNMIK.\95\ While the Joint Monitoring and
Evaluation Commission (JMEC) already exists to oversee the
implementation of the peace agreement in South Sudan, the mandate of
JMEC would need to be expanded to undertake this function related to a
neo-trusteeship. The JMEC may also continue to be impeded by the
opposition it has experienced to date.
Timeframe and process for returning powers to the state: Decision-
makers may also consider the timeframe and process for the eventual
transfer of full governance power to local institutions,\96\ including
whether this will be a gradual process and whether any specific
benchmarks must be met to trigger the transfer of authority. The
contemplation of including a mechanism for extending the timeframe or
mandate of the neo-trusteeship may also be beneficial.
Funding and available resources: Finally, decision makers must
carefully consider whether there are resources available to support a
neo-trusteeship prior to onboarding a new neo-trusteeship. In addition
to ensuring that there is sufficient funding, a neo-trusteeship would
also require a sustained commitment in terms of military support and
additional resources.
Steps to Creating a Neo-Trusteeship in South Sudan
In addition to developing a framework for a neo-trusteeship in
South Sudan, there are several preparatory steps that could be taken to
aid in the development of an effective neo-trusteeship. One of the most
important preparatory steps is to undertake efforts to obtain support
for such a mechanism. Regardless of the pathway used to create it,
support from key players in South Sudan, including the political
leadership, would be critical to the trusteeship's success. These
individuals are likely to interpret the formation of a neo-trusteeship
as a direct attack on South Sudanese nascent sovereignty or an
admission that they have failed as leaders. Key political stakeholders,
the majority of whom were directly involved in the liberation
struggles, would need to be convinced that a trusteeship is
appropriate. While a neo-trusteeship does not require the consent of
political leaders, consent may make the implementation of a neo-
trusteeship less burdensome and costly for the intervening force. This
may increase the political will among members of the international
community to engage in the process.
In addition to trying to gain the support of key political players,
local support for the neo-trusteeship would need to be cultivated. The
people of South Sudan are fatigued by the relentless cycle of violence,
and there appears to be growing local support for an alternative,
including a neo-trusteeship, but it is unclear how far such support
would extend, particularly given the typically high political
polarization of South Sudan's population and influential diaspora.
While it is difficult to predict how readily the people of South Sudan
would accept a neo-trusteeship, increased local support would
strengthen its effectiveness.
An additional prerequisite to creating a neo-trusteeship in South
Sudan is sufficient planning and preparation to address the challenges
of implementation in the context of South Sudan. This would include
identifying the actors that retain political and military power in
South Sudan and developing a strategy for their productive engagement
in the system. This could be done through a conflict mapping exercise
that analyzes the current in-country dynamics. As it remains unclear
that the two political leaders have complete control over their forces
operating in support of them, it may be difficult to identify the
players that actively maintain power. Notably, without command and
control, the removal of key political figures would not guarantee an
end to violence. It would be especially important to identify the
spoilers who could derail the process. Further, it would be important
to determine detailed strategies on how to mollify these spoilers that
are operating both in and outside of Juba. This is because if rival
factions perceived a potential power vacuum, there could be additional
fighting as groups seek to take control of territory within South
Sudan.
Based in part on the results of the conflict mapping, another step
in creating a neo-trusteeship in South Sudan would be to onboard strong
leadership for the trusteeship that contributes to popular support for
the mechanism. Throughout South Sudan's struggle for independence, its
political leadership has created political parties and military
operations heavily dependent on their leadership and personality. These
``cults of personality'' have resulted in persistent infighting and
detracted from the parties' ability to operate effectively in
governance roles. However, the leadership still has the strong support
of the South Sudanese public, and even stronger support in South
Sudan's highly polarized diaspora. A neo-trusteeship may benefit from
the exit of the political leadership, as the trustee could focus on
cultivating the next generation of South Sudanese leaders unencumbered
by past political dynamics. But convincing the leadership that their
exit is in South Sudan's best interest would be difficult. Former
Ambassador Princeton Lyman has suggested that they might be offered
amnesty from prosecution as an incentive to step down,\97\ but such
amnesty would jeopardize post-conflict accountability efforts,
especially in light of the strong interest in a hybrid court.
A neo-trusteeship in South Sudan would also benefit from generating
strong international support to sustain a neo-trusteeship. Starting at
the onset, this process would require an increased military presence to
create an environment where the trusteeship could be created. This is
likely to be viewed as a violation of South Sudan's sovereignty,
particularly given the current resistance to the regional AU force and
the reluctance to commit troops. There continues to be uncertainty as
to whether more troops would be provided to support the need for an
increased military presence. In addition, if a peacekeeping force with
a more robust mandate is installed, it will likely be heavily
burdensome on the contributing countries. Policing South Sudan will be
no easy feat, and the U.N./A.U. would need to be prepared for the
challenge. Moreover, the neo-trusteeship would need to be prepared to
address the complex economic crisis in South Sudan, including the
backlog in pay to civil servants.
As a neo-trusteeship's success will also rely on the perception of
the U.N. in South Sudan, it would be important to consider how to
increase its credibility. While those seeking protection by the U.N.
tend to support the institution, those whose enemies are being
protected are more likely to have a negative view of the U.N. If not
addressed, the divisive perception of the U.N. could hamper the
effectiveness of an AU/U.N. trusteeship in South Sudan, and potentially
fuel more conflict.
conclusion
Trusteeships provide an opportunity to intervene in a state long
enough to enable it to develop politically and economically and to
create security. While the dynamics of a trusteeship are complex, if
undertaken with forethought to its legitimacy, clear definition,
transparent and accountable implementation, and exit strategy, the
trusteeship has the potential to be effective in shepherding a state
through a conflict setting. Although there are several steps that would
be required to create an environment in South Sudan where a neo-
trusteeship could be effective, a neo-trusteeship may be a viable means
of creating peace and stability in the country.
----------
Notes:
1. Paul R. Williams holds the Rebecca I. Grazier Professorship of Law
and International Relations at American University. Throughout
his career, Dr. Williams has assisted over two dozen states and
governments in international peace negotiations. His peace
negotiations work includes serving as a delegation member in
the Dayton negotiations (Bosnia-Herzegovina), Rambouillet/Paris
negotiations (Kosovo), and Podgorica/Belgrade negotiations
(Serbia/Montenegro) and advising parties to the Key West
negotiations (Nagorno-Karabakh), the Oslo/Geneva negotiations
(Sri Lanka), the Georgia/Abkhaz negotiations, and the Somalia
peace talks. Dr. Williams has contributed to the drafting of
multiple post-conflict constitutions including the transition
from a unitary to a federal system in Yemen, the crafting of a
democratic constitution in Iraq, and the constitution marking
the transition of Kosovo into a new independent state. Dr.
Williams is also experienced advising governments on issues of
state recognition, self-determination, and state succession
including advising the President of Macedonia and the Foreign
Minister of Montenegro. Dr. Williams co-founded the Public
International Law & Policy Group (PILPG) in 1995. PILPG is a
global pro-bono law firm that provides free legal assistance to
states and governments involved in peace negotiations, advises
states on drafting post-conflict constitutions, and assists in
prosecuting war criminals. PILPG has operated in 25 counties,
set up field offices in Georgia, Iraq, Kenya, Kosovo, Nepal,
Somaliland, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Tanzania and Uganda, and
has members in nearly two dozen key cities around the globe.
2. Princeton Lyman and Kate Almquist Knopf, To save South Sudan, put
it on life support, The Financial Times (Jul. 20, 2016).
3. Hank Cohen, South Sudan should be placed under U.N. trusteeship to
aid development of viable self-government, African Arguments
(Jan. 6, 2014).
4. John Tanza, Former Leader of S. Sudan's Ruling Party Seeks
International Intervention, Voice of America (Aug. 2, 2016).
5. Tom Parker, The Ultimate Intervention: Revitalising the U.N.
Trusteeship Council for the 21st Century, Centre for European
and Asian Studies at Norwegian School of Management, 4 (Apr.
2003).
6. U.N. Charter, art. 76.
7. A.J.R. Groom, The Trusteeship Council: A Successful Demise, The
United Nations at the Millennium, The Principal Organs 142, 142
(Taylor, Groom, eds. 2000).
8. See U.N. Charter, arts. 75-77; Henry H. Perritt, Jr., Structures
and Standards for Political Trusteeship, UCLA Journal of
International Law and Foreign Affairs 385, 387 (2003).
9. United Nations Charter, Art. 77 (1945).
10. United Nations, United Nations and Decolonization.
11. Richard Caplan, A New Trusteeship?: The International
Administration of War-Torn Territories 11 (2014).
12. General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina,
Bosn. & Herz-Croat.-Yugo., ann. 10, art. 2 (Dec. 14, 1995).
13. The provisions of the Dayton Peace Agreement provided the High
Representative with the authority to reinterpret its mandate.
See Tim Banning, The Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law
of the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Chasing a
Legal Figment, Goettingen Journal of International Law, 259,
265 (2014).
14. United Nations, UNMIK Background.
15. U.N. Security Council Resolution 1244, S/Res/1244 art. 10 (Jun.
10, 1999).
16. Paul R. Williams and Francesca Jannotti Pecci, Earned Sovereignty:
Bridging the Gap Between Sovereignty and Self Determination, 40
Stan J. Int'l L. 1, 12-13 (2004).
17. Henry H. Perritt, Jr., Structures and Standards for Political
Trusteeship, UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign
Affairs 385, 402 (2003).
18. United Nations Regional Information Centre for Western Europe,
Kosovo 15 years later: Kouchner hails the success of the U.N.
(Jul. 3, 2014).
19. Dianne M. Criswell, Durable Consent and a Strong Transnational
Peacekeeping Plan: The Success of UNTAET in Light of Lessons
Learned in Cambodia, 11 Pacific Rim L. & Pol'y J. 578, 598-99
(2002).
20. United Nations, East Timor--UNTAET Background.
21. Rudiger Wolfrun, International Administration in Post-Conflict
Situations by the United Nations and Other International
Actors, 650, 663 Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law 9
(2005).
22. Rudiger Wolfrun, International Administration in Post-Conflict
Situations by the United Nations and Other International
Actors, 650, 675 Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law 9
(2005).
23. Michael Smith and Moreen Dee, Peacekeeping in East Timor,
International Peace Academy Occasional Paper Series 17 (2003).
24. Gareth Evans, Peacekeeping in Cambodia: Lessons Learned, NATO
Review (August 1994).
25. UNTAC Background, (last accessed Sept. 7, 2016).
26. Gareth Evans, Peacekeeping in Cambodia: Lessons Learned, NATO
Review (August 1994).
27. Agreement on Provisional Arrangements in Afghanistan Pending the
Re-Establishment of Permanent Government Institutions, Annex
II--Role of the United Nations During the Interim Period (Dec.
5, 2001).
28. U.N. Security Council Resolution 1386, S/Res/1386 (2001), (Dec.
20, 2001).
29. Coalition Provisional Authority Regulation 1, CPA/Reg/16 May 2003/
01, sec. 1 (2003).
30. Coalition Provisional Authority Regulation 1, CPA/Reg/16 May 2003/
01, sec. 1 (2003).
31. Henry H. Perritt, Jr., Structures and Standards for Political
Trusteeship, UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign
Affairs 385, 407 (2003).
32. Air Force University, Lessons Learned: Pre-War Planning for Post-
War Iraq; U.N. Security Council Resolution 1483, S/RES/1483
(May 22, 2003).
33. Air Force University, Lessons Learned: Pre-War Planning for Post-
War Iraq; U.N. Security Council Resolution 1483, S/RES/1483
(May 22, 2003); Eyal Benvenisti and Guy Keinan, The Occupation
of Iraq: A Reassessment, Blue Book Series of the U.S. Naval War
College, p. 279 at n. 23 (2010).
34. Coalition Provisional Authority Regulation 1, CPA/Reg/16 May 2003/
01, sec. 1 (2003).
35. Gareth Evans, Peacekeeping in Cambodia: Lessons Learned, NATO
Review (August 1994).
36. U.N. Security Council Resolution 1244, S/Res/1244 (Jun. 10, 1999).
37. United Nations Security Council Resolution 1264, S/Res/1264 (Sep.
15, 1999).
38. Trevor Findlay, Cambodia: The Legacy and Lessons of UNTAC,
Stockholm International Peace Research Institution, p. 111
(1995).
39. Trevor Findlay, Cambodia: The Legacy and Lessons of UNTAC,
Stockholm International Peace Research Institution, p. 112
(1995).
40. Henry H. Perritt, Jr., Structures and Standards for Political
Trusteeship, UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign
Affairs 385, 421 (2003).
41. Henry H. Perritt, Jr., Structures and Standards for Political
Trusteeship, UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign
Affairs 385, 421 (2003).
42. Henry H. Perritt, Jr., Structures and Standards for Political
Trusteeship, UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign
Affairs 385, 421 (2003).
43. U.N. Security Council Resolution 1244, S/Res/1244 art. 11(b) (Jun.
10, 1999).
44. Trevor Findlay, Cambodia: The Legacy and Lessons of UNTAC,
Stockholm International Peace Research Institution, p. 107
(1995).
45. U.N. Security Council Resolution 1272 art. 1, S/Res/1272 (Oct. 25,
1999).
46. Rudiger Wolfrun, International Administration in Post-Conflict
Situations by the United Nations and Other International
Actors, 650, 663 Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law 9
(2005).
47. See Markus Benzing, Midwifing a New State: The United Nations in
East Timor, 9 Yearbook of United Nations Law 295, 322-24
(2005).
48. General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina,
Bosn. & Herz-Croat.-Yugo., ann. 10, art. 2 (Dec. 14, 1995).
49. Rudiger Wolfrun, International Administration in Post-Conflict
Situations by the United Nations and Other International
Actors, 650, 675 Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law 9
(2005).
50. U.N. Security Council Resolution 1244, S/Res/1244 art. 10 (Jun.
10, 1999).
51. Celeste J. Ward, The Coalition Provisional Authority's Experience
with Governance in Iraq: Lessons Learned, The United States
Institute of Peace 11 (2005).
52. Gareth Evans, Peacekeeping in Cambodia: Lessons Learned, NATO
Review (August 1994).
53. Gareth Evans, Peacekeeping in Cambodia: Lessons Learned, NATO
Review (August 1994).
54. Trevor Findlay, Cambodia: The Legacy and Lessons of UNTAC,
Stockholm International Peace Research Institution, p. 111
(1995).
55. UNTAC Background.
56. United Nations Security Council Resolution 745, para. 2 (Feb. 28,
1992).
57. Trevor Findlay, Cambodia: The Legacy and Lessons of UNTAC,
Stockholm International Peace Research Institution, p. 102
(1995).
58. UNTAC Background.
59. U.N. Security Council Resolution 1272, S/Res/1272 (October 25,
1999); U.N. Security Council Resolution 1244, S/Res/1244 art.
10 (Jun. 10, 1999).
60. Tim Banning, The Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law of the
High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Chasing a Legal
Figment, Goettingen Journal Of International Law, 259, 266-268
(2014).
61. Rudiger Wolfrun, International Administration in Post-Conflict
Situations by the United Nations and Other International
Actors, 650, 662 Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law 9
(2005).
62. Tim Banning, The `Bonn Powers' of the High Representative in
Bosnia and Herzegovina: Chasing a Legal Figment, Goettingen
Journal of International Law, 259, 266-268 (2014).
63. Tim Banning, The `Bonn Powers' of the High Representative in
Bosnia and Herzegovina: Chasing a Legal Figment, Goettingen
Journal of International Law, 259, 266-268 (2014).
64. Tim Banning, The `Bonn Powers' of the High Representative in
Bosnia and Herzegovina: Chasing a Legal Figment, Goettingen
Journal of International Law, 259, 266-268 (2014).
65. David Chandler, State-Building in Bosnia: The Limits of ``Informal
Trusteeship,'' 1 International Journal of Peace Studies 17, 27
(2006).
66. Trevor Findlay, Cambodia: The Legacy and Lessons of UNTAC,
Stockholm International Peace Research Institution, p. 68
(1995).
67. Trevor Findlay, Cambodia: The Legacy and Lessons of UNTAC,
Stockholm International Peace Research Institution, p. 71
(1995).
68. Trevor Findlay, Cambodia: The Legacy and Lessons of UNTAC,
Stockholm International Peace Research Institution, p. 68
(1995).
69. Henry H. Perritt, Jr., Structures and Standards for Political
Trusteeship, UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign
Affairs 385, 422 (2003).
70. Henry H. Perritt, Jr., Structures and Standards for Political
Trusteeship, UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign
Affairs 385, 422 (2003).
71. Henry H. Perritt, Jr., Structures and Standards for Political
Trusteeship, UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign
Affairs 385, 422 (2003).
72. UNMIK, Regulation No. 2006/12 on the Establishment of the Human
Rights Advisory Panel, UNMIK/REG/2006/12 (Mar. 23, 2006).
73. Henry H. Perritt, Jr., Structures and Standards for Political
Trusteeship, UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign
Affairs 385, 469 (2003).
74. General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina,
Bosn. & Herz-Croat.-Yugo., ann. 10, art. 5 (Dec. 14, 1995).
75. Henry H. Perritt, Jr., Structures and Standards for Political
Trusteeship, UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign
Affairs 385, 469-70 (2003).
76. Henry H. Perritt, Jr., Structures and Standards for Political
Trusteeship, UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign
Affairs 385, 470-71 (2003).
77. Henry H. Perritt, Jr., Structures and Standards for Political
Trusteeship, UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign
Affairs 385, 471 (2003).
78. Henry H. Perritt, Jr., Structures and Standards for Political
Trusteeship, UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign
Affairs 385, 469-70 (2003).
79. Rudiger Wolfrun, International Administration in Post-Conflict
Situations by the United Nations and Other International
Actors, 650, 665 Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law 9
(2005).
80. Michael Smith and Moreen Dee, Peacekeeping in East Timor,
International Peace Academy Occasional Paper Series 25-26
(2003).
81. U.N. Security Council Resolution 1244, S/RES/1244 annex 2, art. 4
(Jun. 10, 1999).
82. United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo, UNMIK
Background.
83. NATO, NATO's Role in Kosovo.
84. U.N. Security Council Resolution 2089, S/RES/2089 art. 9 (Mar. 28,
2013).
85. U.N. Security Council Resolution 2098, S/RES/2098 art. 9 (Mar. 28,
2013).
86. N. Kulish & S. Sengupta, New U.N. Brigade's Aggressive Stance in
Africa Brings Success, and Risks, The New York Times (Nov. 12,
2013).
87. U.N. Security Council Resolution 2098, S/RES/2098 art. 12 (Mar.
28, 2013).
88. See Peace Security and Cooperation Framework for the Democratic
Republic of the Congo and the Region, S/2013/131 (Mar. 5,
2013); U.N. Security Council Resolution 2098 annex B (Mar. 28,
2013).
89. See N. Kulish & S. Sengupta, New U.N. Brigade's Aggressive Stance
in Africa Brings Success, and Risks, The New York Times (Nov.
12, 2013); Martha Mutisi, Redefining Peacekeeping: The Force
Intervention Brigade in the Democratic Republic of Congo, The
Social Science Research Council (Jul. 26, 2015).
90. N. Kulish & S. Sengupta, New U.N. Brigade's Aggressive Stance in
Africa Brings Success, and Risks, The New York TimeS (Nov. 12,
2013).
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93. Rudiger Wolfrun, International Administration in Post-Conflict
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Situations by the United Nations and Other International
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(2005).
95. Rudiger Wolfrun, International Administration in Post-Conflict
Situations by the United Nations and Other International
Actors, 650, 673 Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law 9
(2005)
96. Rudiger Wolfrun, International Administration in Post-Conflict
Situations by the United Nations and Other International
Actors, 650, 674 Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law 9
(2005).
97. Princeton Lyman and Kate Almquist Knopf, To save South Sudan, put
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