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.

RVI Field Courses 2012 - Final Application Deadlines

The RVI annual field courses are filling up and applications will be closing in a few weeks. The final application date for the Sudan and South Sudan course is 30 March; for the Horn of Africa course, 16 April; and for the Great Lakes course, 30 April. Applications after the deadline for each course will be considered only if there are cancellations. For more information please download the course prospectus, or apply online – or contact courses@riftvalley.net.

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

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

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

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

For further information (or to request the application form as a Microsoft Word document), email courses@riftvalley.net.

Power to the NCP, sharia to the masses

In a meeting extending to the early hours of Thursday, 23 February, the Leadership Council of the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) approved a major re-distribution of duties in its top rank, namely the leadership of the party’s five sectors and their constitutive secretariats a rung lower. Vice President al-Haj Adam Yusif, Hamid Sideeg, Samya Ahmed Mohamed, Sabir Mohamed al-Hassan and Amin Hassan Omer replaced Qutbi al-Mahdi, Nafie Ali Nafie, Salah Wansi, Awad al-Jaz and Ibrahim Ahmed Omer as chairpersons of the party’s political, organisational, professionals’, economic and cultural sectors in that order. Only Mustafa Osman Ismail, the chairman of the external relations sector was not affected by the reshuffle. In his department Mohamed Yusif Abdalla, Hassanat Awad Satti and Issa Bushra were named secretaries for African, Western and Asian countries respectively. In the political sector, the secretariat for mobilisation headed by Haj Majid Siwar was scrapped and its mandate fused with the media secretariat led by Ibrahim Ghandoor. Hasabo Mohamed Abd al-Rahman, the former commissioner for humanitarian affairs and the head of the Darfur caucus in the parliament, was appointed secretary for political communication, a post previous occupied by al-Haj Adam Yusif. In the organisational sector, Khalil Abdalla replaced Hajo Gasm al-Seed as secretary for Kordofan and the White Nile, and Salah Ahmed was picked to lead the information secretariat. Amin Mahmoud and Abd al-Moneim al-Sunni, the secretaries for students and youth were affirmed in their positions. Adil Awad Salman, the former governor of the Northern state, was appointed secretary for civil society organisations, a newly devised post, while Intisar Abu Najma was named secretary for women, Samya Ahmed Mohamed’s former position. Mohamed Haj Majid and Ammar Bashari assumed responsibility for the social affairs and voluntary work secretariats respectively. 

On a first glance the impression of a major sweep in the leadership of the NCP is justified. This at least is the message that the NCP wants to transmit. The party’s Nizar Khaled Mahjoub told the press that the reshuffle was part of a wider reform agenda endorsed by the December 2011 general convention. Well, that may be so. Closer scrutiny, however, reveals a less dramatic state of affairs. The reshuffle seems to be driven by two related concerns, accommodation of those NCP headmen left out of the post-secession cabinet, and the integration of the Islamic Movement’s influential and more vocal functionaries into the business of the ruling party. The division of labour, or rather the acrimonious equilibrium, between Nafie Ali Nafie and Ali Osman Mohamed Taha was reset despite the apparent delegation of responsibilities to junior functionaries. The first was re-affirmed in his position as Deputy Chairman for Party Affairs, a mandate that provides him with sufficient authority to rule supreme over the new head of the organisational sector, while the post of the second was redesigned to read Deputy Chairman for Executive Affairs, a depiction that corresponds to his role as guardian over the NCP’s cabinet members and the state bureaucracy. Significant though was the NCP’s readiness to promote younger members of the Islamic Movement to high office. Ammar Bashari and Mohamed Haj Majid, to name two of the youngest breed, have next to no experience of political activity before the 1989 coup. In the mid-1990s both were student activists. There are good reasons to believe that Bashari was involved back in 1998 in the murder of Mohamed Abd al-Salam, a fellow colleague in Khartoum University and a member of the Communist Party’s student organisation. Haj Majid distinguished himself by an avid enthusiasm for jihad against the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M) and the regime’s many enemies during the 1990s, and was eventually rewarded for his long service with the top job in the Martyr’s Organisation, the benefits dispenser of the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Popular Defence Forces (PDF) responsible for the well-being of the fallen combatants’ families and close kin. Compared to their generation in the opposition establishment these younger NCP functionaries seem to be faring pretty well, it must be said. In the National Umma Party (NUP), the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), and the Communist Party, I fear, Bashari’s contemporaries are busy writing protest documents against their perceived ‘marginalisation’. The NCP, on the other hand, seems to be ready to offer its offspring the token of inclusion along a rough quota system, a model that emulates, and here I am speculating at will, the experience of the NCP’s strategic partner/patron, the Communist Party of China. Back in January the two parties held what they termed the first session of a high level dialogue in Khartoum co-chaired by the NCP’s Deputy Chairman, Nafie Ali Nafie, and the CPC’s Li Yuanchao, Politburo member, Secretary of the Secretariat of the CPC’s Central Committee and Chairman of the Organisational Department of the Central Committee. “The friendly frank and in-depth dialogue reviewed how to further develop the two parties’ relations in light of the current development, shared experiences on how to consolidate their ruling positions”, reported Xinhua.

In the first public appearance following his new NCP appointment Haj Majid addressed the founding conference of the Islamic Constitution Front (ICF) in Khartoum in the very language he employed as a student agitator for the Islamist cause. “The martyrs of jihad did not die for a person or for a party but for the cause of the [Islamic] faith”, he declared. The conference which brought together representatives of almost the entire spectrum of political Islam in the country, Turabi’s deputy included, renewed the call for a strictly Islamic order as detailed in a draft constitution published under the name of the ICF in October last year, and warned President Bashir of an ‘Arab Spring’ in Sudan if he fails to follow through. The NCP, a partner in the venture, simply responded with the reassurance that sharia will prevail. The opposition in Khartoum, as expected, stumbled over its own incompetence and turned the whole issue into an internecine dispute over the significance of Abdalla Hassan Ahmed’s signature. The PCP’s Deputy Secretary General had attended the event and signed the founding charter of the ICF drawing fierce criticism from his party fellow Kamal Omer, the PCP’s permanent representative in the opposition alliance. The debate thus focused on whether Abdalla had signed in his personal capacity, Omer’s claim, or the capacity of his office, the opposition’s suspicion. 

Whatever the case, the lesson to be drawn is that the NCP and its jealous allies are pursuing the consolidation of a political order defined by commitment to an Islamist frame of reference. Under these terms the NCP could only glee at a fracture in the political scene dividing between the supporters of sharia rule and its opponents, a situation that would naturally allow it to ride high on the Islamic wave and equate instances of opposition to its hegemony with the disparage of Islam as such. This ideological operation is a game that Sudan’s Islamists have mastered very well. Its roots in the Sudanese postcolony reach back to Ismail al-Azhari’s toying with sharia rule in the 1960s as a means to achieve presidential ambitions, while its perfection is certainly Hassan al-Turabi’s primary achievement. In the face of this challenge the opposition to the NCP has usually resorted to the category of soft sharia, or what President Bashir recently denigrated as coy revisionism of hardcore sharia obligations. Necessary, I presume, is the rejection of the sharia-secular dichotomy altogether rather than submission to rules of engagement that favour by virtue of their very formulation the claims of the puritan fundamentalist over those of the enlightened reformer. Sharia as an item of political grammar operates in a secular manner, and has become the name of secular demands. The emergent petty bourgeoisie of the Islamic Movement wrote sharia on their banners to storm the citadels of the sectarian parties, themselves reliant on another read of sharia for their ideological sustenance. Today, the NCP cheers sharia to quench the anti-systemic rage brewing in Khartoum’s impoverished neighbourhoods where feelings of neglect, exclusion and enstrangement are harnessed by the extra-NCP Islamist extreme. The claims of fidelity to sharia, and sharia as such, streamline the conflict in society rather than define it. No wonder it is the CPC that the NCP turns to for advice not the sheikhs of Islam. The counter-claim of Khartoum’s secular opposition has traditionally been the attempt to flake the form from the essence, the first perceived to be sharia and the second the Islamists’ drive for power. What is denied in this flat empiricism is the whole of the societal conflict that determines both.

The NCP, oil and Islam

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

Farewell Wardi

Wardi in young age, ca 1960

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

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

The Sudans: government by war

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

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

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