Foreign Affairs committee  Yes. The debt was contracted by Khartoum and an awful lot of it hasn't been paid for 30 years. So because of accumulated interest, they owe an enormous amount. They're one of the few countries in the world that has a long-term outstanding debt to the IMF. But they have two othe

Foreign Affairs committee  I think the U.S. will try to use its influence in the Paris law, if it was bilateral Paris Club debt, to negotiate a Paris Club writeoff of that debt--if Khartoum cooperates. He hinted that if the U.S. couldn't do it....even though they buggered things up here and there, but any

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes, absolutely. That was the Deloitte/USAID-funded project that I was on. It was called core institutions in southern Sudan. Almost all of our efforts went into advising. There were only three of us in the Bank of Southern Sudan, but there were lots of other people in the other

Foreign Affairs committee  We've drawn up a design for the currency, but it can't legally be implemented until May 2011. There is a body of thought within the Bank of Southern Sudan that they should print and circulate the currency immediately, because there's a paranoid fear that the south will cease acce

Foreign Affairs committee  Well, I mean, this touches on the question of a niche role for Canada, independent of the U.S. I was struck by your remarks on the role of the U.S. The U.S. was instrumental in engineering the CPA, and you said that it was a bad thing, that it should have been engineered on a m

Foreign Affairs committee  Is it going to be dysfunctional for...?

Foreign Affairs committee  Is separation of the south from the north going to be dysfunctional in the long run for the country of Sudan, and in particular, for the south? And second, is it going to be dysfunctional for Africa as a whole? Has the U.S. played a role, has it wrongly played a role, in encourag

Foreign Affairs committee  Well, there is a land tenure law in southern Sudan thanks to the activities of foreign donors and of NGOs. There's an organization called Pact. Pact has been active in I'm not sure righting but certainly trying to observe whether the spirit and the law of the land tenure laws is

Foreign Affairs committee  The Lord's Resistance Army has encamped itself in the southeast of Sudan. Meanwhile, the World Bank, for very good reasons, is trying to regularize and establish agriculture there. These efforts have become almost impossible because the Lord's Resistance Army has displaced, raped

Foreign Affairs committee  I don't have much of an informed view on that, because for security reasons we were not allowed to leave Juba. But lots of other aid workers in Juba were going up there all the time. It was the rainy season and very difficult to get there, as you well know. So there's the simple

Foreign Affairs committee  On the question about Abyei—and then I'll refer this to Mark and Elsadig, because they may know more about it. I believe that the international community, starting with the United States, is going to do everything it can to ensure that the referendum goes ahead, voter registrat

Foreign Affairs committee  I think Mark probably knows more and has a better idea about that than I do. There were, however, fears in Juba that the so-called djellaba Arab traders would be expelled or worse. They're a core part of the economy in Juba. They're good traders, but they're not citizens. When I

Foreign Affairs committee  I've got a little example of a land grab here, but let me just read what I've got in italics. The upshot is that these agricultural sell-offs are very likely to stoke the fires of further intertribal violence, because evicted farmers migrate to new lands and they attack or are at

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I am a retired professor of economics from Simon Fraser University, but I've spent the last four months in Juba, southern Sudan, as senior advisor to the Bank of Southern Sudan. I've been working for Deloitte under a contract to USAID. Our manda