The NCP, oil and Islam

The editor of al-Intibaha’s mujahideen page wrote a notable piece on 21 February calling on Sudan’s Minister of Oil, Awad al-Jaz, to resign his post and save what remains of his reputation as the hero of Sudan’s oil boom. Alas, it did not last, argued Jaafar Banaga al-Tayeb, because three of the Islamic Movement’s hawks, Salah Gosh, Nafie Ali Nafie and Awad al-Jaz, succumbed at the critical moments of examination, the first in the abode of the Presidential Palace, the second in the spas of Addis Ababa, and the third in the quagmire of oil. The editor, while acknowledging the Minister’s herculean accomplishment, the extraction of Sudan’s oil against all odds during the nineties, blamed him for two deadly blunders. These, he detailed, are the surrender of the country’s oil to South Sudan and the failure to extract the oil reserves in northern Sudan in a timely fashion to preclude the eventuality of secession. Jaafar described Juba’s transit fee proposal of 70 cents as an affront to the regime in Khartoum. “The Ingaz (Salvation) [regime] only dwarfs, wastes its self-respect and our respect for it, when it agrees to negotiate with each and every contemptible rogue,”, he wrote in reference to the readiness of Khartoum’s negotiators to engage Pagan Amum, the Secretary General of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) who headed South Sudan’s negotiation team at the recent round of post-secession talks in Addis Ababa. In a last remark Jaafar mourned the Islamic Movement, which, he said, does not exist anymore as an organized structure but only survives in the persons of its members. He implored al-Jaz to discipline himself as it were, since no authority was in place to do so.
Combined in Jaafar’s outburst are the anger at the failure of the regime in Khartoum to maintain its greatest prize, oil rent, and secondarily oil infrastructure rent, and the projection of that anger in racespeak. In the chronology of Sudan’s wars the oil moment is arguably the most significant. Although the confrontation between north and south predates oil the introduction of the mineral into the equation unleashed its destructive potential to the full. Once commercial amounts of oil were uncovered in South Sudan in the early 1980s the Addis Ababa Agreement signed in 1972 between Nimayri’s government and Joseph Lagu’s South Sudan Liberation Movement became almost immediately outdated. The exact details of the Agreement’s implosion are in a sense a matter of circumstance, the decisive factor being that its formulae could not withstand the pressure of the crude. It took the warring parties, the central government and the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement more than twenty years to reach a truce based on an equal division of the oil rent, 50% to Khartoum and 50% to Juba, and self-determination for South Sudan. On these terms, and in the absence of politics proper, the secession of South Sudan was inevitable. The rulers in Khartoum nursed the fantasy that they could win both ways, get rid of the troublesome south, a greater threat to their hegemony in peace than in war, and maintain Juba in their orbit considering its dependence on the northern pipelines. Furthermore, Khartoum looked forward to a decisive improvement in its international standing, generous debt relief from the Western powers and the lifting of multiple regimes of sanctions imposed on the country. The West, in President Bashir’s depiction, did not keep its word, and Juba preferred to suspend oil production altogether rather than continue to share its proceeds with Khartoum.
Oil, in a sense, had liberated President Bashir from a marriage gone nasty with Hassan al-Turabi, and lifted him above the squabbles of the political class altogether. For a few fat years President Bashir and the greater majority of the Islamic cadres who chose to side with him against their sheikh, were almost immune against political challenges. Empowered with the flow of oil revenues the regime was well placed to widen its constituency among the ambitious petit bourgeoisie of the Sudanese heartland, dispense its prizes to all the willing, and reduce the recalcitrant to a state of political vegetation. Where oil did not reach, war replaced politics, in the rule as a tool to secure a handsome negotiation position vis-à-vis the regime.
Bereft of oil rents the regime in Khartoum is today forced to re-engage its political surroundings. On the popular level the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) propagated a nationalist/racist narrative of a (north) Sudanese identity as opposed to the runaway South Sudan, and devised a whole new system of citizens’ identification and registration to translate the notion into a fetish. President Bashir, the wannabe father of the born-again nation, was the first to undergo the procedure of identity verification and received a glossy ID card to document his christening. The campaign, under the fine name of the Civil Registry, faltered at the inefficiency of the government’s own bureaucracy. The narrative, however, developed a separate momentum, even at the expense of the NCP as evidenced by the increasing autonomy of the Just Peace Forum (JPF), a creation of the ruling party commissioned to flare the chauvinist torch. To its contenders in the political establishment the NCP offered inclusion. The regime invited the National Umma Party (NUP) and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) into the cabinet, an offer that the first was tempted to accept but nevertheless rejected in expectation of a higher bid and the second could not resist. 
Neither manoeuvre seems to be sufficient. Rather, the NCP itself, evidently spoiled by the fat years, is moaning aloud from oil withdrawal symptoms. Jaafar’s remarks on al-Intibaha’s mujahideen page are an echo of the greater disillusion in the ranks of the party. From the other flank, Islamist intellectuals at a distance from the NCP are busy writing their way out of the Islamic experiment. The Khartoum press features on a regular basis articles stressing the original sin of the 1989 coup and calling for the ‘reinvention’ of political Islam in liberal colours along the model of the Tunisian Nahda Party and the Egyptian Freedom and Justice Party, the winners of the ‘Arab Spring’. President Bashir, as things stand, has the army, and the Sudanese have Allah. It is still Sudan.

Farewell Wardi

Wardi in young age, ca 1960

Mohamed Osman Wardi, one of Sudan's greatest singers, passed away this day in a Khartoum hospital. Born in 1932 Wardi gave up a typical effendi career as a school teacher and dedicated himself to music since an early age. His voice was heard on Radio Omdurman for the first time in 1957. Like many of his contemporaries he was attracted by the avant-garde motifs of the Sudanese left and became associated with its politics. A song that he performed in celebration of Sudan's independence became a symbol of the day and the age. He sang to praise the 1964 October Revolution and was incarcerated by Colonel Nimayri in the anti-communist purge that followed the 1971 coup attempt. Wardi, in partnership with the poet Mahjoub Sharif, immortalized the experience in a number of prison songs. When Nimayri was deposed in the 1985 Uprising Wardi again gave the event a tenor and a meaning in his songs. Like many others he chose exile to life under the regime of President Bashir. Wardi returned to Sudan in 2003. By that time he had developed renal failure, the condition that ended his life. 

The man will be missed by admirers in his country Sudan as well as the region. His legacy however extends beyond music. As a pupil in an Omdurman primary school I heard Wardi's 'revolutionary' songs and Nasser's Suez Canal speech through crackling loudspeakers almost daily. This routine was the entertainment that the headmaster, Mr Hassan Salim, chose for us during free hours. For the child I was, Wardi's lyrics were probably  a primer in political education. 

The Sudans: government by war

In an interview on Friday aired simultaneously by Sudan’s three major television stations President Bashir stated that Sudan was now closer to war than to peace with South Sudan. The declaration follows on the collapse of the recent round of negotiations between the two countries over oil transit fees. The details of the row are well documented in the media, and have provided rich material for analyses and forecasts. In brief, Khartoum started to confiscate a share of the South Sudanese oil flowing through the northern pipeline and then seized shipments of the oil in Port Sudan in lieu of transit fees still to be agreed upon between the two countries. In response, South Sudan halted its oil production altogether. Presidents Kiir and Bashir met in Addis Ababa at the helm of the negotiation teams but failed to reach an agreement. Temporary arrangements suggested by the African Union High-Level Implementation Panel (AUHIP) and the Ethiopian Premier Meles Zenawi were reportedly accepted by President Bashir but rejected after some hesitation by President Kiir. South Sudan’s top negotiator, Pagan Amum, made it clear that only a comprehensive deal on all pending post-secession issues would satisfy his government. He demanded the transfer of Abyei and five other contested border areas to South Sudan as a condition for the resumption of oil production and export through (North) Sudan. With this announcement the impasse seemed to be insurmountable and war between the two states more or less inevitable. This, in general terms, is the standard reading of last month’s developments. 

In terms of risk assessment the scare of a full-scale war is obviously justified. The contention, however, is that Sudan and South Sudan are already at war. The Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) clashed several times since the secession of South Sudan with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in Abyei, and continue to fight the SPLA in South Kordofan and the Blue Nile, since the secession of South Sudan an officially separate force. Almost the entire border between Sudan and South Sudan is in fact a war zone. The transition to an officially acknowledged state of war, if it does take place, will not be a qualitative shift in relations between Juba and Khartoum but an extension of the current state of affairs. Arching further back one could argue that the the interim period of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), from 2005 to 2011, was just that, a peace break on the calendar of Sudan’s wars. To grasp why partition could not deliver the promised peace it is necessary to investigate once more the premises of partition, and the nature of the forces that presided over it. The rulers of Khartoum and Juba founded their separate kingdoms on the notion of an immutable contradiction between North and South, grounded in the differences of race, culture, religion and so forth. The same notion serves them well today as they attempt to tame the forces threatening their hegemony. In that sense, their failure to agree on a mutually beneficial arrangement to share the only resource at their disposal, irrational as it is, reflects a political rationale of the first order. To survive Khartoum and Juba need to disagree, the more suicidal the confrontation seems to be the better. Cooperation, by its mere occurrence, would rob both regimes of the very foundation of their rule, the liberation championed by the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) and the ‘good riddance’ claim marketed by the National Congress Party (NCP). 

The Sudanese, on both sides of the 1956 border, are held hostage to this ideological ambience rooted in the history of the north-south encounter. To overcome this closure it is necessary to dispel the mystifications of national identity propagated by Khartoum and Juba in favour of a unity of purpose that heals the fractured corpus of the dispossessed but cuts through the presumed organic unity of each nation. This is the post-secession issue proper.

Wave of arrests in Khartoum

Sources report that tens of youth activists associated with the groups Girifna and Sharara have been arrested by the security authorities over the past two days in what seems to be a preemptive crackdown ahead of 30 January, the date of the relatively coordinated wave of demonstrations organised by the same youth groups last year in the capital and other major towns of (North) Sudan. 

The Intibaha Spring

Some ten days ago the Deputy Chairman of the National Congress Party (NCP), Nafie Ali Nafie, received a memorandum reportedly signed by one thousand members of the Islamic Movement, the semi-clandestine ancestor organisation of the ruling party. The document which became known as the ‘corrective memorandum’ summarized what its author(s) perceived as the commendable successes of the regime and its stark failures, and proposed a reform agenda to address its deficiencies. The 1999 fracture of the Islamic Movement into two fratricidal camps, the opposition Popular Congress Party (PCP) led by the veteran chief of the Movement, Hassan al-Turabi, and the governing NCP headed by President Bashir was identified as the most significant setback of the Islamic experiment in Sudan. To this the document added rampant corruption, political inconsistency as evidenced by the swing from a “totalitarian one-party system” to the current tolerance of opposition parties, “errors” committed by the government in Darfur, and the regime’s security obsessions.

Had the Islamic Movement not seized power in its 1989 coup, said the author(s), the country would have either fallen into the hands of Baath Party elements or Egyptian agents in the army, who were all jockeying to topple Sadiq al-Mahdi’s government. Guided by its innovative reading of Islamic scriptures (ijtihad) the Movement took the right decision at the right time, said the document, and thus obstructed the Western plot to install the rule of a Christian minority led by John Garang and his rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) over the country’s Muslim majority. This scenario, it went on, would have entailed the “ethnic cleansing” of Sudan’s Arabs, a repeat, it said, of the 1964 tragedy in Zanzibar and long before that the expulsion of the Arabs from Andalusia. The Movement faced up to this challenge, said the authors, defeated the rebels on the battlefront, and eventually managed to attain peace through a tortuous and exhausting negotiation process that culminated in a self-determination vote and the breakaway of South Sudan. This conclusion, stated the document, might be criticized by some as another of the Islamic Movement’s failures although it should count in its favour politically and intellectually. 

Publicly, the NCP’s leading figures welcomed the memorandum as an instance of awareness in the ranks of their party remarking that all the issues it discussed were already addressed in the party’s national convention held in December last year. However, neither President Bashir, the Chairman of the NCP, nor Ali Osman Mohamed Taha, his deputy and the Emir of the Islamic Movement, to whom the memorandum was directly addressed, made any public comments in its regard. The critical nature of the document compounded by the conspicuous silence of the two men at the top prompted observers in the Khartoum press to compare it to the famous ‘memorandum of the ten’ that signalled the 1999 conflict between President Bashir and Hassan al-Turabi. The NCP bigwigs dismissed the comparison and rubbished projections of an imminent split in the party as unjustified exaggerations. Qutbi al-Mahdi, the chairman of the party’s political sector, argued that the memorandum’s signatories had acted in good faith by preserving their anonymity. 

Qutbi, I presume, is right, but only in a false sense. The ‘corrective memorandum’ does not compare to the ‘memorandum of the ten’, and is unlikely to be the foreplay of a power struggle as fierce as the 1999 divorce between Turabi and Bashir. Its author(s) did not challenge the authority of the party’s leadership and their demands were largely a re-run of the NCP’s official line. The document detailed a set of reforms that the NCP, being the ruling party, should implement with the objective of rooting out corruption and achieving “comprehensive social and political justice”. These included the establishment of a judicial anti-corruption body, promotion of the regime’s political transformation towards an elections-based order that respects the free will of the citizenry, promulgation of a permanent constitution for the country, and guarantee of the independence of the judiciary. Regarding the NCP’s organisational well-being the document demanded that the ruling party sever its organic links to the state structures and develop binding rules to govern the office terms of its leaders. Apart from the reform rhetoric above the document made a few recommendations that deserve attention: continuation of the regime’s project to “Islamize” the state and society, “fearless enforcement of sharia without hesitation”, and coordination with the Islamic forces in the country to combat secularism and moral subversion. 

So what then is the correction of the ‘corrective memorandum’? I suppose al-Tayeb Mustafa spelled it out in his address to the Shura (Consultative) Council of his party, the Just Peace Forum (JPF), a few days after his paper, al-Intibaha, published the text of the memorandum. He told the meeting that the country’s troubles would only be resolved if and when the JPF is invited into the government. This, to my knowledge, is the first time that Mustafa loudly voices his power ambitions. Recently, al-Intibaha chided the NCP for accommodating the ‘sectarian’ forces of old Sudan at the expense of the Islamist vanguard. In fact, the ‘reform memorandum’ that al-Intibaha attributed to the mujahideen of the Islamic Movement, i.e. the combatants of the Popular Defence Forces (PDF) who took part in the war against the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), reads like an editorial in the paper. Al-Intibaha actually dedicates a daily page to the glory of the mujahideen and their accomplishments. If not authored by al-Intibaha’s folks the document, it can be safely stated, mirrors their fantasies. Mustafa, of course, denied any links to the document but stressed that it did not go far enough. The Islamic Movement, he said, is in need of a “genuine revolution” and not the timid inking of demands. Lately, the JPF has been mobilising support in Sudan’s central states as a separate entity from the NCP. The party chairman, al-Tayeb Mustafa, tours the country to spread his message and receive vows of allegiance. The JPF teamed up with several forces from the Islamist fringe and drafted an ‘Islamic constitution’ for the rump (North) Sudan which they eventually delivered to President Bashir. The NCP notables, Ghazi Salah al-Din, Amin Hassan Omer and Qutbi al-Mahdi all publish frequent musings in al-Intibaha and are habitually celebrated on its pages. Ghazi in particular has lately become a favourite of al-Tayeb Mustafa. The man stands out in the crowd of the NCP nomenklatura by his 2008 attempt to displace Ali Osman Mohamed Taha from the leadership of the Islamic Movement. Although largely dormant and hollowed out the Movement remains a handy tool in the contests of the ruling elite. 

The memorandum in a certain sense defines the limits of the permissible in today’s Sudan. Criticism of the NCP functionaries, even the bitterest, is tolerated if not encouraged in the same fashion that prohibitions cry out for their violation, provided that the ultimate authority of the man at the top is acknowledged. He and his intimate captains, Bakri Hassan Salih and Abd al-Rahim Mohamed Hussein, identify with the domain of sovereignty, the establishing violence of the political order that came into being with the 1989 coup. Even the polished Ghazi would not dare transgress that line. In his recent lecture at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London he argued for the same set of reforms proposed in the ‘corrective memorandum’, i.e. the necessity of a permanent constitution, a wider concept of justice and ‘democratization’, however within the framework defined by the formal requirements of state formation and institutionalisation, bluntly stated submission to the hegemonic order he shares in running. This unqualified distinction between state formation and competition for political power is equally prominent in the debates of Khartoum’s opposition. Shafie Khidir, for instance, developed the theme of a neutral space guaranteed by a democratic constitution and state structures equidistant from the political parties and formations where contestation for power is to take place once the NCP regime is dislodged. The state, however, is never the neutral arbiter it is presumed to be, even less so when it relies on gate-keeping i.e. the control of export-import outlets for its very existence. In concrete terms, what Sudan is being promised is deliverance from the NCP proper to the JPF and allies under the benevolent watch of Bashir and his fellow officers.

Rift Valley Institute (RVI): 2012 Field courses: applications open

The Institute's annual field courses offer an intensive, graduate-level approach to the history, culture and political economy of three subregions: Sudan and South Sudan; the Horn of Africa; and the Great Lakes. The courses consist of a six-day dawn-to-dusk programme of lectures, seminars and panel discussions, led by international specialists and scholars and activists from the region. Dates and locations are as follows:

- Sudan and South Sudan Course, Rumbek, S. Sudan, 26 May-1 June

- Horn of Africa Course, near Mombasa, Kenya, 16-22 June

- Great Lakes Course, Bujumbura, Burundi, 7-13 July

Download the prospectus here and/or apply online here. For further information (or to request the application form as a Microsoft Word document), email courses@riftvalley.net. Applications will be considered in order of receipt.

New positions at the Rift Valley Institute London office - apply by 29 February

The Institute welcomes applications for two newly-created posts. The first is a Finance and Administrative Officer, to work with the RVI Programme Director on book-keeping and accounts, grant administration and office management. The second is a Publications and Public Relations Manager: a writer/editor/administrator who will work with the Executive Director to develop the RVI's publishing programme, manage digital content, and advance the Institute's public profile. The successful candidates will join the RVI's core team in London. For details write to institute@riftvalley.net. Applications close 29 February