Prunier’s war appetite

Gérard Prunier, the prominent French historian of East Africa, published a piece in the New York Times on 5 May under the title ‘In Sudan: Give War a Chance’ reposted on Sudan Tribune. Prunier presented his readers with a Rwandan history of Sudan as it were. In his mind the ills of Sudan stem from an essential racial conflict between Arabs and Africans, one that the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) could not resolve since only religion was considered in its fashioning. The CPA, wrote Prunier, “was signed by only two sides: the Muslim north and the Christian south. That left fully one-third of the Sudanese people  - the African Muslims - without a political leg to stand on”. From this premise Prunier arrived at the conclusion that the way ahead is to support the African Muslim rebels fighting the government in alliance with the southern Christians. “War is a tragic affair, but the brave Sudanese men who have chosen it as a last resort deserve to be allowed to find their own way toward a Sudanese Spring, even if it is a violent one”, he opined. What Prunier is advocating for, without reservations, is a race war where the Sudanese fight it out to redemption as Africans and Arabs. He, I suppose, would have the privilege to observe, count the dead, and eventually publish a bestseller. 

Race has been and continues to be invoked by Khartoum’s rulers and their rebel contenders in the Sudanese peripheries. It was exactly in the terms that Prunier now advocates that the Khartoum regime portrayed the confrontation with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M) in the 1983-2005 round of the Sudanese civil war fought predominantly in southern Sudan but with lasting extensions in the Nuba Mountains and the Blue Nile of northern Sudan, areas where the SPLA/M found similarly aggrieved allies among the Nuba and the Ingessena. The SPLA/M’s attempt to open a front in Darfur among the Fur and the Masalit was not as successful. An invading SPLA force of Dinka under the joint command of Abd al-Aziz al-Hilu, an ethnic Maslati and the man who now leads the northern faction of the SPLA/M in South Kordofan, and Dawoud Yahia Bolad, an ethnic Fur and disaffected Islamist, was rapidly crushed by a force of locally recruited Bani Halba in 1991. The invocation of race in Darfur demonstrated its full wrath in the war that began in 2003. 

What deserves investigation is not only the resort to race by rebel groups seeking to solidify and extend their constituencies or by a government threatened by an arc of rebellions but the brave resistance of a critical mass of the Sudanese to the lure of racist mobilisation. In Darfur, where racial polarization in northern Sudan proved most devastating, the Rizeigat of South Darfur preferred to preserve the peace with their Fur neighbours over Khartoum’s war commission, even after rebel fighters of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) raided Dar Rizeigat in 2004. Angered by the brazen defiance of the Rizeigat nazir, Said Madibbu, Khartoum upgraded the sheikh of the neighbouring Maaliya, traditionally a client of the Rizeigat chieftaincy, to the rank of nazir in 2005. The government intervention empowered the Maaliya to claim land ownership rights in areas that the Rizeigat consider to be under lease to the Maaliya but ultimately their own. What followed was a neglected chapter of Darfur’s ‘other war’ to use Julie Flint’s depiction. The Rizeigat and the Maaliya, two peoples that classify under Prunier’s Muslim Arabs, engaged in episodic deadly raids until a settlement was reached between the two sides with cynical government mediation in 2009. 

The distinction between the readiness of the northern Rizeigat, the landless camel nomads of northern Darfur, to serve Khartoum’s purposes and the unwillingness of their kin, the southern Rizeigat, the land-endowed cattle nomads of southern Darfur, to do the same might appear to Prunier and those who share his views an insignificant detail that does not disturb the race blueprint. To the Sudanese who are ready to imagine a future beyond the determinacy of war it bespeaks of the harsh political economy that underlies the country’s incessant conflicts.

President Bashir’s dictionary

Following the lead of President Bashir the Sudan News Agency (SUNA) started using the term hashara, a pun on haraka (movement), when referring to the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM). President Bashir also suggested tadmeer (destruction) instead of tahreer (liberation) but only hashara caught on. The resemblance with inyenzi (cockroaches), the term used by Hutu extremists to depict their Tutsi enemies in the run up to the 1994 Rwanda massacres, cannot be missed. The President inaugurated the public use of hashara in his victory speech to a company of Sudanese troops in al-Kurmuk, once the stronghold of the SPLM-North in the Blue Nile, on 6 November 2011, granting the observer a glimpse into the combat obscenities of the SAF. 

President Bashir popularized the term in two mobilisation speeches preceding the Sudanese army’s reclaim of Heglig, one in the National Congress Party (NCP) headquarters in Khartoum and another in al-Obeid, the capital of Kordofan state, and in two others celebrating the victory on 20 April. In these last events the cheering crowds would not settle for anything less than the hashara. Abd al-Rahman al-Sadiq al-Mahdi, the President’s assistant and son of the National Umma Party (NUP) boss, was booed to silence when he suggested that Sudan and South Sudan would eventually have to cooperate. When the President rose to speak he was welcomed with the cheer kul al-guwa juba juwa – all the force into Juba, a recycle of the battle cry of the rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) kul al-guwa al-khartoum juwa – all the force into Khartoum, followed by al-shaab yureed tahreer al-janub – the people want the liberation of South [Sudan]. The President said the SAF would proceed to crush the hasharat (pl.) in South Kordofan and the Blue Nile but made no mention of the declaration two days earlier that his plan was now to topple the SPLM regime in Juba. The audience was not satisfied prompting the President to make another of his stage decisions. Sudan’s pipelines will remain closed to South Sudanese oil even if Juba agrees to grant Khartoum the 50% share it enjoyed during the six years interim period of the expired Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), announced an elated Bashir, igniting another round of nationalist orgasms among the crowd. 

Emboldened by the President’s sanction individual patriots rehabilitated the words abd (slave) and farkh (a descendant of slaves) for use in the public domain when referring to the South Sudanese. The racial slurs are in themselves not novel; they constitute elements of the ideological baggage of Sudan’s ruling class. Novel however is their unashamed public employment. I came across a salvo of such insults in the comments section of a Youtube recording of a South Sudan Television interview with Barnaba Marial Benjamin, the country’s Minister of Information, in which he asserted that the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) had pulled out of Heglig and was not defeated by the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF). The Minister ridiculed the victory celebrations in Khartoum saying the Sudanese government was fooling itself and its people. 

Followers of Mohamed Abd al-Karim, a particularly zealous Islamist cleric, took things a step further last Saturday. The assailants stormed a compound of the Evangelical Church in the Khartoum suburb al-Jireif, ransacked the buildings and burned Bibles after breaking through a police cordon. Abd al-Karim allegedly incited the attack in a sermon delivered the day before. No casualties were recorded. The popular committee of al-Jireif, a neighbourhood level administrative organ, laid claim to the land occupied by the church a month before. Abd al-Karim, said the pastor of the church, told worshippers in the mosque where he preaches nearby to go and seize what is theirs. The Undersecretary of the Ministry for Religious Endowments, Hamid Yusif, paid a visit to the church the next day and in an address to its congregation, a mix of South Sudanese, Sudanese from the Nuba Mountains, Eritreans and Ethiopians, promised an investigation into the incident. The Ministry, he said, “condemns this attack and considers it an extremist act born out of individual religious opinion”, an opinion he described as “false and misguided”. 

The “misguided” opinion Mr Undersecretary is certainly not individual; it is propagated daily by al-Intibaha, ubiquitous among the NCP high priests, sanctioned by the state, and has long become the working ideology of an urban mob.

Heglig: the unity of corpses

Khartoum and Juba have only adrenaline to compensate for their loss of oil. In their frenzied attempt to secure the highest returns conceivable from the unsustainable resource, their joint placenta as it were, the governments of Sudan and South Sudan are now effectively plunging into its flames. The allegory of burning moths would have been suitable were it not for the profuse blood been shed at the altar of oil. 

To the empiricist the current war between the two countries flakes layers of ideological camouflage from an essential dispute over oil. Through this prism a retrospective investigation of the 1983 insurgency led by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M), the ruling power in the independent South Sudan today, could come to the conclusion that Bentiu was responsible. The capital of ‘Unity state’, a name cynically conferred on the region by President Nimaryi, was expected to host Sudan’s first refinery and enrich the coffers of the regional government of southern Sudan in Juba through corporation and export tax. Nimayri, however, chose to enstrange his southern Sudanese allies, his partners in the 1972 Addis Ababa peace agreement, and accommodate the Khartoum establishment bosses with whom he had reconciled in 1977 after years of confrontation that peaked with the 1976 trans-Saharan coup attempt orchestrated by the Umma Party, Hassan al-Turabi’s Islamic Movement and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) figure, Hussein al-Hindi, under Qaddafi’s patronage. In 1980 the rayes ordered the construction of the promised refinery in Kosti on the White Nile, but the promise remained just that. He was deposed by a popular uprising in 1985 before he could reap the profits of Chevron’s 1978 discoveries near Bentiu and Heglig. The next rayes, President Bashir, built three refineries, the largest in Khartoum, and two smaller facilities in al-Obeid and Port Sudan, nodes in an export pipeline extending from the oil fields to Port Sudan on the Red Sea. 

This narrative, by its very empiricism, shortcuts the decisive question of why the successive Khartoum regimes behaved as they did, included in glory is the Anglo-Egyptian colonial order they inherited composite with extractive economy and state ideology. The standard answer to this question is race, religion and culture, as can be read in any news article on the Sudans. The racial argument, however, turns a construct into an essence, and does little to explain the dynamics which, for instance, led Paulino Matip, today the SPLA’s second in command, and his captains, to side with the northern jallaba against the SPLA/M. It was Matip’s militia that secured the Bentiu and Heglig oilfields for exploration and production. When the SPLA briefly captured Heglig in August 2001 it did not battle the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) proper but Matip’s army. Peter Gadet led the SPLA’s operations at the time, the same man who under Matip commanded the militia force which cleared the entire area of its human occupants to make way for the industry. Gadet formed the South Sudan Liberation Movement/Army in April 2011 with the objective of overthrowing the SPLM government in Juba. He dropped the plan four months later to re-join the SPLA, and was named last month deputy commander of Juba’s disarmament campaign in Jonglei. Khartoum has no Matip this time and failed to lure Gadet. 

Whether the ever elusive 1956 border passes north or south of the Heglig oil field is today of only rhetorical significance, material for the chauvinist propaganda in Khartoum and Juba. The concrete border rips right through it, and its landmarks are the disputed terms of oil division between the two countries. Harry Verhoeven, speaking to Reuters recently, chose the term “war of attrition” to describe the current military confrontation between Juba and Khartoum. The, attrition, however is not only mutual but self-defeating. The oil industry of the Sudans is like the corpus of the believers in the famed hadeeth, if one organ is harmed the others follow suit. The stakes are high, sure, but not beyond the reach of the marketplace. Until Khartoum and Juba are knocked back into bargaining with words corpses will do the communication.

The stateless Sudanese: victims of tajility

Today, 8 April, is the date set by the Sudanese authorities as a final deadline for the South Sudanese in the country to ‘regularise’ their resident status as foreigners or face unidentified punitive measures. According to press reports President Bashir assured the chief African Union (AU) mediator, Thabo Mbeki, that the ‘fraternal’ South Sudanese in Sudan will not be harmed or unjustly treated as long as they respect the laws of the country and the values and traditions of its people. Sudan’s chief negotiator at the Addis Ababa talks with South Sudan, Idris Mohamed Abd al-Gadir, told the media that the meeting between President Bashir and Thabo Mbeki dwelled on Khartoum’s call on Juba to provide its citizens in Sudan with the necessary nationality documents that allow the regularisation of their residence. As things stand, the South Sudanese who remain in Sudan are effectively stateless. With reference to the provisions of the South Sudan referendum law Khartoum amended its nationality bill in August 2011 to strip the ethnic South Sudanese in its territory of the Sudanese nationality, while Juba is yet to muster the bureaucratic capacity to provide its citizens inside South Sudan with nationality documents let alone those in (north) Sudan. 

Last March Sudan and South Sudan initialled a framework agreement providing their nationals in the other state with the freedoms of residence, movement, employment and the property. The deal, which was expected to be signed by the two countries’ presidents in a summit meeting set earlier in April, became the focus of internal feuding within the NCP establishment pitting the powerful Intibaha bloc which stridently rejected the framework against the negotiators. With the escalation of military confrontations along the border between the two countries hopes of an imminent rapprochement were dashed. Juba bragged about an incursion of its army into the Heglig oil field in South Kordofan. Khartoum responded with the usual: the SAF’s Antonovs bombed the oil facilities in the neighbouring South Sudanese Unity state, and mostly missed. The two countries’ negotiators met again in Addis Ababa only to complain of the other side’s prevarication, and the Bashir-Kiir summit was called off till further notice. 

The military standoff between the two capitals boils down to the unresolved status of the ninth and tenth divisions of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), the predominantly Nuba fighting force in South Kordofan that now constitutes the rebel SPLA in North Sudan. The most favourable scenario, from Khartoum’s perspective, would be a security deal akin to the pact that currently binds Sudan and Chad in regards to their common border. After fitful experimentation with proxies targeting the destabilisation, and ambitiously enough the overthrow of the other, Ndjamena agreed to emasculate the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) which hitherto enjoyed Chadian patronage and Khartoum delivered President Deby’s enemies to the desert. Out of Darfur, and then expelled out of Libya, the JEM rebels risked the trek down south seeking Juba’a cover, a hijra that the JEM leader Khalil Ibrahim did not survive. The Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) gunned him down in the company of a cohort of his captains in northern Kordofan. In the bargaining process between the two Sudans Khartoum seemed ready to offer the ‘four freedoms framework’, despite domestic opposition, in exchange for a security pact, with the SPLA-N as the sacrificial lamb. Juba, I presume, calculated that it would thus waste a major leverage point at the cheap. Tajility thus overruled. The term is an Anglo-Egyptian coinage derived from tajil, the Arabic word for delay, and used to describe the Sudanese state art of forestalling. Apart from legislations, primarily designed to satisfy domestic chauvinist passions, neither South Sudan nor Sudan was at a rush to secure the fate of the thousands of Sudanese now left stateless in the orgy of partition. Juba wanted their secession votes, and received them. Today it is in a position to benefit from the marketing of their plight in its duel with Khartoum. None other than Pagan Amum set the tenor for Juba’s approach towards the issue when he accused Khartoum in March, shortly before the signing of the ‘four freedoms’ framework, of ignoring the predicament of three hundred thousand Southern Sudanese citizens suffering slavery in Sudan. 

A brilliant Khartoum journalist, Ajok Awad Allah-Jabo, herself an ethnic mix of southern and northern Sudanese descent, documented the concrete situation of the “voluntary repatriation Southerners” as she termed her kin, in a two parts report published recently in the daily al-Ahdath. According to her illustration, what is taking place in Khartoum is nothing short of forced expulsion. Armed policemen guard the collection locations, she visited Jebel Aulia south of Khartoum, and checkpoints litter the vicinity of the IDP camps where the stateless Sudanese reside to prevent their escape. Moreover, she discussed the ‘business’ of repatriation showing how northern and southern players, state organs and private entrepreneurs, connive to draw the most from the transport boom. 

Last February Khartoum state ordered the popular committees, neighbourhood level governance structures also entrusted with petty security functions, to draw up lists of foreign residents, including ethnic South Sudanese, in the areas under their supervision and report violators. Sennar state, bordering South Sudan, followed Khartoum’s lead. The governor of Sennar, Ahmed Abbas, told a rally in al-Suki two days ago that he had instructed the localities in the state to implement the 8 April deadline without hesitation. Devolution of the authority over the fate of the South Sudanese resident in Sudan to the lower levels of administration and policing is certainly an ominous development with possibly unwelcome implications, particularly with the prevalent chauvinist, if not frankly racist, propaganda of al-Intibaha in mind. If tajility is to blame for the limbo in which the stateless Sudanese now find themselves further tajility combined with inefficiency of the state bureaucracy and the corruption of the police could possibly rescue them from the caprice of local administrators.

Mohamed Ibrahim Nugud: A Sudanese communist

Mohamed Ibrahim Nugud, 1930 - 2012
(photo credits Talal Afifi)

Mohamed Ibrahim Nugud (b. 1930), the Political Secretary of the Communist Party of Sudan (CPS), passed away yesterday afternoon at the age of 82 in London where he was seeking medical attention. Nugud learned the skills of dodging the punitive apparatus of the state early in his life. He was dismissed in 1952 from the University College Khartoum and incarcerated a whole year for his role in a wave of popular demonstrations against British colonial rule. Upon his release Nugud fled Sudan in disguise to continue his studies in Sofia University, Bulgaria, where he earned a degree in philosophy. He returned to the country in 1958 to become a full time political agitator in the ranks of the CPS battling the military dictatorship of General Abboud (1958-1964). Nugud spent the year 1961 in the prisons of Malakal and Juba for his political activities. 

Following the victory of the 1964 Revolution Nugud was elected a member of parliament in 1965 on a CPS ticket, but was expelled from the house together with the eleven other communist MPs only months later. In November 1965 the parliament voted to ban the CPS and dismiss its elected representatives from the house in an episode of unconstitutional political malice orchestrated by Hassan al-Turabi and his associates in the Islamic Charter Front (ICF). Wary of the accelerating influence of the CPS, considering its decisive role in the 1964 Revolution and the political clout it reaped from the victory, the two sectarian parties, the Umma and the Unionists, backed Turabi in his pledge and delighted in seeing the CPS reduced once again to an illegal organisation. 

Unknowingly, the political parties invited upon themselves a greater evil than the one they thought they had dispelled by banning the CPS. Jaafar Nimayri, the Nasser styled Free Officer, justified his putsch of May 1969 with the claim of defending the progressive gains of the 1964 Revolution against the forces of reaction. Nugud was to say the least well informed of Nimayri’s plans, as was the CPS. The party welcomed the 1969 putsch but refused to grant it the stature of a revolution. Several communist officers sat on Nimayri’s Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) but the CPS under Abd al-Khalig Mahjoub preferred to maintain its autonomy from the regime, a decision that did not find Soviet favour. During the year 1970 the CPS split into two, a faction that chose to dissolve in the regime’s newly established one party, the Sudan Socialist Union, and a majority that backed Abd al-Khalig’s autonomic position. Nimayri eventually dismissed the communist officers in the RCC and they responded with a coup attempt, the 19 July 1971 Corrective Movement. Following two days of military confrontations in the capital Nimayri returned victorious in a counter-coup and the communists were defeated. A bloody period of vendetta followed. Nimayri ordered the execution of the CPS top leadership including the political secretary Abd al-Khalig Mahjoub, and the officers involved in the context of a wide anti-communist purge. Nugud escaped Nimayri’s wrath in hiding together with several other leading figures of the party. He was then picked as Abd al-Khalig’s successor, a position that he occupied until his death this Thursday. Nugud became the master of clandestine activity; he emerged from the underground in 1985 upon the collapse of Nimaryi's regime to lead the CPS through the parliamentary period that lasted only four years. He was elected as a MP representing al-Diem, the Khartoum constituency where a woman was recently killed by the aggressive Public Order Police. 

When al-Bashir took over power in the 1989 putsch Nugud was jailed together with other prominent politicians in Cooper Prison and then placed under house arrest. He escaped his captors and slipped into hiding until early 2005. The Sudan that Nugud re-surfaced in was not the country he had experienced before. The challenge that faced him as political secretary of the CPS in the 2000s was much more formidable than his first test of endurance, the task of rebuilding the CPS following its debilitating confrontation with Nimayri’s regime. From the 1969-1971 setback Nugud drew the conclusion that the struggle for socialism in the conditions of Sudan must complement rather than negate the achievements of liberal democracy. His insights and the direction he devised for the party helped restore the democratic credentials of the CPS as it were. When the CPS re-emerged in 2005 from years of exile activity and clandestine agitation inside the country against the regime of President Bashir, thanks to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), the situation had changed radically and was not anymore graspable with the simplistic opposition between dictatorship and parliamentary democracy. The CPS formula for change, restoration of the democratic order through a broad political alliance as a condition for the pursuit of a global solution for Sudan’s multiple crises, put it in one boat with the mainstream parties of the Khartoum establishment including Turabi’s Popular Congress Party (PCP) but did not deliver, a shortcoming of the party’s strategy that Nugud well recognized. 

Nugud was a sharp intellectual well versed in Marxist classics and the literature of Eurocommunism. He agreed with many of Althusser’s theses and was a great admirer of the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm. Among his intellectual accomplishments is a pioneering book on the relations of slavery in Sudan. Before his death Nugud embarked on two research topics, the evolution of the Sudanese state, and the historical role of Sufi brotherhoods in Sudan. The thorough analysis of these three institutions, slavery, the state, and Sufi brotherhoods, he considered instrumental in understanding the historical trajectory of the country. I recall long evenings of conversation with him on these issues, discussions that he preferred over the persistent occupation with current politics. With his death the CPS has lost its leader, the Sudan a politician and an intellectual of calibre, and I personally a mentor and a friend. 

The SAF's no to the four freedoms

In a statement released late on Sunday the spokesperson of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), Colonel al-Sawarmi Khaled Saad, claimed that the Sudan People's Liberation Army/Movement in North Sudan (SPLA/M-N) with the support of South Sudan was preparing to launch a new offensive in South Kordofan. On these grounds, concluded Saad, it is evident that South Sudan has scrapped the recent agreements signed between Juba and Khartoum. With this statement, it seems, the SAF declares its rejection of the four freedoms framework. In the same vein the Speaker of the National Assembly, Ahmed Ibrahim al-Tahir, and the Vice President, al-Haj Adam Yusif, both downplayed the significance of the four freedoms framework and affirmed that it neither affects the 8 April deadline or prejudices the amendments to the Sudanese nationality bill passed by the National Assembly. The Just Peace Forum, I guess, has mustered sufficient political muscle as to hold a veto over the ruling National Congress Party's political choices. 

The NCP’s sobbing negotiators

Last Tuesday the negotiations teams of Sudan and South Sudan in Addis Ababa initialled two so called framework agreements, the first on the status of nationals of the other state, and the second on the stalled demarcation of the border between the two countries. While the latter, essentially a commitment to form a joint commission to oversee the process, passed almost unnoticed, the deal on the status of nationals in the other state became the focus of intense political positioning and mobilisation in Khartoum. The deal, applauded by the African Union and international observers, spelled out a commitment to negotiate through a joint committee co-chaired by the ministers of interior in the two countries the means to extend the freedoms of residence, movement, economic activity, and property to the nationals of each state in the other, following a transitional period of undetermined length during which efforts are to be accelerated to provide the nationals of each state resident in the other with appropriate identification and relevant documents. 

Even if approved by Presidents Kiir and Bashir, supposing that the announced summit meeting between the two does take place, the framework agreement remains just that, namely a suggested framework. It neither commits the two countries to any immediate measures to address the citizenship dilemma of the Sudanese stranded between the two states, nor can it protect the disenfranchised of Sudan’s partition from the impulsive behaviour of the law enforcement agencies to which they remain prey. Where politics failed the negotiators in Addis Ababa had administration to offer. It must be mentioned here that Khartoum and Cairo are also bound by a ‘four freedoms agreement’, but Sudanese travellers to Egypt are still obliged to obtain a visa. Obviously, Khartoum and Juba are under considerable international pressure to reach speedy solutions for their disputes, and as such had to produce at least a token of progress along that path. The four freedoms agreement declared in Addis Ababa serves that purpose well. It looks good and, unlike oil, entails no immediate costs. Well, what the National Congress Party (NCP) negotiators hoped would be a cheap exercise in public relations proved to be a domestic political crisis. 

The Just Peace Forum (JPF), headed by al-Tayeb Mustafa, declared the alarm upon announcement of the deal. In a statement published on the pages of its paper, al-Intibaha, the JPF announced its steadfast opposition to the agreement which it described as a “humiliation”, a “threat to national security”, and a second Naivasha. Tayeb Mustafa hurled insults at the NCP’s negotiators and Ishaq Ahmed Fadlalla, the author of a column that appears simultaneously in al-Intibaba as well as the NCP’s mouthpiece al-Raed, asked that the negotiators be sent to the war front in South Kordofan as a disciplinary measure. The JPF appealed to the imams of Khartoum’s mosques to make the four freedoms framework agreement the focus of their Friday sermons, and maintained that it will stop at nothing to prevent the implementation of the “catastrophic” deal. As a short cut al-Tayeb Mustafa implored his nephew, President Bashir, to scrap the deal as he had done before with another worthless framework agreement, the document signed between the NCP’s negotiators and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement in North Sudan (SPLM-N) in June 2011. Both frameworks, I presume, were agreed upon with the sole aim of winning the approval of the international beholder. The June 2011 agreement was signed at the behest of the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, and the most recent pieces were penned down in the shadow of her threats and with the immediate intervention of the US Special Envoy to Sudan, Princeton Lyman. 

On Friday, a great number of Khartoum’s prominent preachers answered the call of the JPF. The most vocal was Sheikh Tanon, the imam of a posh mosque in the upper class Khartoum district, al-Mamoura. Tanon likened the four freedoms framework to the 1978 Camp David Accord signed by Egypt’s Sadat and Israel’s Begin. The negotiators who approved the deal, he claimed, had in doing so betrayed their faith and their country. Incidentally, the head of Khartoum’s negotiation team, Idris Mohamed Abd al-Gadir, was in the mosque listening to Tanon’s sermon. According to Saturday’s papers in Khartoum he stood up to defend his case to cries of reproach from his fellow worshippers. Overwhelmed Abd al-Gadir broke into tears. The NCP official contended with the claim that the ultimate responsibility for the deal lay not with him but with the President Bashir. In his daily column on Saturday Tayeb Mustafa described Abd al-Gadir as a mild chap incapable of facing up to Pagan Amum, the “predator”. He demanded that Abd al-Gadir and his team be replaced and punished for their repeated failures, the first being the mother of all disasters in Mustafa’s mind, the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M). 

Only Ali Karti, Sudan’s Foreign Minister, the man who gets to feel the international pressure on the country at close range, attempted to defend the four freedoms framework in public. Informed by the experience of the June 2011 framework agreement the usually vocal NCP high priests did not dare an opinion. Ultimately, it is President Bashir, the sultan, who has to decide whether it pays better to bluff the international beholder or his domestic audience. Unlike Abd al-Gadir, he cannot sob his way out of the clutch of his lovers.