South Sudan’s clashes show how far it has to go

Clashes in South Sudan show the world's newest nation remains fragile. Other views: stripping Britons fighting in Syria of their citizenship is unfair, and Palestine will never get a fair settlement with Israel unless the power balance is more even.

Civil wars in our part of the world don’t require much fuel to flare up. States don’t necessarily have to include different religions or sects to justify random killing fests.

All the basic elements are there, mainly political conflict and partisan hostilities, suggested the columnist Elias Harfoush in the pan-Arab daily Al Hayat.

“When South Sudan separated from Sudan over two years ago, we thought it would bring an end to the war between factions of the population. We hoped it would allow for some stability and development to replace overspending on weapons,” he said.

Differences that separated the now divorced northern and southern parts of Sudan went beyond the religious and extended to deeper ethnic and cultural rifts that provided the fodder for 40 years of confrontations.

Enormous military, financial and economic efforts were exerted in the West to find a solution to the south’s problems and to put its choice of independence on the right track.

“But the religious homogeneity between the South Sudanese wasn’t sufficient to prevent civil strife or the emergence of the conflict between the Dinka and the Nuer tribes that escalated to become the backdrop of the presently raging struggle in the youngest country on the world’s map,” he said.

The Dinka is the tribe of the country’s president and its largest ethnic group.

The Nuer is the ethnic group of the former vice president, who was suspected of attempting a military coup this week and is now leading the armed opposition.

Fighting on December 15 between soldiers connected to each tribal group and who are members of the presidential guard ignited the political struggle that has been simmering for some time in South Sudan and which sparked a wave of violent ethnic killings.

“Rather than represent an opportunity for development, the country’s enormous oil resources became grounds for a greedy power struggle,” the writer added.

The situation isn’t much brighter in Sudan where the struggle between president Hassan Al Bashir’s regime and its opponents is hindering any attempts to remedy the country’s internal issues, further compounding by the international isolation imposed on the president for his part in the Darfour crisis.

“The sad reality is that we live in culturally and evolutionarily disastrous area,” he opined.

“You don’t need to be Shiite, Sunni, Christian, Arab or Kurdish to brandish a weapon and start killing your neighbours.

“What is certain, however, is that we are far from the state-building phase where a loyalty to the homeland comes first,” he concluded.

Britons lose citizenship for fighting in Syria

When it comes to human rights of their Muslim citizens, most western nations put aside their equality laws and act like third world governments, using security-based excuses that are often unconvincing, argued Abdel Bari Atwan, editor-in-chief of the news website Rai Al Youm.

The London-based newspaper The Independent ran on Monday an investigative report titled “No way back for Britons who join the Syrian fight”. The report said that the UK Home Secretary Theresa May prevents return of British nationals who have fought in Syria by stripping them of citizenship.

“Ms Theresa May has extraordinary hatred for Muslims, whether they have British citizenship or they don’t,” the writer added.

She was behind the attempt to deport Sheikh Raed Salah, a prominent defender of Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, and sought to ban him lecturing in British universities, accusing him of being a terrorist so she could please some racist Jewish-British lobbies, he wrote.

Such cases should be discussed from a humanitarian angle, rather than a purely political one. This is because depriving citizens of their nationality – after they have left the country in which they were born and bred and of which they have acquired citizenship – just because they are Muslims, is contradictory to the rule of law that western countries pride themselves on and which usually makes them a safe haven for the persecuted.

Palestinians must even the equation with Israel

The equation governing the relations between Israel and Palestine and the Arab states is a tough one, the Sharjah-based newspaper Al Khaleej asserted.

For Israel, the equation rests on an illegal occupation and an evil power backed by the US and western countries. For the Palestinians, it rests on a legitimate cause undermined by weakness, division and an open option for peace with no room for force even in self-defence, it said.

As such, there is no possibility of forcing Israel to accept a resolution at all, never mind a fair and final one. It is only natural that the outcome of any Israeli-Palestinian negotiations will be uneven, as well.

Negotiations are a form of conflict without a fight, but the threat of military force is the factor that decides negotiations, even if it is not used, the paper continued.

All similar events in history confirm that. As long as the equation remains unchanged and unbalanced, Palestinians and the Arab states will emerge utterly defeated from any political face-off.

Any group who decides beforehand that it is defeated relinquishes all means of power in the face of an enemy that has excessive force, nuclear arms and a voracious appetite for aggression and expansion. Instead they have to wait for some free gift that may never eventuate.

Digest compiled by The Translation Desk