Ramaphosa navigates a minefield in South Sudan

4 June 2015

Is South Africa’s deputy president, the ubiquitous peacemaker and troubleshooter Cyril Ramaphosa, riding to the rescue of South Sudan’s faltering peace process? Or is he rushing in where angels fear to tread: into a volatile and toxic environment where the internal and regional dynamics are way beyond the comprehension of a comparative newcomer from distant South Africa?

This question was being asked in Juba this week after Ramaphosa – who is President Jacob Zuma’s special envoy to South Sudan – took his involvement in the complex efforts there to a higher level.  

Cyril Ramaphosa and regional politicians and officials escorted five of the members of the group of so-called Former Detainees, also called the G10+, back from exile in Kenya to the capital Juba.

Deng Alor Kuol, John Luk Jok, Kosti Manibe, Madut Biar, and Cirino Heiteng, once senior officials in the ruling Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), were coming home as free men – for the first time since President Salva Kiir had them arrested after warfare erupted between his and former vice president Riek Machar’s factions in Juba in 2013.

The detainees were caught in the middle of the conflict, dissenting from Kiir’s autocratic leadership style but also not willing to take up arms with Machar. They were later released from detention through Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta’s intervention.

Ramaphosa and Co. brought them back in terms of the Reunification Agreement, which the leaders of all three factions of the now-fractured SPLM – Kiir, Machar and Kuol – signed in Arusha, Tanzania, in January this year. South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) and Tanzania’s ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) are co-guarantors of the inter-party talks that led to that agreement. CCM Secretary-General Abdulrahman Kinana, as well as the foreign ministers of Kenya and Ethiopia, also accompanied the former detainees back to Juba.

As he left Juba on Wednesday, Ramaphosa hailed the return of the five as ‘a really gigantic step towards consolidating peace here in South Sudan,’ and commended them for their courage in coming home. He did not confirm whether the South African Defence Force had deployed 60 crack troops to Juba to protect the five, as some media reported. The South African defence ministry denied this, but military analysts said they would have had to do that, regardless.

Some Western diplomats have hailed Ramaphosa’s and the CCM’s achievement in bringing back the five former detainees. They said the CCM/ANC negotiations had so far achieved more than the parallel and official peace negotiations being conducted by the Intergovernmental Agency for Development (IGAD), the regional inter-government organisation, which have stalled.

But others are not so sure. The CCM/ANC inter-party talks are based on the assumption that since the civil war erupted because of fissures within the ruling SPLM, re-uniting that party should end the war. The two sets of negotiations are supposed to be complementing each other, but are not fully doing so.

The glaring absentee from Ramaphosa’s triumphant return party was Machar’s faction, the SPLM In Opposition (SPLM-IO), Kiir’s military foe. Berouk Mesfin, a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) in Addis Ababa, asked pertinently: ‘What is the added value of bringing back five individuals who have no troops in a country grappling with civil war? It’s truly mindboggling.’

A Juba-based analyst who did not wish to be identified, agrees with Mesfin that South Africa was, wittingly or unwittingly, bolstering the Kiir faction of the SPLM at the expense of the Machar faction. ‘Arusha was a really interesting example of liberation parties working together to secure each other’s chokeholds on their states,’ the Juba analyst said.

Re-uniting the G10+ Former Detainees faction with Kiir’s SPLM would not address Machar’s genuine grievances – such as the massacre of his political supporters and fellow Nuer people when the war erupted – and would merely boost Kiir’s ability to crush Machar.

The reports that South Africa had also sent in troops was strengthening a perception in Juba that Pretoria is helping to prop up a government that the analyst describes as ‘actively conducting campaigns of mass atrocities, war crimes and what humanitarians are calling ethnic cleansing in southern Unity State.’ Pretoria apparently did not grasp the complexities of the regional tensions and rivalries at play, she said. Mesfin added that: ‘South Africa does not have any leverage on Kiir, Machar, Uganda and Sudan: the key players in this conflict.’

Sebastian Gatimu, a researcher at the ISS in Nairobi, said that in principle South Africa's involvement in the mediation was logical and helpful. South Sudan had borrowed a lot from South Africa, including its transitional constitution and the SPLM political party structure. And South Africa potentially brought some necessary neutrality into a process where regional powers were pursuing their own national interests. But he also expressed concern about the perception that Pretoria was showing bias against Machar's SPLM-IO. 

Some observers have noted with alarm that at the recent summit in Luanda of the International Conference of the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR), leaders – including Zuma – had issued a communiqué which came out firmly on Kiir’s side. It strongly condemned Machar and his faction ‘for their continued intransigence and reneging on previous agreements…’

While affirming ‘the sovereignty and legitimacy’ of Kiir’s government, the ICGLR leaders – including Kiir himself – urged the SPLM-IO ‘rebels’ to accept and participate in the formation of the proposed all-inclusive Transitional Government of National Unity. The language of this communiqué has suggested to some that the ICGLR is setting up Machar’s SPLM-IO as a ‘negative force’ to be pursued only militarily, rather than engaged politically.

A Western diplomat close to the negotiations shared some of the concerns about the ICGLR’s demonising of Machar and the SPLM-IO, but added that this was not as worrying as it might seem, since the ICGLR was not closely engaged in the peace efforts. He also expressed concern that some key members of both the ANC and CCM seemed to believe that the time had come to handle Machar’s faction militarily. But he was reassured that Ramaphosa did not share this view. He commended Ramaphosa for recognising that it was vital to negotiate with Machar, and for lending his and South Africa’s considerable weight to the peace process, noting that Ramaphosa was the highest-ranking official involved.

Ramaphosa was indeed acutely aware of the conspicuous absence of Machar’s faction from this week’s return party. He told journalists that he had spoken to Machar just before his arrival in Juba to inform him what he was doing and to assure him that no peaceful solution was possible without his participation. ‘I said to him that what was missing was the SPLM In Opposition.’ He said he had arranged a meeting between Machar and the leaders of South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya and Ethiopia to discuss the reunification process.

And as he left Juba, Ramaphosa said: ‘What we envisage happening in the coming weeks is that there will be further consultation and … a return of the other leaders of the SPLM, both constituting part of the former detainees and hopefully, this we will very work hard for, of Riek Machar’s SPLM In Opposition.’ He added: ‘If we can bring the three together and we are determined to do it, we will then have really made a gigantic move in building peace in South Sudan.’ Indeed. And a very big 'if'.

Peter Fabricius is an ISS Consultant

This article first appeared in ISS Weekly, an online publication of the Institute for Security Studies.