Eastern Sudan conflict threatens peace in the south
Sept 29 2005, (HAMESHKOREIB) “We have learnt the lessons of Darfur,” says Sheikh Ali, who runs the town of Hameshkoreib, in eastern Sudan, for the rebel Eastern Front. “This government only listens to people who carry guns.” What he means is that, while Sudan’s main southern rebel movement has, after some 30 years of on-off fighting, won a deal that promises autonomy and perhaps even eventual independence for the south, other disaffected regions must now fight for similar concessions. While strife in Sudan’s western province of Darfur continues, a growing rebellion in the east is further weakening the central government in Khartoum-and could even cause the delicate north-south deal to unravel.
As the main southern group, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), withdraws its forces from the country’s eastern belt as part of its agreement signed earlier this year with the government in Khartoum, eastern rebels are replacing them. The Eastern Front’s bases are over the border, in Eritrea. Sudanese government forces and tribal militias are limbering up for a showdown on the Sudanese side of the border. There are growing fears that the government in Khartoum is planning to unleash the militias, just as they did in the west, when mounted Arab levies known as the janjaweed were allowed, and probably encouraged, to commit an array of atrocities against the disaffected Darfuris, leaving perhaps 180,000 dead.
The Eastern Front was set up last year as an alliance between two eastern tribal rebel groups, the Rashaida tribe’s Free Lions and the Beja Congress. They were later joined by the Darfuris’ Justice and Equality Movement (JEM). The rebels’ gravest threat is to block the flow of oil, which is exported through Port Sudan at a rate of 300,000 barrels a day. The government also plans to build a second refinery nearby that would double the output of Sudan’s refined oil within three years. That plan, too, could be stymied.
The government is rattled. A senior intelligence official privately admits that it already has three times more troops in the east than in embattled Darfur. It is vital, he adds, that government forces retake the eastern areas from which the SPLM has withdrawn.
Tension began rising earlier this year when at least 17 rioting Beja people were killed by police in Port Sudan. Since then, a steady trickle of angry young Beja men has flowed towards rebel camps across the border in Eritrea. “You can’t breathe,” says Ahmed, a recent arrival in one of the camps, who accuses the government of stealing the area’s wealth while “keeping one foot on our throat…I’d rather die fighting.” The Eritrean government in Asmara is plainly abetting the Sudanese rebels, just as the Islamist government in Khartoum gives succour to the Islamist opposition in Eritrea.
For the JEM, whose heartland is Darfur, its alliance with the Eastern Front and the relocation of some JEM troops from west to east is a chance to pose as a movement with national ambitions. At present, its western branch has a representative at the on-off peace talks in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, but its eastern one does not.
The JEM’s eastern commander, Abdulaziz Osher, who is based in Asmara, says that the historic peace accord between north and south is “flawed”-because it leaves his lot out of the equation; in particular, the eastern provinces are denied what he considers to be a fair cut of Sudan’s oil wealth, which will be allocated in a complex formula between north and south. “The international community is again making the mistake it made in Darfur by insisting on its application and continuing to ignore those of us, whether in the east or the west, who say we’re not happy,” he says.
Riots followed the death in a (probably accidental) helicopter crash in Uganda two months ago of John Garang, the southern rebel leader who had just become Sudan’s vice-president in the north-south deal that provides, among other things, for a referendum in six years on full independence for the south. Since then the southerners have been fairly quiescent. But they are particularly annoyed that, in a carve-up of ministerial posts announced last month, their new leader, Salva Kiir, agreed to let the northerners keep the energy (ie, oil) and mineral portfolio as well as the finance ministry and 14 other posts, to the SPLM’s nine.
The strife in Darfur is by no means over. Peace in the south is fragile. And now, to make matters worse, the easterners are demanding a bigger slice of the cake, both in budget revenue and government posts-and say they will fight to get it. Sudan is barely holding together.
(The Economist)