Global Policy Forum

By Moyiga Nduru

The arrests of army officers for allegedly attempting to overthrow the government of President Omar Hassan al Bashir in Sudan have caused a wave of panic over the future of peace talks underway in neighbouring Kenya. Ten middle-ranking army officers, along with Islamic opposition leader Hassan Abdullah al Turabi, have been detained this week on suspicion of plotting to topple the government. The coup plot, led by a colonel, comes at a time when the Sudanese government and the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) are about to clinch a deal to end Sudan's 20-year-old conflict.

Despite the widespread concern among Sudanese, the SPLA does not believe that a coup, or a change of government in Khartoum, will derail the peace talks. ''The peace process is irreversible. We have reached a point of no return. A lot of countries are involved in it. So a bunch of coup makers cannot just reverse the process,'' Barnabas Marial Benjamin, the SPLA representative in Southern Africa, told IPS in Pretoria this week. Benjamin, who was visiting the South African capital along with three other SPLA officials this week, was referring to the United States, Britain and Norway, which are pushing for a deal to be signed as soon as possible. ''Any change of government in Khartoum will not affect the gains we have realised in Kenya. We have already signed a number of protocols like wealth sharing and security arrangements with the government. This is not going to change. No southerner is going to renegotiate these protocols from the scratch,'' David Deng, who is in charge of public service in the rebel Movement, told IPS.

More than two million people, mostly civilians, have died since the SPLA took up arms to fight for autonomy or independence for the people of the south in May 1983, according to human rights groups. The police arrested 72-year-old Islamic leader Turabi on Wednesday, just three days after the 10 army officers were picked up. The government said the coup plotters hail from the strife-torn western region of Darfur, where two rebel groups launched a guerrilla war against the government last year. More than 5,000 people, mostly of African descent, have been killed, around 800,000 have been internally displaced, and over 110,000 have trekked across the border into Chad, according to the United Nations.

The conflict in Darfur, an independent kingdom annexed to Sudan in 1917, started as a low-key ethnic dispute between migrant Arab nomads and indigenous African farmers over grazing lands in the drought-prone region in the 1970s. By last year, the tension had turned into a full-fledged civil war.

Last month, Turabi criticised government policy in Darfur. He said the fighting in Darfur should not have been separated from the efforts to end the conflict in South Sudan. Turabi, the brain behind the 1989 military coup which brought Bashir to power, has fallen out with the Sudanese leader. He was freed in October 2003 after spending nearly three years under house arrest. Despite the arrests, some southerners have remained sceptical of the alleged coup plot. ''There was never an attempted military coup d'etat, in particular one that is spearheaded by officers from Darfur. These officers know they will not be accepted by all the (army) units unless there are northerners (Arabs) involved, said Elias Nyamlell Wakoson, a professor of literature at Grayson College in Texas, the United States, in an document he distributed to South Sudanese. ''Since the escalation of the armed conflict in Darfur, the Bashir junta would have placed all the senior officers from Darfur under strict surveillance, including officers supporting Hassan Abdullah al Turabi,'' he said in the document, a copy of which was received by IPS.

Wakoson, who comes from South Sudan, believes Khartoum is looking for a pretext to derail the peace talks. ''The Bashir regime has reached a point where it has had enough of the SPLA, and it wants to bail out of the peace talks through a staged coup. Once they bail out, the successor of the present military government will come with its own agenda and demand that the whole game of negotiation with the SPLA start from zero,'' he wrote. ''If this is not what is happening, then it is another of the political games to divert the attention of the domestic constituency from the peace talks in Kenya and turn it on Darfur. It obviously is a mobilisation strategy to find pretext to intensify the genocide in Darfur,'' Wakoson wrote.

Mukesh Kapila, the outgoing U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Sudan, has described the fighting in Darfur as 'ethnic cleansing', and compared it with the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. ''The only difference between Rwanda and Darfur now is the numbers involved,'' he told the U.N. Integrated Regional Information Networks on Mar. 22. Up to a million Tutsi and moderate Hutus were slaughtered by a Hutu militia, known as Interahamwe, or those who fight together in Kinyarwanda, in 1994. Kapila was in Rwanda at the time of the massacre.

The Sudanese army has been unhappy with a clause in the protocol that provides for the south the right to secede after the proposed six-year transitional period, which begins after the signing of the peace agreement. Egypt, too, is worried. Helmi Sharawy, director of the Arab and African Centre in Cairo, says he prefers the south to remain within a united Sudan. ''Starting development from the scratch will be difficult. The south will benefit more if it remains within a united Sudan,'' he told IPS in Pretoria last week. Egypt is concerned over the Nile water, its lifeline, which flows through south Sudan from Lake Victoria in East Africa. Egypt is uncomfortable with competition over the use of the water, especially by countries that it has no influence or control over.

Some think tanks have adopted a more pragmatic approach on the possibility of Sudan's disintegration. ''If the people of South Sudan decide to vote for independence, then that's it. Personally, I believe in a voluntary choice of association. You can't force someone to live with you if he or she doesn't like it,'' Taju el-Din Abdel Rahim, secretary general of the Pan-African Movement, told IPS. But the Sudanese army may beg to differ. It has intervened in every political dispute, through coups, since independence from Britain in 1956.