By Joshua Craze.

The border region between Sudan and South Sudan contains some of the two countries’ most fertile land. Much of the border lies between the ninth and tenth parallels, just below the dunes and stabilized sand sheets of the goz (Johnson, 2010b, pp. 16–17). While the goz sees rainfall of only 400–600 mm per year, the border regions, with their heavy clay soil and acacia bush, see rainfall of 600–800mm per year. Supplies of gum arabic, wood for charcoal, and a variety of precious stones and minerals are also found along the border.

Control of these assets is an issue in some of the contested borderland areas, but none of the contemporary disputes over the border can be reduced to a struggle over resources. The most valuable resource along the border is land, for agriculture and grazing. While there is oil in the borderlands, none of the contested areas contain oil, with the notable exceptions of Diffra in Abyei, and Hejlij on the Unity–South Kordofan border.

In the cases of Diffra and Hejlij, the sense of historical entitlement to these areas, on the part of the Ngok and Rueng Dinka, is just as important a motivating force for South Sudan in its territorial claims. This is not to say that resources are not crucial to an understanding of con-flict in these areas. Most importantly, the border regions offer a dry-season space for pastoral and trans humant groups from both sides to find grazing for their cattle.

In this sense, the borderlands have always been a meeting place between different Sudanese groups, and, like all meeting places, they are also centres of tension, where competing claims must be negotiated. Very schematically, one can say that the history of the borderlands over the last 90 years has been the tale of their transformation from zones of encounter to zones of division.

One of the important moments in this transformation was the 1920 implementation of the Closed District Ordinances (CDO), which were designed to prevent Northern traders travelling south, and to create, as far as possible, a cultural and political separation between Sudan and South Sudan. This policy 16 Small Arms Survey HSBA Working Paper 30 was formalized as the Southern Policy in 1930, and attempted to stem the spread  of Islam.

It was terminated in 1946. However, even during the period of the Southern Policy’s implementation, its effects were not uniform and implementation not standardized. Renk county was excluded from the CDO, and close links developed between the resident Abialang Dinka and Northern Sudanese merchants and agriculturalists (see section VI). The Abialang Dinka also learned to speak excellent Arabic, and many of them converted to Islam. Kaka town, now in Upper Nile state, was moved between provinces during the British colonial period, in part to ensure continued trade links between the town and what is now South Kordofan.

In other areas, the separations brought about by the Southern Policy were more absolute. Sudan’s civil wars transformed the landscape along the border.20 During the second civil war, militias backed first by the National Islamic Front (NIF) and later by the National Congress Party (NCP) displaced primarily Dinka populations and destroyed civilian settlements. In some rural areas, the SPLA held sway and organized ‘peace markets’ between Northern traders and the Southern Sudanese (SUPRAID, BYDA, and Concern Worldwide, 2004).

In other areas, SAF-backed militias organized relations between pastoralist peoples in the border zone, leading, in the present, to markedly different relationships between these areas and the GRSS. Despite the constant movements of the war, when the criterion for evaluating the border between the two countries was being decided in 2005, the SPLM insisted the border should be the provincial boundary of the southern provinces as it existed on 1 January 1956—the date of Sudan’s independence. This date provides a historical datum to which future disputes about the border can be referred.

Unfortunately, the provincial boundaries of 1956, to the extent they existed, were not well recorded by the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium government. As Douglas H. Johnson, who advised the South Sudanese government on its border claims in 2006, notes, ‘much of the border was unsurveyed [at the time of independence]. Even the most detailed maps do not record significant topographical features along the boundary lines’ (Johnson, 2010b, p. 15).

The difficulties of relying on an incomplete, and often inaccurate, set of documents to determine a historical border that has only a dubious relationship to present patterns of cohabitation will be explored in the next chapter. It should be noted here that the only exception to the legal centrality of the 1956 border is Abyei, where the CPA mandated the Abyei Boundaries Commission (ABC) to establish Abyei as ‘the area of the nine Ngok Dinka Chiefdoms transferred to Kordofan in 1905’ (Abyei Protocol, 2005, clause 1.1.2).

In the case of Abyei, the ABC had to rule on the extent of a people; for the 1956 border, the actual practices and locations of border communities are unimportant. Legally, what counts is a relatively inaccessible historical record. This is the central reason why communities like the Abialang Dinka of Renk county feel so angered by political negotiations over the border; they feel marginalized because, indeed, they are marginalized: where communities actually lived in 1956—never mind at present— is, legally, besides the point.

This is significant because, as numerous historians have shown, in many places the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium government had a relatively light footprint, and the administrative boundaries of a given territory may not even have been particularly reflective of how communities were spatially organized in 1956.

Since 1956, much has changed in the border region. Even if an agreement can be reached between Sudan and South Sudan about the location of the border, it will inevitably cause a great deal of disruption, forcing people to reorganize themselves in the present to fit along a line from the past. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to resolving the crisis along the Sudan–South Sudan border is that it involves tackling not one but many problems. Most fundamentally, there is a territorial dispute between two states, and a series of
local tensions between the different groups who live along the border.

These two different threads interact in all sorts of surprising ways: sometimes nationalism is taken up in order to advance local interests; sometimes, as in the case of Abyei, local interests are a mask for national politics. In theory, the disruption caused to local communities by the imposition of a national border should be minimal. The CPA, a raft of subsequent security arrangements, and the 27 September Addis Ababa agreements all safeguard the free movement of transhumant and pastoralist groups. In practice, however, since the signing of the CPA in 2005, Northern pastoralist groups have found it increasingly difficult to enter South Sudan, especially since the country’s formal secession in July 2011.

In part, the difficulties of Northern pastoralist can be traced back to the second civil war. Many pastoralists—such as the Missiriya of South Kordofan—were involved in militias whose raids displaced Southern border communities, and these actions damaged traditional conflict-resolution mechanisms.22 Some Southern suspicions about Northern pastoralists are fuelled by uncertainty about whether a given group is composed of pastoralists or of NCP-backed militia members.

This suspicion explains the ban on Thuraya satellite phones in many grazing agreements: South Sudanese communities fear their positions will be reported to SAF. This distrust is not helped by the fact that the extant NCPbacked militias in South Sudan use the same routes into the country as Northern pastoralists, leading to fears that the two parties are collaborating. Another problem for Northern pastoralists also dates from the second civil war. During this period, when groups like the Missiriya passed into Southern states, they had to negotiate with the SPLA, and not just with local groups.

This situation has continued post-CPA, and it has made grazing agreements increasingly a matter for state-level political and military deliberation. This has meant that grazing routes are subject to new and unfamiliar evaluations—security concerns and military positioning—and it has also reduced the need for host and migrant communities to work together, weakening traditional conflict resolution mechanisms.

These mechanisms were already strained by the second civil war. The GoS organized militias to attack Southern Sudanese border communities, and these militias were often composed of members of the very border communities that rely on grazing in Southern Sudan. Compensation for relatives of those killed by militias has often not been paid, breaking down inter-community links.

The legacy of the war is also visible in the number of small arms found along the border. While South Sudan has now made moves towards community disarmament in several border states, in a situation of general uncertainty, many communities do not want to give up the weapons that saw them through the last war.

In Sudan, the GoS continues to arm militias and Popular Defence  Forces (PDF), and pastoralists do not feel safe in South Sudan without weapons. Even if, as is agreed in the 27 September Addis Ababa agreements, a Safe Demilitarized Border Zone (SDBZ) is established, and both SAF and SPLA withdraw from the border regions, it will still be difficult to ensure that pastoralist groups enter without weapons, a difficulty that current negotiations occlude.

Craze Dividing lines If grazing negotiations are in the hands of state actors, border communities have also increasingly been acting like states. Since 2005, communities have made absolute, quasi-nationalist claims over the border region more frequently.

Grazing rights have been guaranteed by a national political framework that does not deliver, driving pastoralist and transhumant communities to frame their demands in terms of the absolute claims of the nation-state. In Appendix Two of the ABC report, several types of rights claims are distinguished. Dominant rights are those rights that pertain to areas of land over which a group has non-negotiable rights.

Secondary rights are often seasonal grazing rights, and are a limited set of rights over an area: the limits often
refer to time (in dry but not rainy season), extent (along this grazing route, but not another), or use (for grazing, but not for settling). Often, secondary rights areas can overlap—two groups can share an area where both groups have secondary rights claims—and one can also have secondary rights where another group has dominant rights, such as the Missiriya’s grazing rights in Abyei, or Seleim grazing rights on the west bank of the Nile in Upper Nile state.

The CPA does not officially recognize flexible secondary rights claims—it simply says that ‘traditional rights’ to movement will be respected, rather than spelling out processes by which secondary rights disputes will be articulated and resolved. Since 2005, such rights claims have not been respected, and pastoral and transhumant groups on both sides of the border have increasingly framed their claims as dominant rights, or, in extremis, as claims of absolute and exclusive rights to an area.

In a negotiating framework that only thinks in terms of state-based political actors, framing one’s demands like a state is an attempt to gain visibility: the Missiriya lay absolute claim to an area south of the River Kiir24, where historically they had secondary rights, and the Rueng Dinka lay claim to an area that roughly correlates to their seasonal grazing territory in South Kordofan—the maximal area of their secondary, not dominant, rights.

These claims have largely undermined the shared understanding of secondary rights claims that existed among communities along the border. Missiriya claims to exclusive possession of Abyei, for instance, threaten the possibility of cohabitation with the Ngok Dinka, who feel angry that the Missiriya are claiming territory they feel is theirs.

The nationalization of the Sudan–South Sudan border has also changed relationships between border communities in other ways. In border negotiations, the idea that pastoralists are simply foreigners within a nation-state is increasingly invoked. For instance, the Malual Dinka of Northern Bahr el Ghazal compare the Rizeigat to Kenyans and Ugandans.

This is a fundamental transformation of the way the relationship between host community and pastoralists is conceptualized. While Kenyans and Ugandans work in South Sudan, they are not afforded the privileges that Northern pastoralists received before the second civil war: they are treated as foreigners within a state framework, rather than as a people with whom the Malual Dinka had a long relationship based on reciprocity and shared ties. Further, the relationship between Kenyans and South Sudan is fixed: the formal frameworks of expectation and action for a migrant worker do not shift relative to family ties, ecological conditions, and political circumstances.

This is very different from grazing agreements between pastoralist groups and host communities, before they were redefined in terms of a nation-state framework. The imposition of a national boundary has also instituted a more general asymmetry. Over the last 60 years, Northern pastoralists came south to graze their herds and buy cattle and, while Southern groups would not generally go north for grazing (especially after having been displaced from their northernmost grazing sites during the second civil war), they would travel north for wage labour, and relied on the trade brought south by Northern merchants.

Shortly before South Sudan formally declared independence, Sudan closed its border, and fewer traders got through, causing higher prices and a lack of basic commodities all along the frontier. Moreover, as people returned from Sudan to South Sudan to vote in the July 2011 referendum, and the situation for the South Sudanese in Sudan became increasingly precarious, border communities began travelling north much less.

This asymmetry feeds into a belief among Southerners that there is no reason to allow Northern pastoralists into South Sudan as they bring nothing productive with them. Furthermore, as there is no longer any reason to travel north, there is less reason to worry about maintaining relations with Northern groups. Finally, following years of ill treatment in Sudan, many returnees are angry at Sudanese traders and pastoralists for things that happened to them in Khartoum; the pastoralists are taken as tokens of Sudan more generally, and become targets for South Sudanese retribution.

In general, since South Sudan gained independence, community antipathy along the border has increased as GoS-backed militias, intensified nationalism, and trade blockades create new lines of division. While the 27 September Addis Ababa agreements would be a step forward if implemented, even a full agreement on the contested areas would leave a great deal of work to be done to repair inter-community relations and to discover how pastoralist and transhumant groups can retain their livelihoods in the face of a new national border.

Border negotiations

There are two analytically separate issues involved in negotiations over the border between Sudan and South Sudan: where the border is, and what type of border it is. There is then a third question at stake: what type of temporary border should Sudan and South Sudan have while deciding the above, and whereshould this temporary border be located.

The first two questions are related. While, for instance, the Missiriya advance claims to territory beyond the River Kiir (Craze, 2011, pp. 18–21), they are primarily concerned with securing safe grazing routes in Abyei and South Sudan. However, their experience since the CPA has taught them to mistrust South Sudanese promises that their safety and freedom of passage will be secured in an Abyei belonging to South Sudan (Pantuliano et al., 2009, pp. 18–19). Because they do not have faith in the promise of a soft border they can easily cross, they insist on an absolute location for the border, so as to safeguard their rights, with Abyei remaining within the boundaries of Sudan.

One of the reasons negotiations over the border have run aground is that border communities have little faith that the type of border dictated by the CPA will be actualized, leading to groups making expansive claims for land, and refusing to believe that their secondary rights will continue after the imposition of a national border. Both the NCP and the SPLM have important constituencies among border communities, and both sides have been intransigent because they fear alienating these groups, who, for the reasons indicated above, fear any concessions on where the border is located.

At the same time, as Johnson has argued (2010b, p. 108), the interests of local groups have been instrumentalized by the NCP and the SPLM to mask national interests, and destabilize the talks in Addis Ababa. Because the type of border guaranteed by the CPA is so vague, local groups have been distrustful of arguments that appear to place areas where they have secondary rights outside the official borders of their respective countries.

The CPA gave no space to the very real changes to secondary rights claims that will occur with the imposition of an international frontier. Indeed, there has been little frank discussion of the border as a political issue at all. The border was not, in the structure of the CPA, considered to be a political issue, but one determined by a bureaucratic mechanism—the Technical Border Committee (TBC). Consequently, that mechanism was politicized, as political issues ran aground in a bureaucratic structure.

The CPA

During the negotiations leading up to the signing of the CPA, the GRSS insisted that the line determining the North–South boundary would be the provincial boundaries of Bahr el Ghazal and Upper Nile as they stood on 1 January 1956. This understanding of the border dates from the 1972 Addis Ababa agreement, which defined (articles 3 and 4) the Southern Region in the same way.

In 2005, delimiting the boundary was thought to be essential, not simply to confirm the extent of the two territories, but also to establish the area in which a population census and voter registration for the referendum on Southern secession could occur. The CPA tasked the TBC, which was to be established by the presidency, with carrying out the delimitation and demarcation of the border between January and July 2005.The CPA does not give details on the modalities of the TBC’s work, and does not give deadlines for specific tasks.

Impasse at the TBC

The TBC was set up later than planned, amid disagreements about its composition. It was finally established in September 2005, after the deadline for it to complete its work had already passed. The presidential decree that established

the TBC stated:

1. The Technical Committee has the task of demarcating the border line between South
and North Sudan as of 1/1/1956.
2. Without contradicting the generality of the text in item (1) above, the Committee has the following functions and powers:
a. Consult all maps, drawings and documents.
b. Visit all the border areas between North and South Sudan and overlapping tribal areas.
c. Consult tribal leaders and civil administrators in the overlapping areas, listen to their statements and review any documents provided by them.
d. Solicit internal and foreign expertise if necessary.

From the outset, the TBC was hampered by a lack of funding and a series of lengthy procedural disputes. The South Sudanese members of the committee said the delays occurred because the NCP members could not take decisions without conferring with those above them in the GoS political hierarchy. An official close to the process said one NCP minister, Idris Abdul Gadir, could be
called ‘the nineteenth member of the committee.’

To keep reading about this great report please go to: http://www.smallarmssurveysudan.org/fileadmin/docs/working-papers/HSBA-WP30-North-South-Border.pdf