South Sudan.

The creation of a new country is an immense undertaking. From the comparatively simple logistics of organising the demarcation of frontiers to establishing a governmental framework and all of the tens of thousands of tasks in between.

The difficulties of such an enterprise should not be underestimated or diminished, it is a mammoth accomplishment to even start the process.

So I think that whilst we should welcome the setting up of South Sudan we should not forget the background to its creation or the part play by Omar Al-Bashir, who took power in a 1989 coup d’etat.

We should not forget the ICC’s warrent for his arrest.

I would heartily recommend Eric Reeves’s work on Darfur and beyond to understand what has happened and why.

Reeves’s past piece on China’s role in this conflict is illuminating:

“The weaponry and ammunition in this and many other subsequent attacks on the UN peacekeeping force were in all likelihood manufactured in China and imported into Darfur by Khartoum’s armed forces—in direct violation of a UN Security Council embargo on all such movement of arms or ammunition. This is confirmed in a new, unpublished report from the UN Panel of Experts on Darfur, created by UN Security Council Resolution 1591 (March 2005). According to the Washington Post, the UN panel reports “finding recently manufactured shell casings from Chinese ammunition at the site of numerous attacks launched by unidentified assailants against peacekeepers from the joint UN-Union Mission.” This finding clearly implicates Khartoum and its proxies in the attacks on peacekeepers. “