Gaddafi’s corpse

Muammar al-Gaddafi, the last to fall in the series of Nasser-inspired officers who snatched power from the colonial era monarchists of the Arab world, was lynched last week by the combatants loosely assembled around Libya’s Transitional National Council (TNC) in his hometown Sirte. The TNC Chairman, Mustafa Abd al-Jalil told a rally celebrating the ‘liberation’ of the country that shari’a will constitute the major source of legislation in the new Libya. Any laws that contravene shari’a will be scrapped, he added.

In Sudan not a single political force distinguished itself by refusing to dance around Gaddafi’s corpse. Of particular interest was the contest between the two wings of the Islamic Movement, the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) and the opposition Popular Congress Party (PCP) to claim the greater joy at Gaddafi’s demise. Al-Intibaha ran a lengthy editorial the day after excelling in Schadenfreude, and adorned its pages with photographs of the slain colonel. The NCP’s Nafie Ali Nafie told the press that Gaddafi was a mighty thorn in Sudan’s back. He had granted crucial support to the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M) in its formative years and supplied different factions of the Darfur insurgency with safe havens and arms. Mustafa Osman Ismail, President Bashir’s foreign affairs advisor, stated that Gaddafi’s demise is a lesson to all tyrants! The death of the colonel, he hoped, would pave the way for a lasting peace in Darfur. The PCP issued a celebratory statement titled “The Demise of Libya’s Pharaoh”, warning Sudan’s rulers of a similar fate in case they insist on rejecting the demands of the people. Even Sadiq al-Mahdi, ever conciliatory, had no mild words for Gaddafi. He argued that the manner in which Gaddafi died corresponded to his tyrannical rule.

It is fair to state that neither the Islamic Movement nor Sadiq’s Umma Party had ever registered any qualms over Gaddafi’s favours in times of need. After his fallout with Nimayri the Libyan colonel had provided the Islamic Movement and the Umma Party, at the time allies in the opposition National Front, with training, arms, and finances to bring down the Khartoum regime. The two recruited a formidable militia with Libyan support and attempted in July 1976 to storm Khartoum after a long trek from bases in Libya. They did not succeed in overthrowing Nimayri but did succeed in dispersing firearms in the wasteland of Darfur, at the time a mere side-effect of the power politics of the Khartoum elite that went largely unnoticed. Payback came when Sadiq al-Mahdi was elected Prime Minister following the 1985 uprising against Nimayri. Gaddafi generously supported the Umma Party’s electoral campaign and the Umma chief, once in power, allowed Gaddafi to operate in Darfur as a sovereign. At the time the Libyan leader was embroiled in another episode of the lengthy Chadian-Libyan conflict, and needed Darfur as a corridor and a recruitment ground for operatives against Hissène Habré. Darfur was swept into political-military dynamics in the region and beyond, if not globalised so to speak as a distant theatre of Cold War drama. Darfur’s ever grumbling war has certain roots extending to this episode of militarisation. Both the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) led by the pro-Turabi Khalil Ibrahim and the pro-government Abbala militias famed as the Janjaweed list among the beneficiaries of the Gaddafi logic. Incidentally, they shot at each other. 

Sadiq's hand

Upon the secession of South Sudan last July President Bashir declared his intent to form a ‘broad-based government’ in the rump (North) Sudan possibly with the participation of the main opposition forces. Since then the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) has been engaged in extensive negotiations with the two larger parties in the scene, the National Umma Party (NUP) led by Sadiq al-Mahdi and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) led by Mohamed Osman al-Mirghani. Conscious of the inevitable economic and political repercussions of secession the NCP wished to secure its hold on the Sudanese heartland through an alliance by engulfment with the two sectarian mass parties or at least one. Apart from spurring the breakaway of yet another DUP faction the talks with the two major parties did not yield any results of immediate interest to the NCP.

According to the Vice President, al-Haj Adam Yusif, the NCP had made a most “convincing” offer to the opposition, as much as half the seats of the cabinet. Despite the declared rejection of the offer by both the NUP and the DUP Yusif remains hopeful. He told a conference of his party in Atbara “the [opposition] parties still have the opportunity to join the government at any time irrespective of the composition of the coming cabinet”. President Bashir himself acknowledged the deadlock in his address to the National Assembly on 10 October. He made the rhetorical claim that NCP and the opposition had reached a consensus over “national concepts” and certain “commonalities regarding the preservation of the country’s unity”. On a more aggressive tone Qutbi al-Mahdi, the chief of the ruling party’s political sector, told reporters on 5 October that the opposition faces the choice between cooperation with the NCP and collaboration with the enemies of Sudan, the Western powers, Israel, and the International Criminal Court (ICC). Nafie Ali Nafie, the NCP’s Deputy Chairman, resumed the flirt when addressing the closing session of a conference of the ruling party’s political sector attended by the NUP chief, Sadiq al-Mahdi, and several senior DUP politicians on 11 October. He stated that the participation of the opposition parties in such a function of the NCP is a consequence of the “constructive dialogue” between the two sides.

The NUP and the DUP had apparently bargained for more than a share in the cabinet. The NUP had a name for its bride wealth, Sadiq al-Mahdi’s ‘national agenda’, a list of demands under the theme of ‘the transformation of the party-state into a nation-state’. The DUP, not so much plagued by concerns of intellectual prestige, chose a more frank approach. The party’s negotiators simply stated that the NCP’s offer was far less than the due of the historical party of the national movement. They demanded the allocations of positions to the DUP extending right through the government structure, from the presidency to the localities. 

Sadiq al-Mahdi at least was obviously reading from his 1977 diary. In that year the NUP chief and President Nimayri agreed on the terms of what became known as the ‘national reconciliation’. Sadiq al-Mahdi returned from years of exile to assume a leading position in Nimayri’s Sudan Socialist Union (SSU) next to Hassan al-Turabi. The two men had allied against Nimayri in the opposition National Front generously hosted by Libya’s Gaddafi. Exhausted by their disastrous July 1976 military attempt at Khartoum from their Libyan base the two chose to join the man they could not beat. Turabi made the best of the unexpected turn of events. The rapprochement with Nimayri is identified in Turabi’s history of the Islamic Movement as the period of ‘reconciliation and development’. The Islamic Movement grew into the state machinery as it were. Sadiq al-Mahdi was less fortunate. Incapable of adaptation to the realities of the ‘one party state’ a frustrated Sadiq eventually resigned from the SSU’s politburo to grumble at home while Turabi developed the definitive disorder of army politics, an infatuation that eventually cost him his power and his Islamic Movement.

Informed by this experience Sadiq al-Mahdi resisted the NCP’s passionate overtures secretly hoping that a repeat intifada might sweep the regime away.  Sadiq is equally anxious that such a popular outburst might even endanger the authority and standing of the established parties, his own included. The wise NUP chairman wants the Aristotelian gold, a negotiated hygienic transfer of power through the means of a constitutional conference and an electoral process. The anti-Mahdist Sadiq, I fear, does not have the sufficient credit to make such a long call. 

State Islam according to al-Intibaha

Late in August the Just Peace Forum (JPF) led by al-Tayeb Mustafa had cuddled up to the extra-Turabist if not the anti-Turabist forces of the Islamist scene in Sudan, the Wahhabi Ansar al-Sunna, the remnant non-Turabist Moslem Brotherhood, the aggressive Moslem Clerics Association, the Moslem Forces Union, and a set of even smaller groups, to form the single theme Islamic Constitution Front (ICF), an umbrella format akin to the Kauda alliance, but arguable more focused. Beginning on 3 October al-Intibaha, al-Tayeb Mustafa’s toxic newspaper, started publishing a draft constitution for the rump Sudan crafted by the ICF brothers in faith. Pushing the contestation of Islam and the state forward as the ultimate political question in the country the text reads like somebody’s fantasy and by definition another’s nightmare.

The draft, in the tradition of Sudanese precedents, begins with a series of definitions: “Sudan is a united Islamic state that exercises sovereignty over all the regions within its territory, and where the dictates of Dar al-Islam apply”; “Islam is the religion of the state, a faith, a path and a way of life”; “Arabic is the official language of the state”; “Sudan is part of the Moslem Umma and a member of regional and international organisations”. Sovereignty, according to the draft, is exercised by Allah alone, while shari’a rules supreme and the Umma enjoys political authority, three variations on the theme of the ultimate source of political power in Islamic jurisprudence. After fitful experimentation with the same abstractions Hassan al-Turabi has lately declared society sovereign, the implied condition being that Moslems constitute a majority. To qualify shari’a for his rediscovered passion for parliamentary democracy Turabi argued that the elected representatives of the nation may choose to uphold or drop articles of shari’a at will, since the consensus of the Umma constitutes in itself a source of legislation next to the Quran and the traditions of the prophet. The revisionist Turabi of today would probably rubbish the constitutional propositions forwarded by the JPF et al as an instance of infantile Islamism, further evidence of the chronic decay of Moslem societies.

To illuminate the abstractions above one has to read further into the draft constitution. Legislative authority in the Islamic state of Sudan is the due of an elected shura (consultative) council; the members of the council are nominated for election from five colleges: scholars of shari’a, specialists in the natural sciences, professionals, leaders and notables, and individuals with considerable experience and knowledge. To qualify for membership of the council a nominee has to be Sudanese, at least thirty years old, of sound mind, of fair standing, capable of ijtihad, and of reasonable opinions, in addition to satisfying the conditions of inclusion in one of the five colleges as stipulated by law. The draft details ‘fair standing’ with the qualifications of Moslem, male, sane, and evidently pious. The head of state is elected by popular vote from three nominees not younger than forty years old handpicked by the shura council. The draft lists the same set of conditions for the office of the president with the addition of the necessary power to confront the enemy and wage jihad, as well as sound organs and senses. 

Essentially, the Islamist margin is spelling out its version of a WASP oligarchy so to speak, free of camouflage. Naïve as it may appear the ICF’s draft transpires of the post-colonial quest to mould the state rather than reject it. The ICF is demanding a state with which a fantasized pious Moslem can easily identify. The irony being that power, albeit congruent with an imagined tradition of Moslem statehood, has to be guarded from the same Moslem plebeians by an elite corps of shari’a fellows, distinguished effendiya of the professions, and revered notables. In the absence of a credible left capable of transcending the divide between urban and rural struggles in Sudan this utterly modern frustration with the shortcomings of the state as it exists cannot but translate into ethnic fission in the peripheries and its Islamized rearticulation in the heartland.

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.