Below are a collection of videos reporting on the recent increase in military conflict in the Abyei region.

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Sudan takes control of oil-rich Abyei (Al Jazeera English, May 22, 2011)

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Abyei takeover escalates Sudan tensions (Al Jazeera English, May 24, 2011)

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UN warns Khartoum over Abyei assault (Al Jazeera English, May 25, 2011)

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Abyei residents flee after north takeover (Al Jazeera English, May 26, 2011)

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UN condemns Sudan Abyei takeover (Al Jazeera English, June 3, 2011)

The material presented in the report comes from workshops in Malakal, Juba, Bor and Khartoum in May and June 2009, just after my own visit to Southern Sudan, although I went to Juba, Wau, Aweil and Abyei. Information comes from input during the workshops by local and international NGOs, faith group, politicians, government officials, civil society organizations and “others”.

The report defines four scenarios based on two uncertainties: 1) whether the country will be at war or at peace, and 2) whether the country will remain united or whether the south will secede from the north (see diagram below).

FOUR (five) SCENARIOS:

In the document’s executive summary, five main findings arose from the exercise of creating these four scenarios:

1. “It may not be wise to direct all long-term attention to developmental rather than humanitarian assistance.” because, the report stipulates, even in the best scenario (self-professed as the ‘CPA Hurray!’ scenario) “small-scale conflicts are still likely.”;
2. The ‘CPA Hurray!’ scenario is worth pursuing as a strategy because it “promises a less violent future.” But, according to this report (and this recent report), it “appears less plausible”.
3. The materialization of “free and fair elections is essential, not only to guarantee peace, but as the only peaceful way to bring about unity,” which according to September 2007 focus group survey, A Place to Call Their Own, as well as the report’s own southern focus groups, most Southerners do not want.
4. “Continuous outside mediation and pressure is needed to get all parties to implement the CPA and to make unity attractive.” It continues to explain that the “time horizon” needs more flexibility and needs to be extended beyond 2012. The need to talk about a “post-2012 period” is paramount particularly “about what unity might look like” to make the pre-2012 period “more manageable.”
5. “The critical difference between a successful and unsuccessful outcome will be to a large extent determined by whether the South has a stable, cooperative and confident leadership.”

The interesting future histories in Sudan between 2009-2012, created by the report’s author, lead to each of the four post-2012 Sudan scenarios are followed by the suggestions and policy options for the international community. They are well researched and seem to portray the current situation in Southern Sudan. Future histories are then formulated to create each of the four scenarios.

Based on the five main findings outlined above, the report seems to favour scenario #3, which represents the point of view of Northern focus groups, who view ‘CPA Hurray!’ as “a romantic but possible scenario.” The members of Southern focus groups expressed a belief that “a renewed war between the North and the South next to unavoidable” so scenarios one and two were most likely to them.

Possibly the most interesting element in the report is the identification by the Northern focus groups of a fifth “Stagnation’ scenario within the ‘no war’ and ‘united’ quadrant of the diagram. Based on a third uncertainty, which is given little attention these days, is the possibility that neither the 2010 elections nor the 2011 referendum will take place. They believe that “because elites in power in Khartoum and Juba have little to gain from [a election and a referendum], and prefer the present situation to continue.” This status quo situation would allow Sudanese and international actors to “muddle through, continuing to ‘band aid’ the Sudanese system together.”

I recount anecdotes of my time in Southern Sudan to friends, family, journalists and am reminded of how little we know about the place, which beckons a second visit. How the media focuses on the war in Darfur, or the International Criminal Court arrest warrant against Sudanese President Omar el-Bashir but completely ignore the immense challenges facing the southern part of the country as it adapts to times of relative peace four years after the signing of the January 9, 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), which ended 21 years of civil war.

Few people I’ve spoken with realize that Sudan is divided in two: Sudan and Southern Sudan with a coalition Government of National Unity dominated by President Omar al-Bashir’s National Congress Party for the whole of Sudan, and a semi-autonomous Southern Sudan led by President Salva Kiir Mayardit’s Sudan People’s Liberation Movement. Salva Kiir is also First Vice-President of Sudan under the power-sharing peace deal. Even fewer people I’ve spoken with are aware that under the mandate of the CPA, Southern Sudan is scheduled—at the end of its post-war six-year interim period—to hold a referendum in 2011 that will determine whether or not Africa’s largest country will be divided, giving independence to the South.

In the meantime, what has happened to the one million people that have been living as refugees in neighbouring countries for up to two decades, or to the four million Internally Displaced People (IDPs) who were uprooted from their homes when they fled the fighting? More than two million have already returned to their traditional homeland in the south, which was devastated by the war. How are the returnees adjusting to the tenuous peace now that they have returned to regions they no longer recognize, or for the younger ones, have never lived in?

Below are IDPs during their return to Southern Sudan in 2008 as coordinated by the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Nearly all of the Southern Sudanese I had the pleasure of speaking with while visiting the south have returned to their traditional homelands only within the last two years. Many left when they were very young while some were born in exile, which required of them complete readaptation to a homeland they do not know.

Why is our media uninterested in following the story of an African region the size of France after the end of what has been described as the Twentieth Century’s longest and bloodiest civil war? Five million displaced and two mimmion dead! What is it about the initiation of peace and democracy that persuades news editors to look elsewhere for stories? This virtual blackout of information about Southern Sudan is what led me to visit. I wanted to meet the people who are making the transition to a peaceful society.

Now that I’ve returned, I have more questions than before, but they are no longer based on a total lack of information. How does a rebel army like the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) make the transition from rebel forces to official army of Southern Sudan and member of the Joint Integrated Units with its former foe, the Sudan Armed Forces? How is former soldier, Lt. General Salva Kiir Mayardit adapting to his new job as President of the Government of Southern Sudan (GoSS) and First Vice President of  Sudan’s interim Government of National Unity (GNU)? What are the most imposing obstacles to the peace agreement (and there are many: serious underdevelopment, food insecurity,  intertribal conflicts, international pressures, border disputes, resource sharing, slow/non implementation of CPA requirements, census results, February 2010 national elections, the 2011 independence referendum, etc.)

I will attempt to address the above questions and others in future posts to this blog so I invite you to return here and comment on what your read. I am in regular contact with people I met in Southern Sudan and will be following their stories and the story of Sudan as it unfolds. I’ve just begun to review the thousands of photographs, hours of video footage, dozens of audio interviews, and the pages and pages of notes taken throughout my trip. I’ve started reading the books, reports, newspapers and documents I picked up while in Southern Sudan and have consolidated the names and contact details of people I met there. I’m reviewing websites of organizations I came across in Sudan and am adding links to the relevant ones to the sidebar on this blog. There are many news blogs that provide regularly updated news about Sudan, many of which I’ve added RSS feeds here as well.

Burningbillboard.org is my South Sudan resource gathering point. If you are interested, it can also be yours.

I’m approaching chapter ten in the 535-page novel and only months into the war as it completely transforms the life of the story’s protagonist: Achak. The last sentence of chapter nine reads, “I continued to run.” The seven-year-old Achak had been on the run–much of it alone–for days and nights through darkness; always escaping the horsemen, the murahaleen, the Baggara raiders. At one point, he watches from a hiding place in his village church as his best friend, Moses, is chased by a horseman bearing down on the child “now with a sword raised high over his head.” Achak could only turn away and “dig [him]self into the earth under the church… There were none of [his] people visible; all had run or were dead.”

The novel’s parallel narratives jump back and forth between Achak’s life as a child in Sudan and his time in the United States. Eggers begins the story with Achak–a recently arrived refugee in the American city of Atlanta, Georgia–opening the door to a unknown woman in search of a phone, stating that her “car broke down on the street.” This chance encounter is the beginning of a robbery of Achak’s appartment with him, or “Africa” as his assailants call him, held prisoner, bound and gagged on the living room floor.

With tape across his mouth and in fear of further reprisals, Achak addresses his robbers in imaginary confrontations, describing his past and of his assailants’ unknowing: their incomprehension of what he has gone through before his misadventure with them. Achak gains courage each time he contemplates his past and his ability to survive where others haven’t. It’s during these moments of recollection that he recounts the loss of his boyhood innocence as the civil war vaulted into his life without warning, tearing him away from all that was familiar.

The 40 minutes of fireworks continually pull me away from Achak’s eastward walk toward refuge in Ethiopia. Without having visual access to the fireworks, I remember a radio show I once produced for CKUT 90.3fm the week following the invasion of Iraq and the bombing of Bagdad. I tried to comprehend what it might be like in Montréal, if the same targets were bombarded in my own city. Just as Achak helps me imagine his war in Sudan, the blasts outside remind me of what war might be sound like here as a civilian unaware of military strategy, uncertain of the bombing campaign’s duration nor its intensity. Vulnerable to the blasts and the destruction.

The United States began bombing Bagdad with its “shock and awe” on March 21, 2003 with more than 3000 bombs, including 320, 1000-pound (450-kilogram) cruise missiles launched from Persian Gulf-based USS Kitty Hawk. How did the blasts outside my window compare with those in Bagdad that night? How much more deafeningly did the bombs fall on Bagdad? How much did the ground rumble and how much brighter were the blasts? In Montréal, we admire the explosions while in Bagdad the population feared them, hid from them, died under their rubble.

The fireworks eventually reached their crescendo finale with a pulsation of blasts and massive sonic booms. Chester hid like the dog he is deep under my desk, shivering with fear. The citizens of Bagdad must have felt like dogs five years ago when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld defended the US military’s bombing campaign by saying that the intensity could not be compared with the Nazi blitzkrieg during WWII. “The weapons that are being used today have a degree of precision that no one ever dreamt of in a prior conflict,” Rumsfeld said without comparing the number of bombs dropped nor the attainment of their targets, which included military installations, radio and television stations and their towers, government buildings and official palaces, among other targets.

What if Montréal received USA’s bombs instad of Bagdad? Which buildings would be targeted? Whose lives would be ended by near misses while living next door to the targets? There are dozens of military infrastructure in downtowm Montréal. The little yellow-bricked castle of Les Fusilliers Mont-Royal on Roy street just west of rue St-Denis is immediately across the street from an elementary school in the heart of a residential neighbourhood. The Blackwatch are based in an armoury on de Bleury street near de Maisonneuve. CKUT radio on University street at des Pins; CJAD on Ste-Catherine street at the corner of Fort street; Radio Centre-Ville on St-Laurent and Fairmount; CBC tower on René-Lévesque or the TVA building on de Maisonneuve. The are all in residential neighbourhoods and all would have been targeted that night! How many of the cruise missiles would have missed their intended targets, instead slamming into people’s living rooms? How many fireballs and plumes of smoke would rise from Montréal neighbourhoods? How many corpses would be trapped under the rubble as “collatoral dammage” without any reference to the life that once inhabited them?

The fireworks seemed less entertaining to me as they once had. David Egger’s writing about Achak’s war fuelled my imagination. The fireworks added enough audio accompaniment to bring me to a place where I have no real experience: a war zone. It is easy to be indifferent or apathetic to war while comfortably reading in a spacious living room. But it is not acceptable. I am no longer able to sit it out. I need to submerge myself in the subject.

Southern Sudan seems the next logical destination for me, particularly since I have a friend working their with the United Nations. The city of Juba in southern Sudan will be my first destination to seek out an understanding of war.

I will get close to it by interviewing people like Achak Deng or soldiers from the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. By capturing footage of the recovery since the end of Sudan’s civil war three years ago. By writing about it and researching ideas in preparation of an eventual documentary film. I will share my preparation for the trip, my journey to and from Sudan, as well as the weeks I spend in the country through this blog. Expect text, audio recordings and video footage. My estimated time of departure is end of October 2008. Stay tuned!