Global Policy Forum

By Gerard Prunier

Peace accords signed in Nairobi, Kenya, on 9 January 2005 ended a conflict that has ravaged Sudan for the past 21 years. About 1.5 million people have been killed; more than 4 million have been displaced inside Sudan and 600,000 took refuge in bordering states (1). No wonder the international community has welcomed this political, and also economic, agreement, reached after two and a half years of improbable negotiation.

But caution is essential, as there are still extremely violent clashes in the western province of Darfur (2), a conflict that the signatories in Nairobi ignored. It will be difficult to apply the complicated arrangements that have been agreed to a composite political body with elements from both the Christian guerrilla and Muslim fundamentalist movements, while opposition groups from north and south are frustrated at their exclusion from the process.

The war between north and south Sudan is both cultural and religious, and dates back 50 years. In August 1955, when the British had yet to withdraw from the country, the announcement that British officers were to be replaced with Arabs provoked the Equatoria Corps, a unit of black soldiers, to mutiny. There followed 17 years of war that ended with the peace of Addis Ababa in February 1972. That conferred relative autonomy on the three southern provinces within a confederal framework. But the discovery in 1979 of oil in the south and the construction in 1980 of a huge canal designed to divert the water of the Nile for Egypt's benefit (the Jonglei Project) prompted President Gaafar Muhammad Numeiri unilaterally to repudiate the Addis Ababa accord.

The war resumed in May 1983 when black units of the Sudanese army rose up against their Arab commanders. Colonel John Garang took over the leadership and created the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A). President Numeiri had United States backing, and so the rebellion won the support of Ethiopia under the leadership of Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam and his socialist camp allies. The end of the cold war and collapse of the Mengistu regime in May 1991 seriously undermined the SPLM/A and almost brought it down. But in 1993 Uganda under President Yoweri Museveni took over from the failing Ethiopia. Meanwhile an Islamist fundamentalist regime had been installed in Khartoum in 1989, and the SPLM/A, like Kampala, found itself close to the US.

After several unsuccessful attempts during the 1990s, Khartoum agreed to begin serious negotiations after the 9/11 attacks. The Islamist regime was concerned at the possibility of US military intervention, because at its inception it had backed al-Qaida. Negotiations began in Kenya in 2002. Khartoum prolonged discussions, in the hope that a change in the geographical balance would save it from having to make too many concessions. Not until November 2004 (and George Bush's re-election) did the Islamist regime agree to finalise an overall agreement.

In February 2003 the western province of Darfur rose up against the central authority, demonstrating that the main issue in Sudan was not religion but the monopoly on power held by a small elite of Arabs from the Nile valley. Darfur is 100% Muslim and - despite frequent assertions - the civil war there in the past two years is not a struggle between "Arabs and Africans". The slow expansion of the guerrilla movement into the exclusively Arab province of Kordofan shows that, there too, the dispute is economic and political rather than religious or racial.

The 9 January peace accord is not a single agreement, but a group of separate protocols on different issues signed on different dates. The first is known as the Machakos Protocol, after the town in Kenya where it was signed in July 2002. It provides for a referendum on self-determination for southern Sudan after an interim period of six years, preceded by a pre-interim period of six months.

In September 2003 the parties finally agreed on "security arrangements". These provide for the withdrawal of northern troops from the south and of the SPLM/A forces from the north (3), as well as for the creation of joint integrated units (JIUs). These are to be made up of some 40,000 troops and are supposed to comprise equal numbers from the SPLM/A and the regular army. They are to be stationed in the three southern provinces and in north-south border regions partially occupied by the SPLM/A (Abyei, Nuba mountains and Southern Blue Nile province). A joint headquarters staff is envisaged. Outside those units, both the SPLM/A and the government will be allowed to retain their own forces, stationed in the south and north respectively.

In December 2003 a protocol on wealth-sharing was agreed. It provides for the regulation of land issues, administration of the finance ministry, the establishment of a dual banking system (Islamic in the north (4) and conventional in the south), and control of the customs and taxation system. But above all it provides for significant oil revenue to be shared. Since the Heglig-Port Sudan pipeline was completed in 1999, Sudan has become a medium-sized oil power. World prices mean that 390,000 barrels produced daily bring in almost $1.9bn annually. The energy ministry has drawn up expansion plans that should make it possible to increase this to 500,000 barrels a day by the end of 2005. If prices hold up, there will be a bonanza of more than $2.5bn to be shared out in 12 months' time (5). The protocol envisages an equal distribution of oil revenue between north and south.

Three other protocols were signed in May 2004. The most important concerns political power sharing; Omar Hassan al-Bashir will remain president and John Garang will become vice-president, with a power of veto over the decisions of the head of state. A government of national unity will be set up during the pre-interim period, with 52% of posts allocated to the current sole party (Mutammar al-Watani or Popular Patriotic Congress), 28% to the SPLM/A, 14% to the northern opposition (6) and 6% to the southern forces outside the SPLM/A. During that period, a constitutional commission is to draw up a basic law - in the past Sudan has had only temporary constitutions or constitutions drawn up under dictatorships.

A census will be held in two years' time (the last was in 1982), making it possible to hold general elections halfway through the transitional period. Two other protocols, signed in May 2004, provide for interim regional administrative systems for Abyei state, on the frontier between Bahr-al-Ghazal and Kordofan, for the Nuba mountains and the Southern Blue Nile province. These regions have mixed Arab and black African populations and, although in the north, they have been the targets of SPLM/A incursions. The last protocols, signed at Naivisha, Kenya, on 31 December 2004, amend a number of provisions of the agreement on security arrangements and the timetable for the implementation of all the other protocols.

The main shortcoming of these protocols is a result of the nature of the signatories. The regime is the direct descendant of the Islamic National Front (INF), a fundamentalist Muslim movement that took 7% of the vote in the last free elections, in April 1986. Even crediting the regime with a peace dividend, it is hard to believe that it represents more than 15% of the electorate. Furthermore, the SPLM/A, designated the sole political partner of the regime, is far from being in control of the whole of the south.

The southern political parties that existed in 1986 have remained in the background and represent significant forces. The anti-SPLM/A militias the government has long been using are much more than just organisations of collaborators, without local backing. The SPLM/A, whose ethnic base is mostly Dinkas in the Bor region, is hardly popular with the major Nuer ethnic group or among the tribes of the equatorial zone. Even if displaced persons and refugees are included, given that the south accounts for only 25%-30% of Sudan's total population, the signatories to the Nairobi accords have the backing of only about 30% of the Sudanese people. What about the remaining 70%? They clearly represent a major unknown factor for the elections.

Garang is gambling: he hopes to regain in the north at least as much as he will lose in the south. The eclipse of the significant Sudanese Communist party and inability of the secular political forces on the left to mobilise leave a black hole in electoral sociology (7). Garang and the SPLM/A hope to win over those lost votes, despite the cultural differences between the "Arab electorate" and the SPLM/A's black African image.

But will the elections ever be held? The first obstacle is the continuing conflict in Darfur, with far more than the 70,000 victims that the international community is prepared to acknowledge (8). This crisis is typical of the failure to take account of population groups outside the finfluence of the Khartoum regime and the SPLM/A. Darfur, an entirely Muslim region populated by black Africans and Arabs (but Arabs different from those of the Nile Valley), has suffered for a century from the same socio-economic and political marginalisation as the south. But its Muslim identity meant that it suffered in silence and accepted the word of Arabs from the dominant group, promising rewards that failed to materialise (9). When Darfur's inhabitants saw in 2002 that the SPLM/A would probably profit from 20 years of war, they rebelled in the belief that only violence would secure them a seat at the negotiating table. They remain excluded and will probably continue fighting until that changes.

As for the south, is it likely that the Khartoum regime will transfer its share of the oil revenue with the necessary transparency? Will the SPLM/A have enough properly trained officials to be able take its place within the central government? What will be the relationship between the national government and the government that the SPLM/A is to be allowed to establish in southern Sudan? And if things do not go as planned, is it likely that the SPLM/A officers, many of them suspicious of the long interim period, will wait patiently for the referendum on self-determination in July 2011? The road to a genuine peace is going to be long for an unequal Sudan divided between a wealthy north and a worn-out south.

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