The Independence of South Sudan: The Role of Mass Media in the Responsibility to Prevent

The Independence of South Sudan

Studies in International Governance Series

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Walter C. Soderlund and E. Donald Briggs

The Independence of South Sudan

The Role of Mass Media in the

Responsibility to Prevent

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Wilfrid Laurier University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Soderlund, W. C. (Walter C.), author

The independence of South Sudan : the role of mass media in the responsibility to prevent / Walter C. Soderlund and E. Donald Briggs.

(Studies in international governance)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77112-117-0 (pbk.).—ISBN 978-1-77112-083-8 (pdf).—

ISBN 978-1-77112-084-5 (epub)

1. Mass media—Moral and ethical aspects—South Sudan.  2. Mass media—Social aspects—South Sudan.  3. South Sudan—History—Autonomy and independence movements—Press coverage—United States.  4. South Sudan—History—Autonomy and independence movements—Press coverage—Canada.  5. South Sudan—History—21st century.  6. Humanitarian intervention.  7. Mass media—United States.  8. Mass media—Canada.  I. Briggs, E. Donald, author  II. Title.  III. Series: Studies in international governance

DT159.94.S63 2014       962.905’1      C2014-904145-4

                                                                C2014-904146-2

Cover design by Martyn Schmoll. Front cover image by Sven Torfinn/Panos. Text design by Angela Booth Malleau.

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CONTENTS

List of Maps and Tables

Preface and Acknowledgements

Chapter 1 Sudan’s North–South Divide

Chapter 2 International Intervention | From Peacekeeping to Humanitarian Intervention to the Responsibility to Protect

Chapter 3 The Responsibility to Prevent | Problems of Identification and Implementation

Chapter 4 Influencing Public Opinion and Foreign Policy Decision Making | The Role of Mass Media

Chapter 5 North American Press Coverage of the 2010 Sudanese Elections

Chapter 6 North American Press Coverage of the 2011 Referendum

Chapter 7 North American Press Coverage of the Declaration of Independence by the Republic of South Sudan

Chapter 8 Assessing the Effectiveness of the Responsibility to Prevent | The Impact of Press Framing on Policy Choices

Postscript Developments since Independence

Notes

References

The Authors

Index

LIST OF MAPS AND TABLES

Map of Africa

Map of Sudan

Map of South Sudan

Table 8.1 South Sudan Coverage, by Newspaper

Table 8.2 South Sudan Coverage, by Type of Content

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Over the past half century southern Sudan has been one of the most conflict-prone areas of the world, having been embroiled in two civil wars lasting nearly forty years—the first from 1955 to 1972, and the second from 1983 to 2005. Estimates of deaths attributed to the latter alone stand at between two and two-and-a-half million, with an additional four million reported displaced from their homes. In assessing the severity of the situation, Sudan’s heavy-handed response to the Darfur crisis and the consequent indictment of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes and genocide should also be borne in mind.

A Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) ended the second civil war in 2005. That agreement provided for a referendum to be held in the south in 2011 to determine the region’s future status vis-à-vis the north. One of the options in the referendum was independence for the region, which turned out to be the nearly unanimous choice (close to 99 percent) of those voting in January 2011. This result had been widely expected, as had large-scale violence to follow. Francis Deng, a prominent Sudanese diplomat and scholar, forecast over a decade ago that "self-determination for the South has been recognized as a right that cannot be denied, wherever it leads (2002, 85; italics added), and, as the date of the referendum neared, US National Security Director Admiral Dennis Blair observed that of all the countries at risk of experiencing a widespread massacre in the next five years, ‘a new mass killing or genocide is most likely to occur in southern Sudan’" (quoted in Sheridan, 2010a; italics added). It would have been difficult to find anyone who quarrelled with that assessment.

The relatively simple question that motivated this study, therefore, was what efforts were made by the international community to implement the responsibility to prevent doctrine identified by the 2001 report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) as the first and best method of controlling serious conflict? The idea of prevention, along with the other components of the ICISS’s Responsibility to Protect (that is, to react to failure to protect people at large, and to rebuild following serious conflict) appears at best to be a work in progress, as events in Libya, Mali, and perhaps Syria most of all, demonstrate. In other words, there is little consensus to date as to where and how these ambitious principles should govern state behaviour, or, as Frank Chalk and associates (2010) put it, there is obvious inconsistency in the Will to Intervene in serious conflict situations on humanitarian grounds. For those very reasons, examining the issue in the context of a case in which widespread bloodshed was thought to be virtually certain is important in terms of the development of international norms.

The specific focus of this study is the role the mass media played in interpreting and advocating the newly proclaimed (2005) prevention obligation. Precisely how much influence media have with respect to foreign policy decision making is still a matter of debate among communication and political scholars, but it seems clear that it lies somewhere between the determinism alleged by the CNN Effect (see Cohen 1994) and the dismissiveness of the suggestion that media outlets are primarily mouthpieces for governments. The study is therefore based on the assumption that mass media have a definite, if imprecise and varying, impact on all aspects of political life, including international relations. In the view of the authors, repetitive, ongoing media coverage (agenda setting), and the way in which critical events are explained in that coverage (framing), go a long way toward revealing why not all humanitarian crises are treated equally (see Soderlund et al. 2008)

Certainly both the volume of media attention that international crises receive and the opinions of the adequacy of whatever coverage occurs differ considerably. With respect to the Darfur conflict which began in 2003, for example, there is disagreement about both the extent and effect of media treatment (see Thompson 2007; Grzyb 2009; Sidahmed, Soderlund, and Briggs 2010; Hamilton 2011a), but there is virtual unanimity that the civil wars between north and south Sudan were severely under-reported by Western media (Livingston and Eachus 1995; Minear, Scott, and Weiss 1996; Livingston 1997; Soderlund et al. 2008; Prunier 2009). Both these cases involved the actual, ongoing, large-scale destruction of human life. How was the mere possibility of such an occurrence to be treated by media, bearing in mind that the Responsibility to Prevent became a recognized norm only in 2005, too late to impact either Sudan’s civil wars or Darfur? It is hoped that what follows will shed some light on that question.

In summary, the book sets out to accomplish a number of major objectives:

1. To explain the background and complexity of the violence-prone relationship between Sudan and South Sudan (Chapter 1).

2. To trace the development of the norms of international intervention in areas of domestic conflict down to the imperatives enunciated by the Responsibility to Protect (Chapter 2).

3. To review approaches aimed at identifying situations calling for preventive measures and to assess the relative effectiveness of major strategies of conflict prevention, both long-term (development aid, capacity building, and trust and confidence building) and short-term (diplomatic efforts and the rapid deployment of peacekeeping forces to stabilize a developing crisis), when applied to dysfunctional societies and failed states (Chapter 3).

4. To review agenda setting (the transfer of issue salience from mass media to mass publics) and especially framing effects (media influence on how events are interpreted by mass publics) with respect to their relevance to the process which culminated in South Sudan’s independence (Chapter 4).

5. To study US and Canadian mainstream press coverage of three key events in South Sudan’s path to independence: the April 2010 country-wide elections, the January 2011 referendum in the south, and the July 2011 final declaration of independence. Reportage will be examined with respect to the identification of potential violence-producing problems and the framing of these in ways that might mobilize public opinion to support prevention efforts or other more forceful international interventions (Chapters 5–7).

6. To evaluate South Sudan’s independence process in terms of the interaction between press coverage and international (especially US) diplomatic efforts to avoid a humanitarian disaster (Chapter 8).

7. To reflect on what constitutes success and provide readers with an account of the problems that faced the new state and region in the four-year period following independence (Postscript).

This book had its origins in the authors’ collaboration on Humanitarian Crises and Intervention (2008), which compared the impact of mass media coverage of international intervention in ten humanitarian crises of the 1990s, including a chapter on the Sudan’s Second Civil War. The idea of the project was reinforced by a second collaborative effort, The Responsibility to Protect in Darfur (2010), with Abdel Salam Sidahmed (updated and printed as a paperback in 2012), which noted important connections between Darfur and the Second Sudanese Civil War, some of which have reappeared in the contested area of Abyei and in the Nuba Mountains region. As the crucial referendum approached, therefore, we felt compelled to turn our attention to it.

We began work on the project in the spring of 2010 by studying the April elections that returned President Omar al-Bashir to power, and followed that up with a study of the January 2011 referendum, before completing it with a study of the potentially deal-breaking violence leading up to and including the declaration of South Sudan’s independence in July 2011. During that period three conference papers were presented: The South Sudan Referendum, Round #1: North American Press Coverage of the 2010 Sudanese Election (Canadian Political Science Association, May 2011); "Framing the Responsibility to Prevent: North American Press Coverage of the South Sudan Referendum (Canadian Communications Association, June 2012); and The Responsibility to Prevent: From Identification to Implementation" (Canadian Political Science Association, July 2013). Comments of discussants, fellow panelists, and audience members helped to identify arguments in need of clarification.

Books do not, of course, appear without significant help from many whose names do not appear on the cover. In this case our thanks go in particular to Abdel Salam Sidahmed, who initially was slated to be co-author of the book. He contributed his expertise to the design of the project, but in 2012 he was asked by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to establish a country office in the Republic of Yemen to promote and protect human rights during that country’s transition to democracy. As this required his full attention, he was unable to contribute further, but we are heavily indebted to him for the enlightenment he has provided over the years with respect to Sudanese history and politics in particular.

We also wish to thank our graduate research assistant, Kiran Phull, who on a number of key occasions used her considerable Internet skills to move the project along. As always, the University of Windsor was very supportive of our work. Thanks go specifically to Vice-President for Research Ranjana Bird; Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Science Cecil Houston; and Head of the Department of Political Science Tom Najem, all of whom held these positions during the time the book was being researched and written. In the fall of 2011 Professor Soderlund taught a graduate seminar on crisis intervention in Africa, in which some material appearing in the book was discussed, leading to useful clarification of concepts and arguments. The United Nations Map Library receives our thanks for the use of their maps of Africa, Sudan, and South Sudan as does the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program for the grant to Wilfrid Laurier University Press that made possible the book’s publication.

At the Wilfrid Laurier University Press we are indebted to Ryan Chynces for encouraging us to pursue this project, and to Lisa Quinn, Blaire Comacchio, Leslie Macredie, and Rob Kohlmeier for ultimately managing the never easy process of getting a book into print. Craig Hincks did a superlative job of copy-editing the manuscript. Sergey Lobachev compiled the index.

Also deserving of our thanks are two conscientious reviewers of the manuscript who offered a number of very useful suggestions for revision, virtually all of which we adopted. Needless to say, whatever errors or imperfections remain in the work are clearly our responsibility.

Walter C. Soderlund

E. Donald Briggs

Windsor, Ontario

26 May 2014

Map 1 Africa. The United Nations Map Library.

Map 2 Sudan. The United Nations Map Library.

Map 3 South Sudan. The United Nations Map Library.

CHAPTER 1

SUDAN’S NORTH–SOUTH DIVIDE

It is the mission of social scientists with an international focus to unearth the root causes of undesirable or tragic events in the world in the hope that understanding these will improve the possibility of prescribing a cure for present ills, or at least a means of avoiding their future repetition. In carrying out this mission, however, they have a tendency to try to reduce complex situations to one or two intrinsically persuasive beginnings, both because parsimony is an academic virtue (especially when writing for publication) and because it is a natural human desire. Saying that something has multiple, interwoven, overlapping, mutually reinforcing root causes, after all, is neither very satisfying nor very helpful from a prescriptive point of view. It simply leaves the impression that one has failed to find the key to the problem, which, after all must be out there somewhere, unless one is to admit that the mission is in fact impossible.

In the case of Sudan, the tendency has been to fall back in one way or another on that reliable scapegoat British colonialism as the principal factor responsible for the fact that since independence in 1956 the state has been chronically unstable and mired in almost continuous civil war until 2005. Distinguished Sudanese scholar Francis M. Deng, for instance, began his 2002 essay Sudan: An African Dilemma with the observation that:

The crisis of nationhood currently afflicting the Sudan represents two aspects of the dilemmas that confront African countries as they strive to build nations on the foundations emerging from the colonial state. One is the lack of cultural roots to the modern African state which was fashioned on the European model in virtual disregard for indigenous values and institutions.… The other aspect of the African dilemma is that colonialism separated ethnic groups and brought others together in the process of state formation, creating diversities that were eventually rendered conflictual by gross inequalities in the sharing of power, natural resources, and development opportunities. (2002, 61)

That European colonialism in many cases had a less than benign influence on African states cannot be disputed, and Deng’s two aspects in particular have acquired over time the status of conventional wisdom. No doubt instances may be found elsewhere in Africa where they have considerable validity, but it is questionable whether that can be said of Sudan. As another prominent Sudan expert has maintained, the conflict between the northern and southern Sudan has usually been misunderstood, because the historic roots of the conflict have been misrepresented (Johnson 2003, 1). Those historic roots indicate quite clearly that the blame for Sudan’s modern troubles cannot be laid primarily at the door of its twentieth-century overlords; those roots go back much further in time. As argued by Matthew LeRiche and Matthew Arnold, the social and political nature of the Republic of South Sudan draws heavily on the pre-modern experience (2012, 8).

One must first recall that the Sudan that came into existence in 1956 was not an artificial creation of the British Empire so much as a reluctant acquiescence (on the part of the south at least) to the continuation of an unsatisfactory but long-standing relationship that it was hoped independence would improve. The beginning of the relationship is to be found in the fact that geography has dictated that Egypt and Sudan have been inextricably linked for centuries, while the same factor has made it difficult for any government to tie [north and south] together through transportation or administrative infrastructure (Natsios 2012, 9). Apart from anything else, the Nile River, the White branch of which rises in Uganda and flows the entire length of modern Sudan, is vital to Egypt’s agricultural, industrial, and human needs (Natsios 2012, 5–6), and that has guaranteed continuing Egyptian interest in the lands and kingdoms south of its borders from earliest pharaonic times. Nubia, as the southern territories were then called, was of interest for other reasons as well; it was the source of ivory and, more important, slaves—so much so that the terms ‘Nubian’ [Nubi], ‘Nuba’ [Nubawi], and ‘Sudanese’ [Sudani, i.e., black] entered the colloquial Arabic of the Nile valley as synonymous with ‘slave’ (Johnson 2003, 2).

Penetration into the south by early Egyptian traders and slave raiders probably did not extend far into the territories of the present South Sudan, partly because the great Nile swamplands (the Sudd), extending as far as 240 kilometres, provided a natural and formidable barrier. But by the nineteenth century the south had become the prime slave hunting grounds for the now Arabized and Islamized state apparatus centred on Khartoum. Under Islam slavery was permissible as long as the enslaved were infidels, and the tribes of the south, who remained largely unconverted, were therefore a temptation not to be resisted.

Early in the nineteenth century, Egypt’s ruler, Muhammad Ali (formally a viceroy of the Ottoman Empire, of which Egypt was then a part), embarked on a campaign to make Egypt an international power. To obtain the resources, especially the slave soldiers that would make this possible, he invaded Sudan in 1820. The ensuing Turco-Egyptian rule (the Turkiyya) lasted until 1881 and had profound effects on the development of the Sudanese territories. It was a draconian system, with the slave trade at its centre. According to Andrew Natsios, the slave trade took an annual harvest of as many as 30,000 people captive among the [non-Muslim] African population in southern Sudan.… Some regions of the South were virtually depopulated by the slave trade during the nineteenth century (2012, 18).¹ In essence the south was regarded as an uncivilized region fit only for the extraction of raw, uncultured resources, and certainly not a place a well-bred Arab would want to stay for very long, let alone settle in (see Deng 2002, 72). Indirectly that attitude was reinforced by the more formal and doctrinaire brand of Islam that was imposed by the Turkiyya (though not without difficulty) upon the indigenous and looser Sufi practices that had broad northern support especially in rural areas. Douglas Johnson notes the significant consequences of the Turkiyya: the incorporation of the whole of the South as the state’s exploitable hinterland, the intensification of racial stratification and the widespread identification of the people of the South with low status (2003, 6).

Much has been made of the fact that when Sudan came under British rule (formally Anglo-Egyptian rule) in 1898 the south was administered differently from the north, a practice that in 1930 was formalized in the Southern Policy. This policy prohibited the settlement of northern traders, officials, and educators in the region to discourage the transmission of Arab culture. The south, however, was opened to Christian missionaries, thus strengthening its non-Muslim religious orientation (Sidahmed and Soderlund 2008, 76). The policy also raised the possibility that the future of the south might better lie with the countries of British East Africa (Uganda and Kenya) than with those oriented to the Arab world.

If these factors are emphasized without placing them within the context of conditions that had already been established at the time, the implication is left that the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium (essentially British rule) was basically responsible for creating the north–south