While negotiations over the border are deadlocked in the short term, the out-look is also troubling for the long-term future of the border, whatever the result of any eventual talks.
The 27 September Border Agreement enshrines the idea of a ‘soft’ border with an ‘integrated border management approach’. While the agreement is long on establishing committees and recognizing hierarchies of responsibility, it is short on how a soft border can actually be achieved on the ground. In part, this is promising: one of the advantages of a soft border is that it is flexible and can adapt to changing circumstances.
However, given the current situation, a commitment to a soft border is not likely to satisfy communities along the border. Soft borders require positive inter-community relations. As shall be explored in the following case studies, in many places along the border community relations have almost completely broken down. In these environments, active government involvement and security guarantees for migrants will be needed for successful transhumant grazing.
At present, the state infrastructure is not in place to produce such guarantees:
instead of protecting the migrants, the SPLA is harassing them.
The situation in Abyei exemplifies some of the problems associated with the idea of a soft border. Any group crossing a soft border may well be a militia.
Given the NCP’s proclivity to use the Missiriya as a proxy force, soft borders could allow the Sudanese state to advance its interests under the guise of
pastoralist activity. Given the primary focus on security in the 27 September Border Agreement, militia activity would immediately harden a soft border.
In this context, the agreement’s lack of specificity about soft borders becomes troubling. The Missiriya do not trust the ABC and PCA, partly because the rights of movement and grazing, referred to in the CPA and subsequent accords, have no enforcement mechanisms. Also, the structure of the agreements does not allow for any discussion of the real changes to secondary rights that will result from the imposition of a national border. It is this absence of debate that underlies the maximal claims being made by communities up and down the border.
II. The Northern Bahr el Ghazal–East Darfur border
Overall findings:
• Grazing agreements between the Rizeigat and the Malual Dinka are increas-ingly strained. Missiriya pastoralists did not cross into Northern Bahr el Ghazal state during the 2011–12 grazing season.
• The breakdown in grazing agreements with the Rizeigat is partly because the Rizeigat political elite in Khartoum and Ed Da’ein refuses to participate in negotiations with host communities in South Sudan. The GoS is actively trying to discourage pastoralist migration to the South in order to prevent the consolidation of links between the Rizeigat and forces inside South Sudan.
Those who do come South to graze and trade tend to have links to, or are members of, the SPLM-N. Internal conflict in Sudan is inextricably bound up with the crisis in the border region.
• In Northern Bahr el Ghazal, there is a resurgent nationalism among the Malual Dinka. In places like Warrawa and Gokk Machar, communities have little inter-est in acknowledging the grazing rights of Northern pastoralists who spent 20 years raiding them; it has largely been the state government that has guaran-teed the passage of Northern migrants. Given that the 27 September Security Agreement indicates that ‘joint tribal mechanisms’ will resolve disputes in the SDBZ, if implemented, this bodes ill for the coexistence of the Rizeigat and Malual Dinka.
• There is widespread resistance in Northern Bahr el Ghazal to the imposition of a demilitarized zone in the 14-Mile Area. While this opposition has re-cently softened, the centrality of the Samaha–Kiir Adem area to the SPLM-N and JEM means that the successful demilitarization of this area will be a real test of the 27 September agreements.
• Contemporary relationships between the Malual Dinka and northern pasto-ralists groups are largely inheritances from the second civil war.
Introduction
Until the dispute over the 14-Mile Area in October 2012,53 relations between communities living along the border between Northern Bahr el Ghazal and East Darfur54 were better than those along any other segment of the Sudan–
South Sudan border in the post-CPA period. Trade between groups living along the border has continued since Southern Sudanese independence, following contact during the second civil war, when the SPLA encouraged the Rizeigat to come to ‘peace markets’ around Samaha (SUPRAID, BYDA, and Concern Worldwide, 2004). There have also been successful meetings to negotiate graz-ing rights for Northern pastoralists seekgraz-ing dry season pasture.55 The relative success of these meetings is due to three central factors:
1. A relative lack of NCP politicization among the Rizeigat has meant that, unlike for the Missiriya in Abyei, local political dynamics have not been overwhelmed by national politics.
2. Governor Paul Malong Awan’s powerful control of Northern Bahr el Ghazal state56 has meant agreements with Northern nomads, that are underwritten by the state, have a degree of efficacy not found in states where the political administration has less control over armed elements along the border (e.g.
Unity state).
3. While there is a great degree of historic mistrust of the Rizeigat among the Malual Dinka, because of some of the Rizeigat’s actions during the second civil war, the antipathy between the two groups is not as intense as that between the Missiriya and the Ngok Dinka in Abyei; trading and pastoralist movement continued, albeit in reduced form, during the second civil war, allowing for a greater continuity of practice post-2005.
That said, while the Northern Bahr el Ghazal–East Darfur border worked better for traders and pastoralists than the borders of other states between 2005 and 2011, it still did not work very well.
In 2012, the Rizeigat and Missiriya reported harassment from the SPLA on the southern side of the border, and from SAF in Sudan, which prevented pastoralists and traders from crossing the border.57 Decades of distrust, built up during the war, and growing nationalism in South Sudan, threaten to under-mine community relations in Northern Bahr el Ghazal. This situation could
explode if the SPLM pressures the state government to move the military back from areas that Northern Bahr el Ghazal state believes it owns because of its struggle to win their possession during a bloody second civil war.58