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arab experts have warned of a high chance that the launch would be delayed by bad weather but in the end it did blast off just about a minute about. one thirty one am here in moscow after decades of war and bloodshed southern sudan is getting ready to break free and go it alone next on our . guest discussed whether it's already at risk of failure even before it flies its first flag of independence. and. hello and welcome to cross talk i'm peter lavelle after decades of conflict and war south sudan is set to become an independent state on july ninth as the world intends to pay for this event and there are lingering questions surrounding the viability of this new oil rich country has south sudan failed even before it's established.

to cross-talk the future of south sudan i'm joined by my guest 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 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 me 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 southern sudan their people in government or want to become

known then sudan the people of southern sudan the international community and of course the neighboring african countries so there are a lot of fact is i actually think that the future on south sudan while while it is not problem free is is much more positive than i had 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 to small fairchild and they're known and the people who are most important for you 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 can go to you i'll repeat my question is in 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. it is certainly not mission impossible. 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 are 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 see that 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 then i 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 my mind called this and i 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 nature 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 care have to help them to build institutions incidentally i think if you stress democracy 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 do with the oil the united states is well endowed with oil it doesn't corrupt their 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 festive now the hard work begins there and one side today comes the country. independent people should not say everything is done and goof and particularly people like me activist 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 to . 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 euphoria leading up to the end to end dependence day it's very easy to simply put aside the fact that there is active fighting going on and be 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 in 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 argue that i'm on the hopeful side and not not tonight and i am sense because you know we are in washington washington yes celebrate and live for over two hundred years of the end dependence if you cast your mind back it looked like a very impossible mission when windows peters 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 incident state the. state. the so.

we. can say. thank you all to mind you were talking about the birth of another sudan.

and you can say. ok mr mesereau like to go to you know when it was mentioned right before i went to the break what about the north north sudan as it will be and their attitude towards 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 there was all that oil by the way but nonetheless what cards they played 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 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 dependence 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 a 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 near you want to jump in there. yes i wanted to i think. it's very right i mean jonathan is right to buy the ambassador made the point of president bashir in the north not be 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 brick a when he sent seed but then who are seen beginning last week and since he came back he's been very beleaguered what i want to see another five in the northern

china china's relationship with bashir which also would bring in their rule of the united states i mean we all know president obama. wants an africa and he's taking the interest in africa issue from two of those machines and. this is obama was yes in south africa so i hope that behind the scenes president obama is talking today chinese because there have been an influence on on both. sudan said specially 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 sheehan's arms comes 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 is so it can be a positive factor and you're saying mr ambassador i'm going to you know i did

during celebrations on saturday hell ring 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 up. 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 cards and 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 john if in the mean if there if we have by sure is not so secure is a lot of people make 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 in perspective 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 oil isn't pumped out of the country so i mean what kind of what kind of variables is he going to 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 than the right things for the domestic northern sudanese audience the message that president bashir and 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 level producer about four hundred ninety thousand barrels a day 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 sudanese oil because 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 whatever moves he makes one way or another it could destabilize the north as well we've been focusing a lot on the south and what about the north yes that is absolutely true and it's

and yeah i have i hope it doesn't happen i mean the ambassador is right that there was i mean going on for a long time but i would think you do even further you know i'm from don i'm going to begin to bring in one hundred fifty seven sudan actually became independent. and the tensions that broke out in two non-self actually you can see it's. and sold 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 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 or sued sudan and all the in sudan trying to break up i mean there's even some talk among some of the other had me 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 breaking away i think it should be the exception rather than the rule and i hope it doesn't happen in other parts of

sudan but beyond whom it depends on how the government governs the country if people feel that their wishes and grievances are taking into account in the i listen to even if the problems are not solved they will still be 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 sudan was mentioned but again i think washington if it is creative 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 bricks because i think that's a general rule i don't like to see brit guards in africa for that matter it benefits political ambitions political people more than ordinary citizens but in

the case of southern sudan i think it's the assertion that proves the rule ok jonathan i'm going to give you the last word in the program what is the future of south sudan in thirty seconds. 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 independence 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 bar a new brand new country of south sudan ok that's a very good point in the program are 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.

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