President Barack Obama's presence at a high-level meeting on Sudan at the United Nations on September 24 was the most recent sign of his administration's intensified diplomatic efforts to avert a catastrophic return to war in Africa's largest state. On January 9, southern Sudan is scheduled to vote in two referenda. One is on self-determination for the south; the other is on the disposition of the oil-rich and ethnically divided region of Abyei. Both are cornerstones of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that ended Sudan's civil war.
After reports of internal Obama administration squabbling over whether and how to engage with the government in Khartoum, the president's presence at the UN meeting, the roll-out of a new U.S. strategy on Sudan ten days earlier, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's recent phone calls and meetings with senior northern and southern leaders all seemed designed to promote policy coherence and message discipline.
The next three months will test whether this approach succeeds in inducing the key political actors in Sudan to manage successfully the referenda and the post-referenda environment. Four factors will determine its effectiveness:
1) Having refocused efforts on Sudan, the administration must sustain its diplomatic approach, maintaining unity both within the U.S. government and among the key international stakeholders of the CPA
2) The administration must work with the parties and other stakeholders to reconcile the tension between the credibility of the referenda--preparations for which are woefully behind schedule--with the date of the referenda, which is sacrosanct for southern Sudanese
3) Western governments, and the United States in particular, must establish a framework for their post-referenda relationship with northern Sudan
4) U.S. goals and strategy for addressing the situation in Darfur must be articulated in more detail and must be consistent with efforts to promote fulfillment of the CPA.
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