In Ethiopia, the secession of Eritrea is still a fresh wound. The sense that a nation has been ripped at the historical and spiritual core pervades the national mood. Two decades have not been enough to reverse a sentiment of national defeat and tragedy.
In Sudan, the rise of Islamism, which romanticizes a pure Islamic state, has tempered the sense of national loss. With the formal secession of Southern Sudan due in July, Sudan-proper is now closer to the idealized norm: a mono-religious nation. Sudan will now finally be able to embrace an Islamic identity and heritage openly. There will no more be the ambiguities and uncertainties that prevailed when the south was part of the nation.
As luck would have it for the north, the one issue, the status of Abyie, a disputed area between the two sides with ample deposits of hydrocarbon riches, which could have spurned a happy ending, had also ended favourably at the last minute.
Abyie would most probably have figured less in the stakes for both northerners and southerners if not for the ‘black gold’ that sways in abundance below its hot, dusty terrain.
To northern Nomads, Abyie has always been grazing land to their cattle, which they had passed through unhindered for centuries. Southerners, on the other hand, have also inhabited it as agro-pastoralists for centuries. The two communities tolerated each other until the advent of colonial administrators.
But whatever the blunders of Colonial administrators, less blood would most probably have been shed over the years if not for the discovery of oil in the 1970s. Northerners could not resist the temptation, however ill advised it had always seemed, to redistrict oil rich southern areas, primarily Abyie, in to northern administrations.
Inevitably, war, and, in a way that is only possible in Africa in contemporary times, stealthily and brutally, ethnic cleansing ensued for decades. Unsurprisingly, southerners, still essentially agro-pastoralists, suffered much more at the receiving end.
Perhaps more as a consolation prize for acquiescing to the referendum, rather than the merits of an iron-clad case, the north has been awarded most of the oil in Abyei by the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA), in The Hague, to whom the case had been referred to by the consent of both parties.
And so what European colonizers had disastrously lumped together as the modern nation of Sudan oblivious to history, psychology and sentiment was cleverly given leeway to succumb to local will; albeit generous concessions to the stronger party.
With the secession of Eritrea, the colonial status-quo was re-established four decades after being reversed by local forces when Eritrea was reintegrated, with the blessing of the UN, with the historical hinterland, Ethiopia.
