South Sudan is facing a cascade of chaos

The unfolding cataclysm in Sudan will not be contained inside Sudan’s borders. In addition to cascading Sudanese refugee flows into Europe, the Gulf and neighboring African states, violent kleptocrats throughout Africa will be watching to see if the feuding Sudanese warlords face any repercussions for their wanton destruction.

This is acutely evident in South Sudan, which shares deep history with the combatants and issues dividing Sudan and possesses some of the same sparks that could ignite into a raging fire, potentially dwarfing what has unfolded so far in its neighbor to the north.

As in Sudan, there are two primary and highly armed South Sudanese factions allied with numerous local ethnic-based militias. For the past 20 years, these factions have vied for the control of the natural resource riches associated with state domination. As in Sudan, corruption isn’t an aberration, it is the operating system. State institutions have been hijacked to enrich the networks around President Salva Kiir and other South Sudanese powerbrokers feeding off government control. As in Sudan, there is a near total absence of accountability for mass corruption and mass atrocities.

Over the past few years, South Sudan’s leaders have repeatedly undermined an already shaky peace agreement signed in 2018. At every turn, ruling party elites have ensured minimal or piecemeal implementation of the pact. The modus operandi is to implement just enough elements to hoodwink the international community into head-in-the-sand inaction.

For example, just as in Sudan before the war erupted, the security arrangements in the South Sudan peace agreement are badly behind schedule, with no resolution in sight. Officials have thumbed their noses at benchmarks established by the United Nations Security Council to meet implementation goals. Worse, the country is not even close to meeting most milestones in a key part of the agreement designed to roll back egregious corruption and the capture of state institutions that oversee accountability on government spending. Yet the international community has only responded by issuing veiled threats, failing to hold officials accountable.

South Sudan is sleepwalking into what could arguably be another round of devastating violence within the year. Attacks by holdout rebels, militarized cattle-raiding, and inter-communal fights fueled by a general breakdown of the rule of law are escalating in many locations. Basic democratic requirements such as free speech and freedom of association do not exist. Elections envisioned for next year may not happen, as critical requirements — such as the drafting of a new constitution and the formation of a body to oversee voting — are far behind schedule. If elections are not held on schedule, the prospects for violence are significantly elevated.

Previous international policies aimed at addressing the crisis have failed spectacularly. Intermittent and half-hearted “Swiss cheese” sanctions poorly pegged to strategic outcomes have left big holes in the financial pressure net, meaning that there is actually very little pressure on the regime, although a few of its elite are feeling some heat. This is despite empirical evidence from 2018, when a few rounds of impactful sanctions and a Treasury Department anti-money laundering advisory on South Sudanese elites using the global financial system to move the proceeds of corruption helped bring leaders to the negotiating table, resulting in the aforementioned 2018 peace pact. Because policymakers in the U.S. and elsewhere lost focus after that and no follow-up actions were taken, those impacts on the calculus of South Sudan’s leaders have been lost.

To prevent another descent into full-scale civil war in South Sudan, the calculations of the warlords and their beneficiaries must be altered, and impunity must be challenged. Specifically, the international community must work to remove the personal profitability that results from total state control. Concerned governments and multilateral organizations need to make it painful to personally benefit from violent state looting.

To rebuild leverage aimed at preventing another full-scale civil war, the United States, United Kingdom and European Union, along with others with potential clout, must consider a much larger regime of escalating costs and pressures targeting the kleptocratic networks feeding off South Sudan’s resources.

Sanctions can’t just target individual officials, who rarely move their ill-gotten gains in their own name. Targeted network sanctions should focus on the associates, bagmen, companies and international enablers that facilitate the violence-generating corruption in South Sudan.

The international financial system — from local South Sudanese banks to regional and global banks — is vital to undermining the violent contest over the looting machine that the South Sudanese state has become. The banking system is the get-away car for much of the stolen money. Therefore, regional and global policymakers and banks need to apply pressure on actors in South Sudan until the country has a proper anti-money laundering framework in place, in line with the recommendations of the Financial Action Task Force, which has already grey-listed South Sudan.

Sudan is a colossal early warning sign for what awaits South Sudan if the latter’s trajectory is not somehow altered. Unfortunately, until now, the intermittent individual sanctions, press statements and diplomatic forays have been pure symbolism. To give embattled South Sudanese a chance for peace, international efforts must create real consequences for those who enrich themselves on the back of unparalleled human misery.

John Prendergast is co-founder of The Sentry, an investigative and policy organization that seeks to disable multinational predatory networks that benefit from violent conflict, repression, and kleptocracy.

Brian Adeba is senior policy adviser, Sudan and South Sudan, at The Sentry.