Our Quote of the Day is actually an entire post by The Daily Beast’s John Avlon who notes the birth of a nation: South Sudan:
A new nation was born today, as the Republic of South Sudan officially became the 193rd country on earth.
But the joyous celebration in the new capital city of Juba should not cause observers to think that the struggle for sovereignty is finally over after two decades of bloody civil war. Because without sustained attention from the international community, the youngest nation on earth could find itself fighting for its life within weeks.
The most basic condition of nationhood is defined borders. The Republic of South Sudan, however, does not have its final borders yet set. The still-contested region of Abyei has been the target of repeated violence since the January 2011 referendum in which the South voted 99% to secede from the North. Over 80,000 ethnic Ngok Dinka have been displaced from their homes in Abyei and driven South as refugees. Villages have been systematically burned to the ground and hundreds of people have been murdered.The bridge that connects Abyei to the South has also been deliberately demolished by Northern troops to make it all but impossible for refugees to return. I crossed that bridge six months ago and spent time with the people of Abyei. Their worst fears have become reality with little international outcry, let alone intervention.
Evidence of the violence in Abyei was captured on satellite by the Satellite Sentinel Project, envisioned by George Clooney and executed by the Enough Project, the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and DigitalGlobe. On the surface, armed members of the neighboring Missiriya tribe are to blame, but signs point to their encouragement by the Islamist government of the North, whose President Omar al-Bashir has been indicted on charges of crimes against humanity by the Hague for his involvement in the Darfur genocide, where accusation of ethnic cleansing continues.
Enough Project co-founder John Prendergast has explained the likely scenario to me as being “like Yugoslavia—if you want the territory, you go knock the people off it and move into those areas and then you start negotiating.” This would fit previous patterns.
Abyei is not the only area in Sudan that has suffered an escalation of violence in recent months.
Go to the link to read it all.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.