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markets. of a possible default. after decades of war oil rich south sudan is preparing for upcoming independence now a debate show. if it's at risk of becoming a failed state the moment of birth. if you can. follow and welcome to cross talk i'm peter lavelle after decades of conflict in a war south sudan is set to become an independent state on july ninth as the world

intice to pay for this event there are lingering questions surrounding the viability of this new oil rich country has south sudan failed even before its established. and you can. see. to cross talk to future of south sudan i'm joined by my guests in washington jonathan temin he is the director of the sudan program at the united states institute of peace john campbell he's the ralph bunche senior fellow for african policy studies at the council on foreign relations and need a cooter he is an african political analyst all right gentlemen this is cross talk that means cross talk rules in effect i mean you can jump in anytime you want need i'd like to go to you first in washington and looking at the future of south sudan and will have its independence in a few hours is it mission impossible or is it already mission failed. oh it's neither of those those i don't think those are the possible outcomes of course

everything's in the air it depends on what happens more than it depends on what important act is do the leadership in south sudan the people in government or not want to become known then sudan the people of southern sudan the international community and of cause the neighboring african countries so there are a lot of fact is i actually think the future of the south sudan while while it is not problem free is is much more positive than i have seen in the media they have a number of important since go in for them but a lot of their reporting has been on the difficulties which is right but we mustn't forget that the important things go in for them international goodwill they have a lot of all you know that i'm the small fairchild on the north and the people most important for if you look at the referendum the people voted this is something that people really want and where there is a will there is there is a way ok mr ambassador john campbell if i go to you i'll repeat my question is it

mission impossible mission failed already because as we already heard there's a lot of ifs out there and i'd like to point out this is seems to be a very important foreign policy objective of the united states a lot of money has been poured into this endeavor what are your thoughts on. it is certainly not mission impossible but it is however a challenging mission. a number of the very important issues between south sudan and sudan and the khartoum government still need to be worked through for example only about eighty percent of the border has been delineated then there is the question of how the oil revenue is going to be shared what arrangements there going to be for export in the oil most of which goes out through port sudan which is in the north and then there is the nationality question what do

you do about people from the south who live in the north and vice versa these are important issues left over from the comprehensive peace agreement that have not yet been resolved and then there is the question of the south sudan's own institutional development one of the things we have seen is that in countries which have enormous amounts of oil there are is heavy institutional stress how in other words do you make best use of the oil revenue and prevent it from essential going into the pockets of a few corrupt individuals ok i don't really know and i'd like to bring in jonathan here i mean we've heard a lot it looks like this is a new state built on a lot of hope is that is that. point too much cold water on the future of this new country. it is built on a lot of hope ninety eight percent or more of south sudanese voted to secede and

that was a legitimate ninety eight percent that's almost unanimous which is really a remarkable thing it will be a state boring week but i don't think it will be a state born failed i think that's unfair to the south sudanese but the challenge is that a massive campbell talks about are real and i will add one more which is that there are real ethnic divides within the south and there are perceptions that the southern government and the southern leadership are dominated by a few ethnic groups and that's something that the southern people will have to deal with early on that kind of ethnic division has been very problematic in other parts of africa and i'd like to go to you i mean when helping some south sudan develop its institutions it looks like the military and security get a lion's share of foreign aid united states state department is one hundred million dollars a year at the expense of everything else infrastructure wise and we're talking about one of the poorest places on the planet is that a wise move. well i think it's. it's an understandable move to

begin with i mean notice that in my mind could this and i are all in washington and we have our fingers down on how sudan policy gets me and i think people have been rightly worried about the war in their domain eighteen. of the sudan and we're in for the last few days president bashir has made a lot of very worrying statements and there is war on the border. and in southern kordofan so yes you have to look at the security but everything that has been said i agree totally with because of the especially the challenges of oil and ethnicity we have to help the sudan southern sudanese the u.s. and others who have to help them to build their institutions incidentally i think if you stray as democrats see you will of wired world people wrongly called the oil case it is not their kids what is necessary is once you have oil you have to build

strong institutions to deal with the oil the united states is well endowed with oil it doesn't corrupt. their country as much as people assume for other places so i do think that yes the focus on military security may seem skewed but that is their fair step now the hard work begins there and one side today comes the country. independent the bush should not say everything is done and goof and particularly people like me octave east and people in the united states who do put pressure on what the u.s. ought to do we have our work cut out for us to pressure the u.s. government to build the i'm very institutions i think i share the concern in your question that you should do begins military only well let's talk about the military here if i go to the ambassador human rights watch and amnesty international are very concerned about the funding of the military in the south because they know. soldiers have been responsible for grave human rights abuses including unlawful

killings of civilians and looting and destruction of civilian property i mean again i mean this is such a is this a good time for independence if you have you have militias and security forces that are not very disciplined to be polite the security situation is extraordinarily difficult it's very easy in the you for leading up to. it it's very easy to simply put aside the fact that there is active fighting going on and they in south kordofan there there are claims by various ethnic groups of north north sudan sensually trying to destroy them as independent entities in other words south sudan has to have at this stage a robust security establishment all of that said it is perfectly true that in south

sudan as elsewhere in africa the behavior and the training of the military is not necessarily what we would like it also makes the training of military all the more important and it's interesting jonathan if i go to you i mean it's an interesting mix here i mean the united states has been spending enormous money amount of money on the security situation there and as it was pointed out on this program there's a heck of a lot of oil there i think there's an estimated six billion barrels of oil on the ground underground i mean so you have a very large security force and a lot of oil is not a good make speak why witness security forces be more interested in revenues. well it's important to keep in mind that the southern army of the sudan people's liberation army is the largest employer in south sudan by far this is going to be a country with very little employment opportunity now the s.p.l. a is too large everybody recognizes that and there are

a lot of soldiers in there who should probably be demobilized but it's very difficult for the southern government to do that because there are few alternatives in terms of employment for any demobilized soldiers and there's a chance that any demobilized soldiers might revolt or join some of the current rebellions in the south so that's really a sensitive issue for this southern leadership i think the south is actually rather unified around their oil and they're certainly unified around keeping as much of the oil and keeping as much of the profits as they can but there is certainly speculation about corruption in the oil sector and speculation that the army has been involved in that i mean if i go to you do you see a possible future for south sudan light maybe like nigeria because of the oil. number one i hope not number two i don't really think it because i think of cause they'll be overlaps they'll be they'll be similarities but i think for me the

differences will be essential because if nothing else we have the example of nigeria to to to look out and to try to avoid the things that got them in trouble and so i must emphasize again i think the good is making sure that we build democratic institutions the challenges that michael panel is i've mentioned i'll correct in the give them the right emphasis jobs they don't mean ones of the army and the dominance of the s.p.l. and the ethnic issues but i think we do have the example of other problem areas in africa that the southern sudanese people and the government how can watch by the do need international help and international assistance and i must also add that i'm on the hopeful side and not not tonight and i sense because you know we are in washington washington yes celebrate a good life for over two hundred years of the end dependence if you cast your mind back it looked like

a very impossible mission when windows peter was declare independence and so when people feel strongly about it they can take on the challenges i do think we must find time to talk about the rule of khartoum and president bashir here because with all of the internal challenges on the in sudan i do think are you willing to sign sadly as we are after we return from a break after the break we'll continue our discussion and spend state. still.

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china for asia. to. talk about remind you we're talking about the birth of another sudan. ok mr mesereau like to go to you now and it was mentioned before going to the break what about the north north sudan as it will be and they're out of the new country to the south can they make or break the possibility of a sovereign state a state that can actually take care of itself with all that oil by the way but nonetheless what cards they play to make or break the new country. well. they

certainly have the potential if for example you have full scale warfare breaking out between south sudan and sudan and the north the the emergence of south sudan will become infinitely more complicated i note that according to the press this morning by sheer will be in juba for the the end dependence day celebrations i hope that is correct because ever since the comprehensive peace agreements were signed the north has dragged its feet. on the process by shear himself openly and publicly except the end dependents of south sudan but bashir has an opposition he has an opposition in khartoum there are others in khartoum who are not happy at all about south sudan becoming independent not least because of the oil there is

a kind of mantra that you can sometimes hear in khartoum to the effect of that bashir has lost south sudan bashir has failed to end the crisis in darfur and the shearers approach to the opposition in khartoum. is repressive so bashir is not a totally independent actor in all of this ok jonathan what do you think about that i mean when that when the noise seize all this oil and i do point out i mean right now the oil does go through the north for exports so i mean there is some kind of interdependence already built into this relationship irrespective of attitudes political attitudes about the independence of the new state. and this is why the oil is actually a positive factor in terms of north-south relations in some ways because there is such mutual dependence between the north and the south in order for both of them to get their oil revenue the south gets about ninety eight percent of its revenue from

oil almost all of their revenue comes from oil the north the numbers are a little fuzzy but probably something in the neighborhood of sixty percent of their revenue comes from oil they both need it they can't afford to live without it despite some of the heated rhetoric that we're seeing and so the fact that almost all the oil about eighty percent of it comes out of the ground in the south but then goes through pipelines in the north and refineries in the north means that they have to work out a deal on oil they can't afford to do anything else and so i think there will be a deal on oil probably not by saturday july ninth but they have agreed to keep talking and i think that mutual dependence does act as a brake on the return to full scale civil war which i don't think is likely i do think it's likely that we're going to see some of this violence around the north-south border for some time to come and you want to jump in there. yes i want to i think the ambassador is very right i mean jonathan is right to buy the

ambassador made the point of president bashir in the north not be a new independent and i think that is totally true you shed some light on there he had been saying that he's some. genuine decision of the south to bridge to when he sent seed but then he were seen beginning last week and since he came back he's been very beleaguered what i want to see not go far in the northern china china's relationship by sheer which also would bring in their rule of the united states i mean we all know president obama is. not forgotten and he's taken interest in africa issue from two others missus. this is obama was yes in south africa so i hope that behind the scenes president obama is talking today chinese because there have an important influence on on both. sudan's especially the north

because the our land is problem by companies from three countries the major one being chinese company it is a law that is sold to china and order by she has come from china so i hope the u.s. is talking to china so that they play a constructive role because you're not going to is right they are. dealt with properly can reduce the friction between the two countries because unlike you said yes they both need to do so it can be a positive factor and you're saying that mr ambassador i'm going to you know i did during celebrations on saturday. in the new country there's going to be a lot of dignitaries there i think colin powell is going to be there the current u.s. u.s. representative the united nations susan rice is going to be there and a lot of other dignitaries is it all about oil i mean if it were any other if there were no oil there do you think a lot of dignitaries would be showing. yes yes i think there would be a lot of dignitaries showing up because yes oil is important but what is also

important is that this marks the errand of a conflict which has gone on for almost a generation. i mean the warfare between between the north and the south has marred africa for for more than twenty years i want to take this opportunity though to jump in with respect to the mutual dependence of the south and the north on each other and with the particular focus on oil it's perfectly true yes indeed they're mutually dependent the question becomes whether the leadership of the two and here i would particularly focus on khartoum whether the leadership of the two recognize that fact and are willing to take that reality into account as they develop their policies that's what we're

going to have to watch over the over the next several weeks. to share concern about the belligerence of comments that bashir has been making over over the past week or so i will be watching with a great deal of interest about what he actually says on independence day and the day after what do you think about that jonathan the meaning if there if we have by sure is not so secure is a lot of people mate that might think he is i mean he can have a lot of trouble he's going to have to start saying the right things a respect if it's against his own country's best interest as we've been talking about this interdependence i mean if no one gets any money if the poison pumped out of the country so i mean what kind of what kind of variables is he could have to deal with to get to maintain his power base but he still accept that a new country has come into being. well when we talk about him saying the right things it depends what audience he's talking to and the right things for the

international audience can be very different then the right things for the domestic northern sudanese audience the message that president bush here in the n.c.p. leadership are trying to send right now within the north is that we are in control and that there aren't going to be any more breakaways like what we're seeing in southern sudan and this i think explains to some extent the violence that we're currently seeing in southern kordofan state and the efforts to disarm some troops in southern kordofan state in the north who are aligned with the south and that of course has been a rather violent process to go back to oil as well i think it's important not to overemphasize the importance of oil in sudan it's a medium well there are about four hundred. that doesn't make it a bank's right level producer and for the u.s. oil is actually not that important because the u.s. doesn't consume any suit as of the sanctions that the u.s. has on sudan so this has as much to do with the history and the bloodshed that

ambassador campbell was talking about as the oil it's not just an oil story me if i go to you when you know what kind of precedent is being said here could we see even regions within south sudan start breaking apart or even the north seeing seeing the state of the north start collapsing if once we see bashir whatever moves he makes one way or another it could destabilize the north as well we've been focusing a lot on the south what about the north yes that is absolutely true and it's and the air i have i hope it doesn't happen i mean the ambassador is right that there was been going on for a long time but i would take it even further you know i'm from gun i'm going to begin to plan in one nine hundred fifty seven sudan actually became independent. and the tensions that broke out into non-self fighting actually you can see signs of it in one thousand nine hundred fifty six so the conflict has actually been there for more than fifty years so this brick of the south and the

ninety eight percent for the referendum to me tells me that this was a special case and that i hope it doesn't spread to other parts of. northern sudan trying to break up i mean there's even some talk among some of the other had made groups that well in southern sudan i don't want to put too much of a fine point on it but people always talk about britain you know we i think you should be the exception rather than the rule and i hope it doesn't happen in other parts of sudan by beyond who it depends on how the government governs the country if people feel that their wishes and grievances are taking to our count in the i listen to even if there are problems. and also all day which. allows as in the short time left to give some thought to places like darfur and of cause there sanctions the u.s. as it is now the tsunami was mentioned but again i think washington if it is

created this special. lyman if it is creative those pressure points can actually be used not just on by sheer but also on the oprah zisha and also rebels in other areas like darfur to mention that there are no more breaks because i think that's a general rule i don't like to see brit guards in africa with our military benefits political politico people more than ordinary citizens but in that case on southern sudan i think it's the session that proves the rule ok jonathan i'm going to give you the last word in the program what is the future of thirty second. i think the biggest challenge in south sudan is for the south sudanese to define themselves and to define what it means to be south sudanese for a long time what has held southerners together is getting to this referendum

getting to this and dependence and also the common enemy that they see in the north it's now time to get beyond that and to define what it means to be a member of this there a new brand new country of south sudan ok that's a very good point to end the program on many thanks to my guest today in washington thanks to our viewers for watching us here r.t. see you next time and remember crosstalk.