South Sudan a state born with makings of crisis Salva Kiir, South Sudan's president South Sudan's independence had many midwives. Not least of these were the millions of Southern Sudanese who voted to break away from northern and Arab domination in a 2011 referendum. But among the foreign players, Washington was always among the most hands-on. Successive occupants of the White House - buttressed by the US Congress and encouraged by activists and evangelicals - have made peace in South Sudan, and the right of its people to self-determination, a foreign policy priority in Africa. The unravelling of the world's newest nation over the past three weeks, is therefore reverberating far beyond the remote bush where fighting has raged between different factions of the army, even as peace talks get under way in neighbouring Ethiopia. South Sudan's friends abroad are in somewhat unfamiliar territory. In past crises in Sudan, it was easy to point a finger of blame at Khartoum. The long, ultimately futile war of religious and cultural dominion waged by the government in the predominately Muslim north over those in the south with traditional and Christian beliefs cost more than 2m lives and brought countless atrocities. Even if a good number of these were carried out among southerners, Khartoum's hand was usually in the mix. This time the blame lies squarely within the southern leadership and a power struggle between the president, Salva Kiir, and his sacked deputy Riek Machar. The speed with which a shootout between their rival forces in the army has metastasised into a vicious conflict has exposed the naivety of those self-appointed cheerleaders of southern independence abroad, who argued that all other issues were secondary to sovereignty. This was a view long held by a group of US activists and officials that included Susan Rice, now the National Security Advisor, and George Clooney, the Hollywood actor. They have been influential in promoting the belief that the government in Khartoum is "too deformed to be reformed," and that once liberated the south would thrive. Officials in Khartoum, on the other hand, have long predicted that once free the southern Sudanese would settle scores among themselves. The new state was born with all the makings of a crisis. Its development had been stunted by five decades of intermittent war. Unlike other African liberation movements, the now fractured Sudan People's Liberation Movement had few if any social programmes in areas it controlled. There were few functioning institutions beyond the army and less infrastructure than most African nations had when colonial powers began to withdraw. South Sudanese have returned from abroad en masse to try to fill the void, along with thousands of teachers and aid workers from around the region and beyond. But despite billions of dollars in foreign aid, there have yet been few if any obvious dividends for the wider population. Instead, the first years of self-determination have been accompanied by official corruption on a grand scale. President Kiir initially achieved some peace by bringing together a loose government coalition and by including potentially hostile factions within the army. But he quickly lost it when, in a misjudged attempt at consolidating power, he began to force out rivals. A more protracted conflict could yet suck in Khartoum. The government in the north has an interest in protecting the south's oilfields, from which it garners a significant portion of revenue via pipeline transit fees. The south's rebel allies fighting in border territories in the north could also be drawn in. The prospect of civil war has raised again the question of how much the outside world can and should intervene. It is arguable that given how much it had to overcome, South Sudan needed much greater external assistance than it received. But it is also the case that many of the new state's most ardent supporters have been guilty of looking the other way, when things started going wrong - such was their desire to see the project work. There is no obvious way out now beyond an accommodation among the same protagonists in government and in the army. Longer term, it is hard to see how foreign intervention can be effective without better governance and less corruption by the SPLM, which remains the only political viable force.