South Sudan troubles not unique among new nations

Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, which had been Soviet republics for a half-century, regained their independence in 1991 after considerable agitation but little violence. Strong independence movements arose in the late 1980s and conducted large demonstrations and acts of resistance. Soviet troops killed 14 people when they tried to take control of the broadcasting tower in the capital of Lithuania in January 1991, and at least seven people died in confrontations with troops in Riga, Latvia, the same month. The coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev weakened Soviet control and by the end of August the Kremlin let the Baltics go their own way.

Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia suffered bloodshed both before and after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union gave them independence. Soviet troops killed about 20 pro-independence demonstrators in the capital Tbilisi in April 1989. Just days before the Soviet Union's formal disintegration, Georgia's president was deposed in a bloody coup and the country plunged into both a civil war and conflicts with the separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia lasting until 1995. In Azerbaijan, some 130 nationalists were killed in clashes with Soviet troops that had been sent into the capital Baku in January 1990 after anti-Armenian pogroms that killed at least 90. The republics' militias and troops were meanwhile fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnically Armenian region in Azerbaijan. That escalated into a full-scale war after independence.