The Sudanese straw-men

Protesters in Khartoum kept the riot police rather busy over the past week. In several residential areas people took to the streets equipped with frying pans, pots and jerrycans to vent their frustration over the steep rise in living costs. The protesters demanded the dismissal of the finance minister and the enforcement of government controls on the prices of basic commodities. The authorities responded with the classics, police and propaganda. Senior officials of the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) accused unspecified political forces of exploiting the post-secession economic slump to further their regime change agenda, and complained of a Western conspiracy against the country. Nafie Ali Nafie, the Deputy Chairman of the NCP, put the blame on a certain "communist with some money” whom he accused of orchestrating the largely nocturnal hunger riots. The alleged communist’s long arm, however, reached out to al-Elafoon, a centre of Sufi brotherhoods at a short distance from Khartoum, where worshipers from the main mosque, under the influence of the local Imam, took to the streets following the Friday prayers to protest against the deteriorating living conditions. The same area had welcomed President Bashir some months ago promising allegiance to the last man, woman and child. Evidently, the NCP will find it difficult to sustain its patronage network at the cheap. Contrary to common wisdom the weakest link in the chain is none other than Khartoum itself, and not the peripheral war zones.

Slump is arguably an understatement. Early in September the governor of Sudan’s central Bank, Mohamed Khair al-Zubair, asked Arab counterparts to feed the safes of the Sudanese financial system. Al-Zubair stated that the country needs a minimum of 4 billion US dollars this year to make it through the oil deprivation crunch. Apparently his plea was left unanswered. Bashir welcomed the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad this past week, not a particular favourite of the richer Arabs. While Bashir wished for greater economic cooperation Ahmadinejad did his regular piece, Islamic solidarity against the Western conspirators. Talking to the press in Paris last Thursday Sudan’s foreign minister said the economy of the country faces collapse unless the international community provides Khartoum with badly needed assistance. Back in Khartoum he claimed to have secured French cooperation regarding the relief of Sudan’s burgeoning foreign debt, estimated last December at 31.9 billion US dollars. In short, Khartoum is petitioning all around for aid.   

On the other pole the Secretary General of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement in North Sudan (SPLM-N), Yasir Arman, entertained audiences in the United States and the United Kingdom over the past two weeks with the themes of war in Sudan’s new south. The highlight of Arman’s campaign was the Prendergastian plea for the international enforcement of a no-fly zone over Darfur, the Blue Nile and South Kordofan, justified by the responsibility to protect (R2P). In a Bashir-style speech to the Sudanese political class in London Arman referred to Khartoum’s protesters as the heroes of the impending regime change. In the custom of the opposition effendi Arman blamed the NCP for destroying the economy and impoverishing the nation. His best though was the argument that President Bashir even destroyed the Islamic Movement which Hassan al-Turabi had spent decades to build from a student organisation to a capable power machine. The convenience is surely telling. The split in the Islamic Movement is now considered another of Bashir’s uncountable vices. It seems even the long demonised Turabi is amenable to rehabilitation in the heat of effendiya resistance to the NCP.

More telling I suppose is the parallel between Karti’s rendezvous in France and Arman’s US-UK tour; both demonstrate the profound extraversion of Sudan’s rulers, past, actual or hopeful. Even Nimayri, whom the Sudanese dethroned by popular revolt lives in the memory of many an effendi as the man who begged abroad to give us back at home, a reference to the favours in cash and kind that he was so apt at begetting from his US patrons and their allies in the Gulf, favours that now glare at the Sudanese in the form of a 31.9 billion dollar bill. Bayart possibly phrased it best. He forwarded the proposition that “the leading actors in sub-Saharan societies have tended to compensate for their difficulties in the autonomization of their power and in intensifying the exploitation of their dependents by deliberate recourse to the strategies of extraversion, mobilizing resources derived from their (possibly unequal) relationship with the external environment” whereby the external environment “turned into a major resource in the process of political centralization and economic accumulation” as well as the conduct of social struggles of subaltern actors.  Bayart’s dictum that African elites have been active agents in the dependency misery of their societies echoes Fanon’s denunciation of Africa’s straw-men, the heirs of the colonial state. Arman the ‘secular democrat’ and Karti the ‘Islamist autocrat’ are no strangers to this legacy. 

South Kordofan and the Blue Nile: wars by second intention

Amidst the war enthusiasm that clouded the reception of Malik Agar’s rebellion in the Blue Nile, the complement of Abd al-Aziz al-Hilu’s operations in South Kordofan, little if any attention was paid to the concrete situation in the two states and its immediate backdrop. Rather, Sudan’s irredeemable ‘lovers’, addicted to the pornography of bloodshed, whipped up the excitement to a degree whereby the uninitiated in Sudan affairs concluded that an arc of rebellions was soon to force the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) into submission, the missing ingredient being international cover. John Prendergast, ever the warmonger, contributed his standard suggestion, US military intervention. In a policy document released this September by his Enough Project Prendergast argued for “tangible political, logistical and financial support for the Sudanese parties and non-governmental organisations pressing for democracy”; imposition of a “no-fly zone” over Darfur, South Kordofan and the Blue Nile or the “destruction of the [government’s] offensive aerial assets”. Prendergast acknowledged that the policy line he is advocating, namely a Western-backed armed takeover, had “the potential to lead to more conflict in the short term” as in Libya. That, he claimed, was the lesser evil compared to “the status quo of a dictatorship at war with its own people”. The heavily burdened ‘white man’ cited the Ivory Coast and Libya as instances of successful [military] interventions to protect civilians. In the Sudan of the Prendergastian will once the NATO bombs hit the ground and the armed contenders of the NCP regime storm victorious into Khartoum ‘real’ democracy and justice will blossom unhindered, an outcome that is supposedly guaranteed by the inevitable dictate of history.

From the above my personal favourite is this last doctrinaire twist, the inevitable paradise born out of the destruction of war. Ali Osman Mohamed Taha, the First Vice President restored, had something similar to say when addressing the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) deployed in al-Damazin, the capital of the Blue Nile, on 17 September. “Peace and justice will only be achieved when the enemy is totally defeated” he claimed, and “the loci of treason are destroyed”. “Soldiers of Allah, set out to fulfil your holy mission, we tell you. Your national duty is to subjugate the enemy and clear the state of the traitors” bellowed the NCP negotiator of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA). 

It was President Bashir, the military officer, who at least made a reference to the concrete situation that led to the resurgence of warfare in the Blue Nile. Explaining the position of his government on 5 September to the leaders of the political parties in Khartoum, or to be precise to those who agreed to attend the event, the President argued at length that the former governor of the Blue Nile, Malik Agar, and before him the candidate for the gubernatorial post in South Kordofan, Abd al-Aziz al-Hilu, had opted for war once it was clear that the outcome of the popular consultation processes in the two states would not be in their favour. No wonder Khartoum was pleased when the Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi told reporters in Khartoum on 16 September that the resolution of the conflict with the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement in North Sudan (SPLM-N) lies in the framework of a united Sudan and one national army.

The SPLM proper, now the ruling party in the independent South Sudan, was a uniquely successful political-military machine, paralleled in the post-colonial Sudan only by the Islamic Movement and its contemporary embodiment in power, the NCP. The key to this success was Chairman John Garang’s recognition that ‘separatism’ as a declared aim was the Achilles heel of the Southern Sudanese agitation for empowerment in the post-colonial order, peaceful and armed alike. Garang reinvented the cause of Southern Sudan in the 1983 manifesto of the SPLA/M, its founding document. Through the switch from separation of Southern Sudan to a united ‘New Sudan’ the Chairman was able to extend the South Sudanese insurgency into the definitive territory of North Sudan, namely South Kordofan, the Southern Blue Nile, and in the mid-1990’s his forces even threatened Kassala in East Sudan. The SPLA/M famously attempted in 1990 ignite an offshoot of its rebellion in Darfur through the agency of Daoud Yahia Bolad, a former Islamist student leader in Khartoum University turned SPLA rebel. Although the excursion into Darfur at the time was a grand failure it certainly left a seed that delivered in 2003 with the rebellion of the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) under the leadership of Abd al-Wahid al-Nur and Mini Minawi. By and large the Northern ‘marginalized’, whom Garang recruited for his war against Khartoum, kept their part of the bargain. They followed him faithfully and provided him with badly needed support during the momentous and bloody 1991 split in the SPLA/M. Naturally enough the SPLA combatants from South Kordofan and the Blue Nile sided with Garang the unionist against Riek Machar and Lam Akol who demanded dropping the New Sudan agenda for the cause of Southern Sudanese independence.

While the share of the SPLA forces in South Kordofan and the Blue Nile in war was decisive their share in peace was by all means petty. The 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) secured the right of self-determination for South Sudan through a referendum; the two Northern battle-zones of the North-South civil war however had to make do with a hastily devised arrangement that goes by the name ‘popular consultation’. The CPA protocol on the resolution of conflict in South Kordofan and the Blue Nile defined the process as “a democratic right and mechanism to ascertain the views of the people” of the two states on the CPA “through their respective democratically elected legislatures”. Per protocol the legislatures of the two states “shall each establish a Parliamentary Assessment and Evaluation Commission to assess and evaluate the implementation of the agreement in each State”. The two commissions were supposed to submit their reports to the legislatures of the two states by the fourth year of the signing of the CPA. Likewise the Presidency shall establish an independent commission to evaluate the implementation of the agreement in each of the two States.” This commission shall submit its final reports to the National Government and to the Governments of the two States which shall then take the measures necessary to ensure the faithful implementation of the agreement and rectify any shortcomings. The crux of the matter is then this. The legislature of any of the two states has two options, either to endorse the CPA protocol which then becomes the final settlement of the conflict in the state, or “decide to rectify, within the framework of the agreement, any shortcoming in the constitutional, political and administrative arrangements of the agreement”. In this case the legislature “can engage in negotiations with the National Government with the view of rectifying these shortcomings”. 

Over the fate of the SPLA troops in the two states the CPA Agreement on Security Arrangements during the Interim Period ruled supreme. Without prejudice to the latter the SAF retained the right to amass troops in the two states as it sees fit, the only restriction being sanction of the Presidency. Apart from the contingents in the catastrophic Joint Integrated Units (JIUs) the SPLA forces deployed in South Kordofan and the Blue Nile were obliged to withdraw south of the 1956 border between North and South Sudan as soon as the JIUs were formed and on the ground. The Government of South Sudan (GoSS) was under explicit obligation to absorb the demobilised Southern Sudanese serving in the SAF in South Sudan. The Northern Sudanese SPLA, whether in South Kordofan, the Blue Nile or otherwise, on the other hand were essentially ignored. In his 5 September account of the confrontations in the Blue Nile the Minister of Defence, Abd al-Rahim Mohamed Hussain, divided the Blue Nile SPLA troops into three categories, those serving in the SPLA component of the JIUs, those referred to as the SPLA proper outside the JIUs, and those still in the service of the SPLA in the independent South Sudan. From a CPA perspective none of the three have a formally legitimate ground to maintain their arms in (North) Sudan after the secession of South Sudan. 

Only the referendum and the declaration of South Sudanese independence took place on time. Every other date of the CPA was subject to the procrastination and the manoeuvring of the two parties, the SPLM and the NCP. The population census initially planned for July 2007 took place in April 2008, and the elections originally envisioned in March/April 2009 were eventually held in April 2010. In South Kordofan, the SPLM rejected the census results and the elections in the state were postponed to April 2011. The popular consultation processes, the outcome of which would determine the fate of the local SPLM in the two states, depended essentially on the composition of the state legislatures. In the Blue Nile, where the elections did take place in April 2010, the SPLM’s Malik Agar managed to win the gubernatorial post while the NCP secured a safe majority in the state legislature allowing it effectively to dictate the outcome of the popular consultation process. When the elections were finally conducted in South Kordofan in May 2011 the NCP’s incumbent Ahmed Haroun won the gubernatorial post with less than a 2% margin over his former deputy, the SPLM’s candidate Abd al-Aziz Adam al-Hilu. In the legislature, the NCP scored 33 seats to the SPLM’s 21 thereby achieving the necessary margin to guarantee its control over the popular consultation process. By then the results of the Southern Sudan referendum were already out. War in South Kordofan reignited in June 2011, a few weeks before South Sudan was officially declared an independent state. The SPLM in South Kordofan, orphaned in the rump (North) Sudan contested the outcome of the May 2011 elections, but did not start fighting until it became clear that the SAF was determined to force the disarmament of its combatants.

Malik Agar, who until then maintained a declared commitment to peace, signed off the popular consultation processes as dead. He told the press early last August that the post-secession composition of the national government, the presidency and the council of states, precluded the success of the processes. The SPLM-N, left to fend for itself since the SPLM proper opted for the secession exit, and a minority in the state legislatures of South Kordofan and the Blue Nile, was obviously in a bind. Politically, the NCP was effectively free to steer the popular consultation processes to its convenience; and militarily, the SPLA troops in South Kordofan and the Blue Nile were besieged by the SAF intent on their disarmament. The CPA had backfired.

The only serious attempt to salvage the situation was the 28 June Framework Agreement signed in Addis Ababa between the NCP Deputy Chairman, Nafie Ali Nafie, and the SPLM-N Chairman, Malik Agar. The agreement granted the SPLM-N political recognition but provided for the disarmament of its troops in South Kordofan and the Blue Nile over a negotiated time period. The SPLM-N celebrated the agreement. It had all the necessary components to evolve into a minor CPA, namely international mediation, de facto tolerance of the existence of two ‘legitimate’ armies in the country, even if temporarily, and the approval of the extra-electoral special status of the SPLM-N despite the expiry of the CPA. These are exactly the elements that troubled President Bashir and his generals in the SAF. Khartoum scrapped the agreement as soon as it was signed. 

Before making the grand conclusions that drive the enthusiasm for yet another round of warfare in Sudan it may be judicious to dwell on the lessons of the peace respite that just came to an end. The first I presume is the utter falsity of Prendergast’s ‘gun-driven democracy’ and Taha’s ‘peace by pacification’.

The Sudanese divorce: one wine two broken bottles

In the perception of many a South Sudanese nationalist the event of South Sudan’s independence is the culmination of a reconstructed history of struggle that stretches back to 1820-21, the date that marks the beginning of the Turco-Egyptian occupation of the stretches of land that evolved into the modern Sudan. Of late the Council of Ministers of the Government of South Sudan officially sanctioned this reading of the Sudan’s modern history in a resolution that declared the period 1820-2011 the ‘official’ struggle phase for the liberty of South Sudan.

While it is probably inadvisable to argue against a history freshly crafted by a jubilant state organisation the parallel between this particular reading of South Sudan’s struggle and the fantasy of North Sudanese demagogues who claim a North divorced of any organic link to the South remains instructive. Between the two many a brave attempt to bridge the North-South rift as it were litter the hygienic history of liberation or purge whatever way one may choose to interpret it.

In a sense, the North-South divorce, now an exercise in state-fashioning with international recognition and support, remains haunted by undead ghosts of an (im)possible unity, one that finds root in the  struggles of the Sudanese labour movement, the joint quest for democracy and social justice, rather than in the quagmires of ‘cultural’ difference. What survives today of this (im)possible unity are the common challenges facing two states born out of the fatigue of constructing one. In that regard Sudan’s partition is but another symptom of the twin enduring characteristics of the Sudanese state, its overt ambition and its crippling weakness[1].

Both the National Congress Party (NCP), ruling the rump Republic of Sudan (RoS) and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/ Movement (SPLA/M), ruling the emergent Republic of South Sudan (RoSS), set out to cement ‘unity’ on a new basis. The National Islamic Front (NIF) which evolved to become the ruling NCP wished for a nation-state that satisfies the model of the European colonizer, a homogenous whole weld together by Islam and the dominant culture of the riverain Sudanese heartland. The SPLM on the other hand propagated for a ‘New Sudan’, in the words of its late chairman John Garang back in 1989 “a socio-political mutation” where the power of the central government in Khartoum is restructured. When asked how this restructuring should take place Garang responded “As a socio-political mutation you cannot really delineate it by saying one, two three. But we are talking about a new reality in which the localisms and the parochialisms – Sudan is composed of more than 150 different nationalities speaking different languages with various religions – are transcended by a commonality to which we all pay our allegiance and our patriotism. That commonality has never been achieved in our situation”.[2] The structure of Garang’s quest essentially mirrored that of the NIF. While Garang invested in an abstract Sudanese nationalism yet to blossom the NIF reinvented Sudan’s Islam and riverain culture as driving forces of an aggressive chauvinism. The one, two, three of both parties was war.

Military exhaustion and international pressure eventually led the two contenders to surrender their ambitions to the rationale of division. The Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) signed in 2005 conditioned unity with attractiveness. Expectedly, the Southern Sudanese voted in January 2011 overwhelmingly for secession. As far back as 1976 the NIF had contemplated the secession of South Sudan as a necessary surgical correction to allow for the establishment of an Islamic order[3]. For the SPLA/M the reversal from unity on a new basis to secession was almost natural. Guided by hindsight a ruthless cynic could even claim that Garang’s pedagogy of national unity was but a convenient bypass to secure the support of regional powers, foremost Mengistu’s Ethiopia, against Khartoum.

Secession, however, did not and could not redeem the Sudanese state, now split into two, of its chronic liability. Interestingly, it was within their own uncontested territories, firmly north and south of the almost mythical 1956 border, that the two states face the greater challenges to their authority, and not in Abyei, a region that by its exceptional nature proves the rule of the North-South entanglement. The end of the CPA signalled the resumption of conflict in South Kordofan and the Blue Nile, two regions of (North) Sudan where the SPLA/M had established itself as a local force during the 1983-2005 civil war. In the rhetoric of the northern remnant of the SPLA/M these two regions together with Darfur constitute the new South in (North) Sudan, the units of a tentative alliance joining Sudan’s marginalized of African extraction against the Arabs of the riverain heartland. In South Sudan, dissatisfaction with the division of spoils provided the material for a set of rebel movements even before the July declaration of independence. Instances of armed resistance against the authority of the new republic go today by the names of ‘tribal warfare’ and ‘cattle-rustling’. These, notably, are more or less the same terms that Khartoum used to devaluate the threat it continues to face in Darfur. President Bashir’s famous claim in that respect is that the war in Darfur started with the insignificant event of a camel robbery.

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[1] See Johnson, D.H., The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars: Peace or Truce, Oxford and Kampala, 2011.

[2] Interview with John Garang, Africa Report, July-August 1989.

[3] El-Affendi, A., Turabi’s Revolution: Islam and Power in Sudan, London, 1991, p. 149. 

Unworthy of liberation

In his 3 September declaration of war the Secretary General of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement in North Sudan (SPLM-N), Yasir Arman, declared that the only path left open to the remnant Movement was the “establishment of a ‘national democratic front’ committed to the comprehensive restructuring of the centre of power in Khartoum”. To that end, Arman stated, the SPLM-N will work to promote its recently sealed alliance with the forces of the Darfur rebellion and thus consolidate a “political-military nucleus” that forwards “serious opposition efforts” against the Khartoum regime. Arman went on to call upon the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to enforce a no-fly zone over Darfur, South Kordofan, and the Blue Nile, the new South in (North) Sudan in the political jargon of the SPLM-N. Arman’s notion of restructuring the centre of power through an alliance of the ‘marginalized’, as it were, copies the ‘New Sudan’ thesis of the late John Garang. In an interview with Africa Report in 1989 Garang detailed his notion of the ‘New Sudan’ in the following terms:

“We are talking here of a socio-political mutation - a new entity coming out of what we have now. As a socio-political mutation, you cannot really delineate it by saying one, two three. But we are talking about a new reality in which the localisms and the parochialisms - Sudan is composed of more than 150 different nationalities speaking different languages with various religions - are transcended by a commonality to which we all pay our allegiance and our patriotism. That commonality has never been achieved in our situation”.

The SPLM-N, like the mother SPLM before it, proposes to takeover Khartoum through an armed insurrection of the hinterlands. War between Garang’s SPLM and the central government lasted for 22 years. Khartoum, however, remained what it has been since its establishment under the Turkiya (Turco-Egyptian colonial rule, 1821-1885), the centre of an autocratic, overtly ambitious, chronically weak, and thus demonstratively aggressive state. Instead of restructuring power at the centre the SPLM eventually opted for deliverance by break-off, a choice that the overwhelming majority of the South Sudanese favoured over Garang’s ‘New Sudan’ agenda.

In Sudan’s modern history only al-Mahdi (the Messiah), Mohamed Ahmed bin Abdalla, and his Ansar had succeeded in crafting together the necessary revolutionary thrust to overrun Khartoum from without. The Ansar besieged Khartoum for an approximate ten months before they victoriously claimed the colonial citadel on 26 January 1885. The lessons learnt from the Mahdist episode constitute by and large the guiding principles of the Sudanese state in its relations with its peripheries as it developed under British colonialism (1898-1956) and further under successive national governments.

The Mahdi, who started his military campaign against the Turco-Egyptian Khartoum from the insulation of the Nuba Mountains, propagated an egalitarian ethic that transcended the parochialisms to which Garang referred to under the banner of Islamic revival. In that manner he was able, albeit temporarily, to overcome the schism between the riverain heartland and the wider periphery of Kordofan and Darfur to the advantage of the latter.  The alliance between the bahar (river) and the gharb (West) broke down with the Mahdi’s early death. His Khalifa (successor) Abdullahi al-Taaishi, a Baggara from Darfur, completed the transformation of the Mahdist revolution into a state structure, an exercise that demanded the centralisation of power in his own hands. In that context, the Khalifa faced considerable resistance from the riverain elite of the time, the Ashraf, a term denoting the superiority of the Mahdi’s kin over the rabble majority of the Ansar. The confrontation between the Khalifa and the Ashraf resulted in the latter’s defeat and eventual purge from the upper echelons of Mahdist state power. When the riverain elite re-emerged victorious it did so in alliance with the invading army of Herbert Kitchener as the fifth column of the Anglo-Egyptian re-conquest.

To subdue Khartoum the SPLM-N needs to consider the place of the riverain Sudan in the equation. By defining its constituency in terms of a marginalized African majority versus a dominant Arab minority the SPLM-N mirrors the divisive ideology of the centre it seeks to reconstruct. In so doing the SPLM-N delivers the heartland of the country it wishes to transform to the siege mentality long nourished by Khartoum’s rulers. On both sides of the frontline, it is Sudan’s dispossessed who are sacrificed at the altar of Khartoum. 

Shari'a politics

The Khartoum press reported on 23 August that a number of Islamist groups had declared a new political alliance dubbed the ‘Islamic Constitution Front’ with the sole aim of propagating strict adherence to shari’a and the constitutional enactment thereof in post-secession (North) Sudan. Apart from the vocal Just Peace Forum (JPF) headed by President Bashir’s uncle and the chief of al-Intibaha, al-Tayeb Mustafa, the signatories included the Wahhabi Ansar al-Sunna, the Moslem Brothers, the Moslem Forces Union and the Moslem Clerics Association, in essence all the strictly speaking Islamist forces other than the mainstream Islamic Movement of old, split since 1998 into President Bashir’s National Congress Party (NCP) and Hassan al-Turabi’s Popular Congress Party (PCP). The chief of Ansar al-Sunna, Abu Zaid Mohamed Hamza, was named Chairman of the new front and the veteran guardian of the Moslem Brothers, Sadiq Abdalla Abd al-Majid, its Secretary General. A fortnight ago, on 10 August, Vice President Taha had outspokenly affirmed the government’s commitment to the establishment of a “just Islamic order” while addressing the annual Ramadan breakfast of the Ansar al-Sunna brotherhood in Khartoum. Separately, the official Sudan Clerical Board, a fatwa body attached to the Presidency, submitted on 15 August a memorandum to the Speaker of the National Assembly, Ahmed Ibrahim al-Tahir, detailing its ‘vision’ for the new constitution. Speaking on the occasion, the chairman of the board, Mohamed Osman Salih, told reporters that the experiment of Islamic rule had not been free of faults and omissions and requires a reinvigorating “reform”.  

With the hint of Vice President Taha’s declaration the usually politically quiescent sheikhs of the extra-NCP Islamist spectrum were apparently invited into the playground of power and offered a calculated space to occupy. Both the Ansar al-Sunna and the Moslem Brothers had suffered internal divisions and factional strife over their relationship with the NCP. The two sheikhs named above, Hamza and Abdel Majid, are the heads of the factions that chose to ally with the NCP against fierce criticism from their comrades in Islam who doubted the NCP’s Islamic credentials and denounced its perceived lax implementation of shari’a. The political muscle of extra-NCP political Islam, in particular the orthodox Salafi camp, is nevertheless a factor to consider. Over the past few years organisationally loose but ideologically stringent student associations such as the ‘Union of Moslem Forces’ have become a bloc to reckon with in Khartoum’s universities. Outside the campuses they have remained largely shy when it comes to immediate power questions, except in the instances when the NCP seeks their political clout. Throughout the period of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) the Moslem Clerics Association and its aggressive spokesman, Mohamed Abd al-Karim, targeted the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) with surgical fatwas and government-sanctioned Friday demonstrations designed to counter its possible political ascendancy in the Sudanese heartland. An oft quoted fatwa issued by the Association declared Moslem adherents of the SPLM outright apostates on the grounds of its agitation against the imposition of shari’a laws.

The NCP’s preferred jumpsuit into the future of the rump (North) Sudan remains an alliance by engulfment with the National Umma Party (NUP) and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), the two traditional sectarian business networks of the old Sudan. Lately, President Bashir actually spelled out his fantasy, a new mega-party uniting the three under the eerie title, the Umma Unionist Congress. Rightfully, the President noted that the three parties, the NUP, the DUP, and the NCP’s ancestor, the National Islamic Front (NIF), had echoed each other in terms of programmes in the 1986 elections. Short of such safety the NCP is ever ready to tap its more extreme flanks whenever need be. The JPF served the objective of reconciling public opinion in the North with the secession of South Sudan through racist propaganda. The tame sheikhs of orthodoxy are now invited to set the maxims of political debate against contending forces including Sadiq al-Mahdi and his soft shari’a. The game of the NCP is to emerge as a reasonable arbitrator representing the pious majority. It is by no means a safe one though; the fatwa it can buy today it may not afford tomorrow.   

Democracy by the gun

In a rush attempt to revive the ‘New Sudan’ project propagated by the unionist faction of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) Yasir Arman, the Secretary General of the Movement’s (North) Sudanese organisation (SPLM-N), and Abdel Aziz al-Hilu, its rebellious Deputy Chairman, signed recently a military-political pact with the twin factions of the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) led by Abdel Wahid al-Nur and Mini Minawi, with the declared aim of waging war against the regime of the National Congress Party (NCP) and establishing a secular democracy in Sudan. Notably, it was the same Arman who missed the ‘democracy’ game in April 2010 when he, a presidential candidate, pulled out of the race citing inevitable fraud and the situation in Darfur, in line with the mainstream SPLM’s preference for a safe trade off to South Sudanese independence.

A spokesman of the SPLM-N, who until recently was a reporter for its associate Khartoum newspaper, Ajras al-Hurriya, claimed that the declaration of the brand new Sudan Revolutionary Front (SRF) was signed in Kauda, the SPLM’s capital so to speak in South Kordofan. The NCP press reported that the agreement was sealed inside South Sudan. Ajras al-Hurriya was recently closed down by order of the Press Council on the grounds that its shareholders included South Sudanese citizens. A cynical guess is that the pact was signed in Kampala or over the phone. Both Mini and Abdel Wahid have recently moved to the Ugandan capital, the first from Juba and the second from Paris, where they reinvented the absentee leadership of the pre-Addis Ababa Agreement (1972) South Sudanese political figureheads.

The cause of a secular Sudan did not sell well with the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) which refused to join the pact, and expectedly irked the SPLM-N’s ambivalent allies in the Khartoum opposition, namely the National Umma Party (NUP) and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). Turabi’s Popular Congress Party (PCP) had before voiced its rejection of the SPLM-N’s secular agenda. The first two are more likely to seek a co-existence formula with the NCP in the really existing new Sudan, or the Second Republic to use President Bashir’s depiction of the rump North; while the third, carried away by the vengeance of its chief, prefers to invest in the promise of an ‘intifada’, possibly with the assistance of collateral guns.

Before his exit from the electoral race in April 2010 Yasir Arman and his crew had rather successfully generated a momentum for the dividends of ‘democracy’ and ‘secularism’ on a mass scale. The political space they managed to create then is today doomed to dwindle with the gun as its declared protector. Rather than unite Sudan’s dispossessed the more likely consequence of the SPLM-N’s current military fantasies is the generation of divisions within its own ranks. No wonder the organisation’s very Chairman, Malik Agar, has largely kept a distance from his colleagues designs. The governor of the Blue Nile, backed by a constituency he managed to organise politically, is more a challenge to the NCP’s hegemony than the SRF with its three armies, liberated areas, and busy satellite phones. 

An effendi’s democracy

Failing to think in other than their self-defeating legalistic categories the leaders of the Khartoum opposition, lumped together in the rather wobbly National Consensus Forces (NCF), could only ruminate yet again the claim that President Bashir’s government has lost its ‘legitimacy’. The opposition  had made the same pronouncement at each and every major milestone of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), notably after the April 2010 elections, following the announcement of the results of the January 2011 referendum on the future of Southern Sudan, and now that the South has been christened an independent state. The argument this time is that the Interim National Constitution, an amalgam of the CPA and the National Congress Party’s (NCP) 1998 constitution is no longer valid considering that the CPA has reached its final station. On each occasion, the secretary of the NCF leadership, Farouq Abu Issa, busied the local media with the pledge of a nation-wide political campaign to challenge the NCP, a declaration of next to no substance.

The ‘legitimacy’ argument while formally presentable cynically exposes the opposition for what it currently is; a domestic but detached observation mission with little political muscle to back its proclamations. During their years of abstinence from power the crown leaders of Khartoum’s political parties have done little more than rehearse a fantasy of post-NCP ‘democracy’ that will restore the status quo ante of the pre-1989 Khartoum and simultaneously do away with the country’s many ills in an instantaneous puff of freedom.  Paradoxically the major proponent of this Newfoundland beyond the NCP’s Sudan is Hassan al-Turabi. To that end the veteran leader of the Islamic Movement has recently developed a new look altogether. Revising his political career he declared himself the prime leader of the 1964 October Revolution against the military government of President Abboud and reinterpreted his entire adventure with power as a continuous battle to wrestle freedom from the grip of evil dictators.

The democracy in question I suppose, paraphrasing Georges Sorel, is the paradise of which unscrupulous effendiya dream. Of course, the standard wisdom of Khartoum’s opposition it to blame the chronic crises of the country on the recurrence of military rule, and thereupon to conclude that once democracy is restored the suitable conditions for the resolution of the country’s incessant dilemmas would be created. The argument obviously supposes an unqualified divorce between form and content, a rift through which the tanks of the army have repeatedly rolled. Rarely does it cross the minds of Khartoum’s elite that the doom of their democracy may not necessarily be an imposition of fate but a consequence of its very nature. 

In its heyday the Communist Party attempted with a degree of nuance to address this question and develop an alternative historical narrative of the post-colonial Sudan. To overcome the impasse of Sudan’s abortive democracy, formally sound but by necessity reliant on a rural-urban schism whereby Sudan’s hinterlands are condemned to provide the rulers in Khartoum with votes and resources, the Party suggested alternative forms of government borrowed from the experience of third world liberation movements. In the 1960s the Communist Party advocated for ‘direct democracy’ or ‘popular democracy’ led by a ‘national democratic front’ uniting the nation’s progressive forces as it were. Once the fantasy became reality under Colonel Nimayri the communists were quick to reconsider and soon rediscovered the safe mode of parliamentary rule albeit with a taste of bitterness. Shocked by the bloody confrontation with state power in 1971 the Party simply dropped its critique of the concrete Sudanese mode of democracy without further investigation, to the detriment of both itself and the country.

While the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) in South Sudan has chosen its particular response to Khartoum’s democracy, namely breakaway, the Khartoum opposition, if it is to develop into a credible alternative to the NCP, has to rethink its own. What democracy, and for whom?