Independent South Sudan "free at last" - Reuters

A man dances with fireworks during South Sudan's independence day celebrations in Juba July 9, 2011.

Credit: Reuters/Goran Tomasevic

By Alexander Dziadosz and Jeremy Clarke

JUBA | Sun Jul 10, 2011 11:25am EDT

JUBA (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of South Sudanese danced and cheered as their new nation declared independence on Saturday, a hard-won separation from the north that still leaves simmering issues of disputed borders and oil payments unresolved.

The president of South Sudan, Salva Kiir, stood next to his old civil war foe the president of Sudan, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who now leads just the north, at a ceremony to mark the birth of the new nation.

Under-developed, oil-producing South Sudan won its independence in a January referendum -- the climax of a 2005 peace deal that ended decades of fighting with the north.

Security forces at first tried to control the streets in the south's dusty capital Juba, but retreated as jubilant crowds moved in overnight and through the day, waving flags, dancing and chanting "South Sudan o-yei, freedom o-yei."

Some revelers fainted in the blistering heat as South Sudan's parliamentary speaker, James Wani Igga, read out the formal declaration of independence.

"We, the democratically elected representatives of the people ... hereby declare Southern Sudan to be an independent and sovereign state," said Igga before Sudan's flag was lowered, the South Sudan flag was raised and the new anthem sung. Kiir took the oath of office.

People threw their hands in the air, embraced and wept. "We got it. We got it," one man said as he hugged a woman.

The presence of Bashir, who campaigned to keep Africa's largest state united, was a key gesture of goodwill.

It will also be an embarrassment to some Western diplomats at the event. The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Bashir on charges of war crimes in Darfur.

Bashir gave a speech congratulating the new country. "The will of the people of the south has to be respected," he said, adding that both states had to maintain peace.

RECOGNITION

North Sudan's government was the first to recognize South Sudan on Friday, hours before the split took place, a move that smoothed the way to the division.

The United States, China and Britain signaled their recognition of the state on Saturday, according to official statements and government media reports.

"After so much struggle by the people of South Sudan, the United States of America welcomes the birth of a new nation," said U.S. President Barack Obama, stopping short of announcing any immediate changes in longstanding U.S. sanctions on Sudan that Khartoum has been hoping will be lifted.

Dignitaries including U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and the leaders of about 30 African nations attended.

In a possible sign of the South's new allegiances, the crowd included about 200 supporters of Darfur rebel leader Abdel Wahed al-Nur, fighting Khartoum in an eight-year insurgency just over South Sudan's border in the north.

Earlier, the supporters of Nur's rebel Sudan Liberation Army faction stood in a line chanting "Welcome, welcome new state," wearing T-shirts bearing their leader's image. One carried a banner reading "El Bashir is wanted dead or alive."

Traditional dance groups drummed and waved shields and staffs in a carnival atmosphere.

"Free at last," said Simon Agany, 34, as he walked around shaking hands after midnight -- the time when officials said the South actually became the world's newest nation.

The crowd cheered as Kiir unveiled a giant statue of civil war hero John Garang, who signed the peace deal with the north.

Kiir offered an amnesty to rebels fighting his government and promised to bring peace to troubled border areas.

"I would like to take this opportunity to declare amnesty for all those who have taken up arms against Sudan," he said.

"I want to assure the people of Abyei, Darfur, Blue Nile and South Kordofan that we have not forgotten you. When you cry, we cry. When you bleed, we bleed. I pledge to you today that we will find a just peace for all," he said.

SEEDS OF FUTURE TENSION

Khartoum's recognition of the South did not dispel fears of future tensions.

Northern and southern leaders have still not agreed on a list of issues, most importantly the line of the border, the ownership of the disputed Abyei region and how they will handle oil revenues, the lifeblood of both economies.

At the stroke of midnight the Republic of Sudan lost almost a third of its territory and about three quarters of its oil reserves, which are sited in the south. It faced the future with insurgencies in its Darfur and Southern Kordofan regions.

In Khartoum on Saturday, one sign of the new national order was the disappearance of some English-language and SPLM-linked newspapers. The north said it suspended them on Friday as they were published or owned by southerners -- an ominous signal for more than 1 million southerners left in the north.

Many northerners see the separation as a loss of face.

Analysts have long feared a return to war if north-south disputes are not resolved.

Mostly Muslim Sudan fought rebels in the south, where most follow Christianity and traditional beliefs, for all but a few years from the 1950s in civil wars fueled by ethnicity, religion, oil and ideology.

(Additional reporting by Ulf Laessing, Andrew Heavens and Khaled Abdelaziz in Khartoum and Megan Davies at the United Nations; Writing by Andrew Heavens; Editing by Tim Pearce)

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NATO Seeks Afghan Police in the South - New York Times

The mujahedeen were Afghan guerrilla fighters trained and backed by the United States to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. They later fought against the Taliban and helped topple them from power in 2001.

Under President Hamid Karzai, they were gradually disarmed and demobilized. But many maintain fearsome reputations and have deep links in communities that can be revived to gather intelligence and raise forces quickly.

NATO commanders hope that they can be used to help raise as many as 30,000 local police officers within six months, providing a critical element to help the government and coalition forces hold on to areas newly cleared of Taliban insurgents, the officials said.

Previous efforts to raise local defense forces have failed, largely because of a lack of support in communities and from the government. The police, meanwhile, have a reputation for poor discipline, drug abuse and corruption, and have proved easy prey for the Taliban.

Though some NATO commanders remain cautious about using the mujahedeen, others say the village-based forces can work as part of the coordinated military and civilian strategy that has begun to gain traction in the south since the arrival of 30,000 more American troops and thousands of extra Afghan troops this year.

Under the plan, the new forces will be approved by local councils, or shuras, to ensure that they have the support of all constituencies, that old rivalries between commanders and tribes are not reactivated, and that one faction does not gather too much power to itself.

“Then you partner it up effectively with I.S.A.F. and with the Afghan National Police, then you have got a very real possibility of keeping the Taliban out,” said Maj. Gen. Nick Carter, the departing British commander of coalition forces in the southern region, referring to the International Security Assistance Force of NATO.

Still, many, even in NATO, have reservations about recruiting and arming loosely controlled forces. Many Afghans, too, including President Karzai, are wary of empowering private militias, given the factional fighting among mujahedeen groups in the 1990s and the more recent tensions caused by Afghanistan’s private security companies.

General Petraeus had agreed with President Karzai to a pilot program of 10,000 such local Afghan policemen shortly after taking command in July. Recruitment has already begun in some places to expand that plan, with the blessing of the Karzai government.

On a recent day, General Carter sat with Afghan and American commanders on the roof terrace at the district headquarters of Arghandab, just north of the city of Kandahar, discussing how to consolidate their hold over areas cleared three weeks before.

“How quickly can you recruit 300 local police?” he asked a former mujahedeen commander, Hajji Hafizullah. “Can you bring them for training by tomorrow?” By the end of the meeting, the district governor was signing the papers of several dozen local men who will form the local police force.

General Carter calls the new forces “sons of the shura,” because they require approval by everyone on the traditional council of elders to prevent them from becoming what he called “one bloke’s militia.” The plan has clear echoes of the Sons of Iraq, the neighborhood militias that helped turn around violence there.

General Carter, who completed his one-year tour on Nov. 2, contends that the local forces can provide insight in the Taliban heartland, here in Kandahar Province and in neighboring provinces.

He said one early mistake he made was to remove the discredited local police from Marja, in Helmand Province, ahead of the large-scale operation against the Taliban there in February. Without leaving some of them there to provide important local intelligence, General Carter said, “we did not really have an understanding of what was going on probably for about four to six weeks.”

American Marines holding Marja have been plagued by the reinfiltration of insurgents since the operation. NATO commanders are bracing themselves for the same trouble in the newly cleared districts around Kandahar.

“The challenge always is what happens when a resurgent Taliban tries to come back and tries to undermine the security that you are trying to establish,” General Carter said. “And that we should expect on and off over the next few months.”

Whatever their reputation for excess, the former mujahedeen know their areas and their people like no one else. They have also proved themselves brave enough to stand up to the Taliban. “These guys have the clout to make people braver,” General Carter said.

Local police officers, trained and supervised by American Special Forces, are already operating in a number of places, including part of Marja and an area in Arghandab, and Special Forces units are already looking to recruit men in the newly cleared horn of Panjwai in Kandahar Province, said Brig. Gen. Frederick Hodges, the coalition director of operations in the south.

“It is promising, but the jury is still out,” he said in an interview.

Carlotta Gall reported from Arghandab and Ruhullah Khapalwak from Kabul, Afghanistan.

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India, South Africa could complicate US agenda in UN Security Council - Christian Science Monitor

Washington

The rise of the world’s middle powers was on display at the United Nations Tuesday as India, South Africa, and Germany were all elected to join the big guns on the United Nations Security Council for two years, starting in January.

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The arrival of the South Asian and African regional powers as two of the five new nonpermanent members elected to the Security Council Tuesday could bring new clout to the council – in developing nations, in particular.

But adding India and South Africa to a council where Brazil already holds one of the 10 total nonpermanent seats could also pose new challenges to the council’s old guard, including the United States. Iran, for example, could find a new base of support in the troika of developing powers, all of which have resisted mounting US-led pressures on Iran over its nuclear program.

Brazil voted against the latest round of UN sanctions against Iran in June, and India indicated at the time that it did not favor the resolution and considered sanctions “counterproductive.”

Brazil, India, and South Africa "want to be among the big players, they want to be the ones who get permanent seats [on the Security Council] eventually," says Steve Groves, an expert in international institutions at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.

The UN General Assembly elected five new nonpermanent members to join the five nonpermanent members that still have a year on their revolving terms. Together the 10 will join the council’s five permanent and veto-wielding members: The US, China, Russia, France, and Great Britain.

India, South Africa, and Colombia ran unopposed for the two-year terms reserved for their regions, while Germany and Portugal were elected to two seats reserved for the “Western” regional group.

Portugal won over Canada in what in the end was the election’s only hotly contested race.

With the addition of India, the Security Council will include all of the world’s major emerging powers known as the BRICs: Brazil, Russia, India, and China.
At the same time, the newly configured council will also include five of the six countries that are pressing for a permanent seat on a proposed expanded Security Council.

The gathering of so many powerful developing countries on the council at once has some diplomatic experts predicting trouble for the US agenda, be it Iran, North Korea, Sudan, or Burma (Myanmar). But Heritage's Mr. Groves says the US should take this "rather unprecedented opportunity" to test the kind of world powers these countries want to be.

"I would hope the US would take this as an opportunity to say, 'OK, Brazil, India, and South Africa, you are among the rising powers of the world and want to play a bigger role, let's see how responsible you are now,' " he says, "When the question is Iran or North Korea, will they act with international security in mind or follow the same regional and parochial interests? Let's see if they really want the responsibility."

The confluence of potential permanent members onto the council – Germany, India, South Africa, Brazil and Nigeria (like Brazil an existing nonpermanent member) – is likely to boost pressure for a reform of the council, which has operated under the same five post-World-War-II powers since the UN’s founding in 1945. Japan, which is also a likely candidate for an expanded council, finishes up its current nonpermanent term in December.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Tuesday that Germany would “want to use this seat to increase our influence on the reform of the UN.”

Germany already is a member of the group of nations – the council’s five permanent members plus Germany, or the so-called “P5 + 1” – that are attempting to address the Iranian nuclear issue through diplomatic means.

The Iran issue remains unresolved, with Tehran continuing to pursue a nuclear program that it says is peaceful but which world powers suspect is aimed at delivering a nuclear weapon. With Iran moving forward just as the Security Council balance appears to be shifting away from favoring additional punitive action, some diplomatic experts suggest the Iran portfolio could eventually be taken up outside the council by an ad-hoc “collation of the willing.”

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