Sudan: What comes after the self-determination agreement?
Sudan, Reporter's View, 5/13/1998

The May 6 agreement between the Sudanese government and the Sudan's People's Liberation Army (SPLA), according to which the southern part of Sudan is to be granted the right of self-determination, has touched some sensitive nerves both inside and outside Sudan, and it is yet to engender a wave of repercussions.

The Sudanese opposition National Democratic Alliance (NDA), stunned by the government's unexpected change of position embracing the self determination option, has so far decided to keep silent, apparently to give itself a chance to discuss the issue with the SPLA leadership, which is still considered to be an integral part of the NDA opposition movement. The Egyptian government, who has interests in any political development affecting the unity of Sudan, and who has persistently looked down on a new unwanted state in the Nile valley, also adopted a wait and see position, and is currently assessing the situation.

One significant remark to be made regarding the agreement is that the two signatory parties have ended up at the negotiating table with the initial positions both parties held since the outset of the conflict and thereafter, changed 180 degrees. The SPLA, which started in 1983 with a Marxist manifesto that was later subjected to series of alterations to allow the armed movement to adapt to local, regional and international realities, has consistently called for a unified Sudan, thus rejecting all secessionist tendencies among many southerners.

Yet, the SPLA is now identifying itself with a quite different option, an option which may split Sudan in two, an Arab Moslem state in the north, and an African Christian-animist state in the south. The SPLA's change of heart could not be analyzed without considering the devastating intra-conflicts and defections that plagued the movement during the 1990s, the most outstanding being the defection to the government's side by Reik Mashar who in 1996 signed a peace accord with Khartoum.

The southerners who abandoned Colonel John Garang, the SPLA's historical leader have invariably cited Garang's "undemocratic method of leadership." Nonetheless such defections could generally be traced along tribal lines, something which is not very uncommon in Africa's long history of guerrilla wars.

Another major factor playing into the SPLA's sudden change of strategy has been escalating concerns among southerners about the worsening conditions in the south which was severely hit by the civil war that has so far claimed 1.3 million lives and reduced the southern economic infrastructure into rubble. The SPLA's new position also reflects a greater weight given by Colonel Garang and his colleagues to views intermittently expressed in newsletters published in London and Nairobi by southern intellectuals who tend to doubt the feasibility of the SPLA's alliance with the northern opposition NDA, claiming that northerners in the opposition might have been using the SPLA to serve their own goals without much commitment to fulfilling the south's aspirations, especially given the fact that the leading forces of the NDA, the Ummah party and the Unionist party, had shown no real sympathy to the SPLA's demand for a secular state when the two parties were in government during the period 1986-1989 before General Omar al-Bashir seized power through a military coup backed by the National Islamic Front (NIF).

By agreeing to grant the south the right to self determination, the Sudanese government in its turn shows a dramatic shift in the policy it has long espoused regarding the southern question. One of the main reasons pronounced by the National Islamic Front for supporting the 1989 military coup was to abort a then-imminent agreement between Al-Sadiq Al-Mahdi's government and the SPLA to put the Islamic sharia'a laws on hold until a national constitutional conference was convened to deal with all fundamental issues pertaining to the unity of Sudan.

The Islamists had consistently and adamantly maintained a militant position towards the southern question. Following the military takeover in 1989 a call for Jihad (holy war) was announced, human and material resources were galvanized and the entire country was put in a state of siege in order to prosecute the war and secure a decisive victory.

Although some few Islamists had been outspoken, calling on the government to renounce an armed solution and consider giving the south the right to self-determination, the vast majority of the government's supporters considered war against the Christian-animist south a religious obligation and rejected vehemently any attempt for compromising that position.

However, a cabinet reshuffle last March might have indicated a possible change in the government's strategy toward the south, as a leading figure widely considered to be militant, Ghazi Salahuddin, who was long entrusted with handling the government-SPLA talks was removed to a less significant position. The peace negotiations file was then assigned to the newly appointed minister of foreign affairs, Mustafa Osman Ismail, who was seemingly more than happy last Wednesday, as his cheerful statements had suggested, to answer the SPLA's demand for self-determination.

Egypt's concerns over the new Sudanese attitude are highly understandable. Until 1953 Egypt and Sudan were legally one country. Sudan, though occupied by the British, was symbolically under the Egyptian flag, the official title of the then King Faroug, was "King of Egypt and Sudan". Towards the end of the British colonization of Sudan, the Egyptian government was expecting Sudan to come back into the Egyptian fold. But the Sudanese parliament, under British pressure, passed a resolution in 1953 declaring Sudan an independent state.

Moreover, Egypt has always been concerned with any development that might in any way touch on the Nile waters and their secure flow from sources in Uganda and Ethiopia through Sudan down to Egypt. Cairo has steadily made it clear that it will not tolerate the separation of Sudan into two states and that the unity of Sudan, as Osama El-Baz, president Mubarak's presidential advisor, once put it, is an integral part of the Egyptian national and regional security agenda.

So far, no one knows exactly what the next round of negotiations scheduled to take place in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa will yield. Regional analysts forecasted, prior to the recent round of talks between the Sudanese government and the SPLA which resulted with Wednesday's agreement, that it was going to end in failure like its predecessors.

Previous Stories:
  Kenyan foreign minister confirms Sudan's unity   (5/11/1998)
  Sudanese rebels say Wednesday's peace agreement is not conclusive   (5/11/1998)
  Sudan graciously receives talk of separation   (5/8/1998)

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