SOUTH SUDAN

South Sudan is the world's newest country, a mere two years old. It was ridiculous that a big area largely inhabited by black Christians should be cobbled together on some nineteenth-century bureaucrat's map with an even bigger area largely inhabited by Muslim Arabs. It took decades of alternating high- and low-level civil war for the powers in Khartoum and elsewhere in the world to recognise this simple fact. In July 2011, the two areas went their separate ways.

However, just because you have made one geographical area less artificial doesn't mean that the lopped-off bit is homogeneous. Virtually every country in Africa is an artificial creation of the European imperial powers, and virtually all of them have suffered from the resulting problem; namely tribalism and a fight for resources. South Sudan is no different in that respect, except possibly that it has more resources than normal (in the form of oil) and even more limited capacity to exploit and manage them in a reasonable way. Ever since independence there have been tensions between the two largest tribes in the country, the Dinka and the Nuer, tensions which have almost certainly been fuelled by the resentful former power to the north. Those tensions have now exploded into what seems very like an ethnic civil war.

What can the world in general and the West in particular do in such a situation? Not much, in my view. Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria (plus a long list of others, Northern Ireland, for instance) should be lessons that if people in a country want to fight each other to the death, then there is not much that outsiders can do, unless and until those same people are willing to compromise and live together. At the moment, compromise seems not to be on the agenda. So we are reduced to prodding, trying to starve the flow of weapons (difficult, if not impossible) freezing bank accounts where possible, and trying to ameliorate the dire results of war by helping refugees.

That doesn't sound like much. But better to be realistic than to mouth platitudes that won't happen. It's sad that South Sudan has had so little peace; but viewed from a historical perspective, not so surprising.

Walter Blotscher