Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities

by Mahmood Mamdani

The negotiations and transition were a constant parade of bias. The SPLA, protected by the global acknowledgement of its status as a victim, was coddled and absolved of responsibility for its own violent missteps, the assumption being that a victim can do no wrong. Whereas the ruling party in the North was rightly and roundly criticized for election fraud in 2010, criticism was muted when the SPLA perpetrated its own fraud in elections in the South that same year. When the 2011 referendum on self-determination returned a 99.8 percent “yes” vote in the South, the “international community” lauded the result. After all, it was what the Troika wanted. This was a foretaste of how electoral politics were likely to operate with the ruling party doubling as the army and backed by international patrons whose interests in South Sudan had nothing to do with its people.

The CPA perpetuated the worst legacies of the liberation war, including the SPLA’s refusal to countenance internal reform. The CPA endorsed the power of the SPLA—the power of the gun—at the expense of the political class, civic associations, and the civilian population. That meant that, if a new state were formed, it would be in the hands of an unaccountable clique whose only experience was in armed struggle. When that s...

“International donors,” presidential advisor Peter Ajak wrote in the New York Times, “deployed legions of foreign technical assistants who, eager to showcase immediate results, ended up doing everything themselves, transferring little know-how to South Sudanese civil servants.”52 Hiruy Amanuel, an Ethiopian who served as director of the Political Department of UNMISS, remarked on how UN paternalism and South Sudanese dependence fed one another: “The internationals resist government attempts to take control and yet complain that the government leaves everything for them to do.”53

In other words, the SPLA was parceling out the fabric of the state itself. Its agents did so for their own immediate gain; the higher-ups let it happen so that the SPLA would not collapse and, in doing so, undermine their own benefits; and the UN and the donors celebrated the higher-ups as the legitimate rulers of a legitimate state. Outside supporters griped about corruption while empowering the corrupt party. “The fish rots from the head down,” as a saying, popular in the region, goes.

Rwanda is a metaphor for political violence in Africa. As such, it was a wakeup call, the instigator of a major shift in thinking. The generation that grew up before the Rwandan genocide thought of violence in Fanonist terms—as the midwife of revolution, social change, and progress. On this view, the revolution supplied political independence, which was itself the end of political struggle and the beginning of a social struggle destined to be won. As long as there was independence, social justice would be achieved. Violence was thus either revolutionary or counterrevolutionary: either it was the violence of those trying to usher in social justice or the violence of those determined to prevent it. No third possibility existed. But Rwanda demonstrated otherwise. The violence of the genocide was not that of the poor against the rich, or of the powerless against the powerful. Instead the poor slaughtered each other, and the rich devoured fellow rich. Both victims and perpetrators understood the violence in ethnic or racial—not class—terms.

Southern independence points to another constructive comparison, a contrast rather than a parallel. In the aftermath of genocide, Rwanda followed the Nuremberg model by criminalizing perpetrators, but it also bucked that model by maintaining state unity—something that didn’t happen in Sudan. In Rwanda, Hutu were equated with perpetrators and Tutsi with victims, even though both sides spilled copious blood—but they were not separated in two different political communities. Hutu were marginalized in the subsequent political process, and the new power ruled in the name of survivors, which meant Tutsi. This was a consequence of the community-level reconciliation process, known as Gacaca, in which alleged perpetrators were forgiven in return for speaking the truth—that is, for implicating others who would not come forward voluntarily, so that they might be dealt with by the law. In Sudan, of course, the Troika called for the creation of a separate state for victims—that is, for ethnic cleansing. South Sudan is the outcome.

Islamists were convinced not only that they had to do the Troika’s bidding but also that, with the predominantly non-Muslim South out of the picture, their grip on the North would be that much more secure. Meanwhile, Africanists in the South, including Kiir and Machar, saw opportunity in the terms the Troika was pressing. Africanists thought that their fate would be sealed in a New Sudan, as in the old, should they continue to be a political minority. They wanted the referendum. Had the debate been purely internal to Sudan, with only Khartoum and Garang’s camp at the table, there might have been no referendum. It is for this reason that many suspect Garang’s death was not accidental—that those who stood to gain from independence arranged the fatal helicopter crash to ensure that, instead of a New Sudan, there would be two Sudans: founded on a colonial worldview, shepherded into existence by outside powers, and structured to benefit both those powers and the heirs of customary law and native administration.

Why, I wondered, should the nationalities of these forces matter in the face of questions of legal accountability? If UNMISS’s goal was to build a state, and if the rule of law is essential to that project, then how can individual UN agents be legally immune from the consequences of their actions? The claim seemed to be that these agents’ citizenship—and their status of employment—put the rule of law in abeyance. I could not abide this contradiction, given the UN’s preaching about the necessity of state-building. Nor does the hypocrisy end there. How, I wondered, could the International Criminal Court demand that African leaders be responsible for ending a “culture of impunity” when the UN itself was unwilling to hold its own leadership and functionaries accountable for what the AU Commission called “crimes against humanity”?