Ban Ki-moon is not the best secretary-general the United
Nations ever had, but he has grasped the essential nature of
his job.
The UN is an organisation made up of sovereign states and
their highest priority is the preservation of their own
privileges.
It is the trade union of the sovereign states of the world
and Mr Ban is their shop steward.
Which is why he said what he did last weekend.
Speaking just before the African Union summit opened in Addis
Ababa, the UN secretary-general declared that both the UN and
the AU had a big responsibility "to maintain peace in Sudan
and make unity attractive".
It is not immediately obvious that peace and unity are
compatible in Sudan, where civil war killed about two million
people and created four million refugees between 1983 and
2005, but Mr Ban was in no doubt about it.
The fighting in Sudan ended in 2005 when the northern-based
government and the southern-based rebels signed a
Comprehensive Peace Agreement that created a unity government
in Khartoum and a separate regional government in the south,
and promised the southerners a referendum on secession next
year.
That promise was what stopped the fighting and despite many
crises and clashes it has held for five years.
Not only that, but the dictator in Khartoum, President (and
ex-general) Omar al-Bashir, recently declared yet again that
he will respect a southern decision to secede.
"The National Congress Party favours unity," he said in
December. "But if the result of the referendum is separation,
then we in the NCP will be the first to take note of this
decision and to support it."
So here is this Korean bureaucrat, Ban Ki-moon, urging
African countries to back the unity campaign of the regime in
Khartoum - a regime whose leader, President Bashir, is under
indictment by the International Criminal Court for the
massacres carried out by government-backed militias in
Darfur.
What's more, Mr Ban is ultimately in control of the UN troops
who are stationed in Sudan to guarantee the peace agreement.
Yet he clearly said which side he backed in the referendum:
"We'll work hard to avoid a possible secession".
Who does this guy think he is? He knows.
He is the shop steward of the Federation of Sovereign States
and Allied Trades (also known as the United Nations) and his
job is to preserve the rights and privileges of its members.
Their most important right, of course, is to keep control of
all their territory forever, regardless of the views of the
local people.
The African Union is particularly devoted to preserving the
unity of all its members, because Africa's borders are
particularly arbitrary and irrational.
If any of the disparate ethnic groups that are trapped
together in country A were allowed to secede, then the demand
for similar secessions in countries B to Z would become
irresistible, or so the African orthodoxy has it.
"No secessions" was the paramount rule of the old
Organisation of African Unity and it survived unbroken until
Eritrea got its independence from Ethiopia in 1993.
That was not an encouraging precedent, since Eritrea and
Ethiopia soon ended up at war with each other, and no further
secessions have been recognised since then.
But there is another way to look at this and that is to count
the cost of all the wars that have been fought in Africa to
prevent secessions.
From the Biafran war in Nigeria in the 1960s down through the
various secessionist movements in the Congo and Ethiopia and
on to the breakaway movements in Sudan's south and west
(Darfur) today, at least 10 million Africans have been
killed.
For what? Nobody, except some ruling elites would be worse
off if the secessions had been allowed to succeed.
The Nigerian elite would have somewhat less money to put into
its overseas bank accounts, since the oil money would have
stayed in the southeast and a new Biafran ruling elite would
have bigger Swiss accounts.
Maybe what remained of Nigeria would have split into a Muslim
north and a Yoruba-speaking Christian southwest, since
without Biafra the country would have become a
Muslim-majority state.
So what? Maybe everybody would have been happier that way.
Most people will probably be happier if Sudan does split in
the referendum planned for January 2011.
Those in the Muslim, Arabic-speaking north would have
co-existed peacefully with the various Christian and animist
ethnic groups of the south if they had been left to their own
devices.
However, the northern ruling elite imposed Islamic law to
consolidate its power and the southern elites responded with
appeals to ethnic solidarity.
If the south leaves next year, it will take most of the oil
with it. That is why the northern elite fought so hard to
save national unity . . .
But the oil still has to go out to the sea through northern
territory, so the revenue will still be shared.
After two decades of killing, Sudan is broken and the best
solution is independence for the south.
Unless Ban Ki-moon and his trade union get their way, in
which case the war will resume.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent
journalist.
