Secretary of State Hillary Clinton makes her first visit to South Sudan Friday, making her the highest-ranking US official to visit the world’s newest country. Her trip could not come at a more important time. The UN Security Council gave South Sudan and Sudan until August 2 to move forward with political negotiations and enabling humanitarian access to Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile, where more than 665,000 people have been internally displaced or severely affected by conflict according to the UN. Both countries are now in violation of this ultimatum, putting them at risk of UN sanctions. In the meantime, civilians on both sides of the border are suffering, including 4.7 million people in South Sudan—half the country’s population—who do not have enough food to eat.

A new borehole drilled by Oxfam in Warrap State, South Sudan. Photo by Noah Gottschalk

The official purpose of the trip—part of a seven-nation tour of Africa—is to “reaffirm U.S. support and encourage progress in negotiations  with Sudan to reach agreement on issues related to security, oil and citizenship.” The US has remained deeply invested, both through ongoing high-level diplomacy and through the provision of significant humanitarian and development assistance, in trying to help South Sudan find its way out of the worst crisis since the end of the two decades’ long civil war. By sending America’s most senior diplomat, however, Washington is signaling its escalating concern as well as its impatience with the slow pace of progress.

In his remarks marking the country’s independence just over one year ago, President Obama expressed his confidence that “the bonds of friendship between South Sudan and the United States will only deepen in the years to come.” But being a true friend means speaking hard truths, and Secretary Clinton must use the opportunity of her visit to express concern with the political developments which are having such a massive humanitarian impact on South Sudanese civilians and putting at risk the hard-won gains of peace.

In December, I watched Secretary Clinton address the International Engagement Conference on South Sudan in Washington. In one of the most frank speeches of the two-day event, she welcomed the new nation to the international stage while clearly outlining the challenges ahead. While lauding the new country on achieving its “quest for peace and dignity”, she urged South Sudan to “move forward”, “leave war behind”, and “finalize [the] hard-won peace”. Her discussions with senior South Sudanese officials in Juba, including President Salva Kiir, will not be easy. As Clinton herself recognized, South Sudan has many reasons to be skeptical of continued diplomacy, and progress depends on a “willing partner in Khartoum”. Nevertheless, both countries have no other option but to end their political and economic crisis through negotiations. By sending this message, Secretary Clinton joins the growing voices in South Sudanese civil society urging the government to make the difficult compromises necessary to stop the spiraling crisis in the immediate term, and over the long run, to enable a brighter future for the people of both Sudan and South Sudan.

Credit: Noah Gottschalk

As South Sudan celebrates the first anniversary of its separation from Sudan, the world’s newest nation faces multiple challenges including simmering tensions along the border, the influx of an estimated 165,500 refugees from ongoing conflict in Sudan, inter-communal conflicts, and an economy crippled by the closure of the border and shutdown of oil production. Perhaps most alarming, however, is the escalating food crisis threatening nearly half of the country’s 9.7 million inhabitants according to recent UN estimates. As the government, UN, and NGOs struggle to respond, the country is anticipating the arrival of hundreds of thousands of South Sudanese who are among the last remaining in Sudan and now face an uncertain future back ‘home’. These returnees are triply vulnerable. The already difficult return and reintegration process ahead of them is exacerbated by the economic crisis in South Sudan, while the multiple and overlapping challenges facing the fledgling state means that returnees’ needs are being overshadowed by broader crises. Instead of a joyful homecoming, they face a future of uncertainty as the country marks the anniversary of its political independence with only the certainty that it will remain dependent on foreign assistance for the foreseeable future.

I recently traveled to South Sudan, where I had a chance to speak with some of the newly arriving returnees. They told me about their journey and about their friends and relatives still on the way. In Wau, I spoke to returnees unloading their possessions from a train that had just arrived from Sudan. They described the economic and political pressures to leave Sudan, including the loss of Sudanese citizenship, and the difficult, 18-day train journey ‘home’. A tall Dinka woman wearing a brightly-colored Sudanese tobe and a black ski cap eloquently described her journey from a South Sudanese area of Khartoum all the way to Wau. She had never been to South Sudan and spoke Dinka with noticeable difficulty. Like many others I spoke with, she had little idea of what she would do in South Sudan. Her husband had returned many months earlier, but she had no means of finding him after her mobile phone, which contained his contact details, was stolen. A short while later, a shy 17 year old boy told me how he had come to South Sudan alone, and had no idea where to go and no way of finding friends or relatives. He was coming to the station whenever a new train of returnees arrived in the hopes of running into someone he knew who might be able to help him.

Such stories of people trying to establish a new life in an unfamiliar and challenging new environment were common throughout the years between the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in 2005 and the referendum on the future of South Sudan in 2011. In that six year period, the return of Southern Sudanese was a political imperative for the Government of Southern Sudan and hundreds of thousands returned from Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, the Republic of Sudan, Egypt, and further afield with significant attention and financial support from the government and the international community. Events since then, however, have created an environment where the needs of returnees have been overshadowed. Nevertheless, tens of thousands of South Sudanese continue to return. Once their journey is over, they join nearly a million recent returnees struggling to find their feet in a land that is technically at peace but still very much in crisis.

Despite South Sudan’s huge potential and abundant natural resources, half a century of marginalization and conflict has left the country severely impoverished, with extremely low literacy rates, high levels of displacement, and woefully inadequate infrastructure and public services. Although the seven years since the signing of the CPA enabled greater efforts to address these fundamental issues, investment has fallen short of needs. In the year since South Sudan gained its independence, however, the country risks backsliding  in the face of an economic outlook and austerity measures that slashed budgets for almost all social services. At the same time, politicized tribal conflict, ongoing militia activity, and conflict along the border with Sudan threaten the physical safety of civilians across South Sudan. For returnees, this means returning to a volatile and potentially dangerous independent homeland with only minimal support.

Reintegration and absorption capacity within South Sudan is already extremely limited. The disproportionate focus on the physical return of displaced southerners over their reintegration which characterized the CPA period continues today, and as a result many thousands of returnees are still awaiting assistance and access to land.

Those reintegration efforts that do exist tend to be heavily focused on return to rural areas, with far too little attention on either the link between rural livelihoods and constraints on access to land, or on return to urban areas. Returnees who do not want to settle in rural areas—either because they are uncomfortable with a rural lifestyle, lack connections to those ‘areas of origin’, or because those areas lack basic services—regularly face difficulty in acquiring land in towns. This is for multiple reasons, including government policies which seek to avoid overcrowding of towns, particularly state capitals. The scarcity of job opportunities in urban areas and insufficient programming to target returnees seeking to live in towns, particularly in places like Kuajok and Aweil, have the potential to leave large numbers of recent returnees without any means of sustainably supporting themselves and their families. The Government of South Sudan has a policy that commits it to providing basic services and assistance to returnees. But its ability to deliver is now in question under the austerity budget. Therefore, the government must urgently revisit and outline its reintegration plan, with both humanitarian and development actors involved, to assess the ability to support new arrivals and provide resolution to outstanding issues, such as land distribution, for those returnees already in South Sudan.

More broadly, the oil shutdown in South Sudan brings into critical focus the need for South Sudan to diversify its economy, and particularly to  develop its full agricultural potential for the benefit of all South Sudanese, including returnees. Ultimately, South Sudan must escape cyclical food insecurity and dependence on emergency food aid. It needs to support vibrant markets and a diverse economy, while building a social safety net. For this to become a reality, the international community must continue to pursue all channels to support negotiated solutions to the conflict between Sudan and South Sudan and the resolution of the outstanding CPA issues. Without real peace, there can be no full humanitarian access, durable solutions for Sudanese refugees, or the sustainable development solutions necessary to build a resilient and self-sufficient South Sudan.

Read more about what Oxfam is doing in Sudan and South Sudan.

President Obama’s decision earlier this month to deploy approximately 100 US troops to central Africa in support of regional efforts to defeat the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has attracted both praise and criticism. As one of the only international NGOs providing humanitarian aid in LRA-affected areas of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Oxfam’s primary concern is that any efforts to address the LRA learn from the mistakes of past counter-LRA efforts and ensure that the protection of civilians is at the center of any intervention.

This is not the first time that the United States has intervened militarily in pursuit of the rebel group. Since 2008, the US has provided more than 40 million dollars of logistical assistance, training, and equipment to support regional efforts against the LRA. In December 2008, the US supported Operation Lightning Thunder, a disastrous joint military campaign conducted by the armies of the DRC, Uganda, and South Sudan. The operation not only failed to eliminate senior LRA leaders, but led to vicious reprisal attacks against civilians in eastern DRC and South Sudan, which killed approximately 865 women, men, and children. There is an even longer history of military campaigns by Uganda–where the LRA originated–which did little to dislodge senior leadership while inflicting massive suffering on the civilian population of northern Uganda.

Marie-Paul Kimakosa, 18, with 12 month-old son Emmanuel Mbolina, and Mado, 3 (sleeping). Formerly of Ngilima village, Marie-Paul lost her husband, her father, grand-father, grand-mother to the LRA. Two cousins have been kidnapped and not returned. She fled to Dungu where she has settled with other Internally Displaced Persons. Photo by Simon Rawles/Oxfam.

Focusing exclusively on military solutions to the LRA only deals with one piece of the problem: it is no coincidence that the LRA preys on villages in the most remote and underdeveloped areas of central Africa. The lack of basic infrastructure or effective protection by police, the Congolese military, or international peacekeepers makes vulnerable people easy targets for killing, abduction, and looting.

Although military experts have suggested that the LRA may have been significantly degraded militarily, it nevertheless retains the capacity to displace, abduct, rape, and kill hundreds of thousands. Nearly 440,000 people remain displaced by the LRA in the region, not including those who flee attacks for short periods of time and then return home. Such violence and displacement further entrench poverty and vulnerability for hundreds of thousands. Accordingly, the US needs to do much more to make these communities less vulnerable by developing infrastructure such as increased phone coverage and roads, but also by helping to address the absence of effective state presence and protection which made these areas attractive to the LRA in the first place and continue to allow them to operate freely today.

This is not just good sense; it is also the law. In May 2010, President Obama signed the bipartisan Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009, which made it the policy of the US to “work with regional governments toward a comprehensive and lasting resolution” to LRA-affected areas by providing humanitarian aid and “providing political, economic, military and intelligence support” for both military and non-military strategies to defeat senior leadership of the LRA and disarm and demobilize lower-level fighters.

To operationalize this law, nearly a year ago the Obama administration released a strategy with four key objectives: to 1) increase protection of civilians, 2) ‘apprehend or remove from the battlefield Joseph Kony and senior commanders’, 3) promote defection and DDR (disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration) of LRA fighters, and 4) increase humanitarian access to LRA- affected communities. Some progress has been made over the past year since this groundbreaking strategy was announced, but much more still needs to be done.

Oxfam has conducted annual surveys in eastern DRC for the last five years to better understand the threats and challenges people face as well as their suggestions for national and international actions to help them live in safety and dignity. In 2011, Oxfam interviewed 322 people across nine LRA-affected communities in Haut Uélé Province; 62% of all those interviewed—and the vast majority of women and children—said that they felt less safe than last year.

One important way to help people to feel more secure is to ensure that the Congolese security forces actually protect people from the LRA and other threats. Unfortunately, people interviewed by Oxfam cited the Congolese police and army as both protective forces and as abusers of power. Accordingly, US efforts to combat the LRA should include supporting the security sector reforms that communities say will most directly improve their safety, including providing for soldiers’ pay and welfare, garrisoning troops to reduce tensions with communities, enhancing discipline and justice, and providing training in human rights. Next week, I’ll write more about the non-military means the US should pursue to defeat the LRA and help protect the hundreds of thousands of people who continue to leave in fear of rebel attacks.

Update 25 October 11: Today I live-tweeted Congress’ first-ever hearing on the LRA from the House of Representative’s Foreign Affairs Committee. It was great to see the strong bipartisan support from Committee Members for enhancing US involvement in helping to reduce the suffering caused by LRA. Not enough attention, however, was given to the non-military aspects of the LRA strategy including encouraging the demobilization of lower-level fighters and providing humanitarian and development assistance. In response, Oxfam America released this statement reminding policymakers of the obligation under the law to take a more comprehensive approach.

This blog was written by Noah Gottschalk, Senior policy advisor for humanitarian response.

The Republic of South Sudan will become the world’s newest country on July 9, just over three weeks from today. Casting a shadow over the celebrations that should mark South Sudan’s first independence day will be the situation along the new country’s border with the north.

Since I last wrote about the contested area of Abyei, from which the United Nations now estimates over 100,000 people have been displaced, the situation has deteriorated, with fighting spreading to neighboring South Kordofan. Latest reports indicate 6,000 people are seeking safe haven around the UN compound in the state capital Kadugli, with estimates of nearly 60,000 more displaced and unknown numbers seeking refuge in the Nuba Mountains, their exact whereabouts and condition unknown. To further complicate matters, ongoing violence and serious fuel shortages are making it harder for people to flee fighting and for aid groups to reach people in need. Higher fuel costs also mean higher commodity prices, a serious problem in a place where 90% of people live on less than one dollar a day.

While aid efforts are underway to assist people who have fled Abyei, the UN has been investigating why its peacekeepers were unable to prevent the crisis from escalating in the first place. Last week, General Babacar Gaye, the former commander of UN troops in neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo and currently the top adviser to the UN’s Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) visited Sudan to find out for himself. His conclusions were damning. A spokesman said the peacekeepers “could have and should have had more visibility to deter any violence against civilians” and insisted that they would learn from these mistakes.

This family recently returned to southern Sudan after 21 years of living in the north, in the hope that after independence they would be able to have a better future. Photo by Caroline Gluck/Oxfam

Discussions in New York over the coming weeks will have a big role in determining if this will actually happen. South Sudan will get a new UN Peacekeeping mission when it becomes a new country. At issue is whether the new mission prioritizes the protection of civilians from violence with a mandate under Chapter VII of the UN Charter to physically intervene – with force if necessary – when civilians’ lives – including aid workers – are under threat. Some within the US government are reluctant to give the new mission the mandate to do so, worrying that it might be seen as undermining the new government of South Sudan. The reality, however, is that the new government, despite its laudable public commitments to protecting its people from violence, still needs support from the international community. The new government continues to work to transform its fighting forces into a professional army and to develop a civilian police service, and faces significant challenges in protecting southern Sudanese against the wide array of threats they face. North-South tensions are not the only such threats: civilians are also increasingly put at risk by violence between the SPLA and other armed groups, large scale clashes between communities, and the ongoing threat of the Lord’s Resistance Army.

As one of my colleagues working in Juba recently said, “Protection of civilians is an extremely complex, resource-intensive and politically sensitive task, one which arguably UNMIS was not set up to effectively do.” We can change that if the new mission gets it right from the start. It should have a mandate both to protect civilians from violence and to work with the new government to make it better able to protect its own people in the longer term, so in the future it can do so without a peacekeeping force.

In January, President Obama described the relatively peaceful referendum in which southern Sudanese overwhelmingly voted for secession as giving “the world renewed faith in the prospect of a peaceful, prosperous future for all of the Sudanese people — a future that the American people long to see in Sudan.” That future is at risk right now. But our government can and must make the right decisions to support the world’s newest country and its people, and to restore the hope we all felt just five months ago. Supporting a Chapter VII mandate is the best way to start.

This blog was written by Noah Gottschalk, Senior policy advisor for humanitarian response

Tensions are running high in Sudan, where an upsurge in violence in the border region of Abyei has displaced tens of thousands of people and raised fears of a return to all-out war.

With just over six weeks to go before South Sudan becomes the world’s newest country, the world’s focus has largely been on the incredible accomplishments of the largely peaceful referendum held last January to determine the future of Sudan. The results of that vote, which was a key provision of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that ended more than two decades of conflict, were overwhelmingly for secession, and southerners have been readying themselves for what they had hoped would be a peaceful independence day.

Yet with the violence in Abyei – an area roughly the size of Connecticut that was one of the worst-affected areas during the war and has long been seen as a key flashpoint of conflict –the security situation is on a knife-edge. The conflict in Abyei comes at a time when southern Sudan is facing its most violent year since the end of the civil war in 2005. Not including these recent events, over 1,400 people have been killed in southern Sudan so far this year – already more than in the whole of 2010 – and at least 117,000 have fled their homes, as violence has dramatically increased in recent months.

The Sudan referendum happened peacefully, but violence has broken out in the border region of Abyei. Photo by Alun McDonald/Oxfam