Happy Birthday to you SPLM
Editorial, Kkartoum Monitor
May 15, 2006 — Tomorrow, 16th of May 2006, coincides with the 23rd anniversary of the Sudan Peoples Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A). This year’s anniversary is unique. For the first time after 22 years in row, the movement will be celebrating its anniversary without its founding father the late Dr. John Garang De Mabior, champion of the 9th January 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) and former Sudan’s ever first-Vice President hailing from the south.
It is a unique anniversary also because it is the SPLM/A’s first anniversary in power after becoming a ruling partner in the Government of National Unity (G0NU), the government of Southern Sudan in addition to South Kordofan and the Blue Nile states.
But this year’s SPLM/A anniversary celebration, like the preceding ones, is far from complete. Much of what the movement has been struggling to achieve are still hovering in Sudan’s political limbo. The CPA fruits are still unripe in several respects. The Abyei people who have fought courageously and bravely along the SPLA front lines have no reason to celebrate the anniversary. The CPA provisions concerning their region is being suppressed by the National Congress party (NCP) whose chairman is President Umar al-Bashir.
For the Abyei people, the CPA has not been translated into tangible peace dividends of development and social services. While marking its anniversary, the SPLM/A should recognize that its political future is hooked to ensuring that the CPA is fully implemented in letter and spirit so as to realize the “New Sudan” of liberty, equality and democracy.
Most importantly, the movement should ensure the “Right of Self Determination” for the people of southern Sudan at the end of the interim period in 2011 whereby southerners will vote in a free and internationally monitored referendum to choose whether to remain in a united Sudan under the “one country two systems” arrangement, or opt for an independent Southern Sudan. This is a task the SPLM/A should reiterate and recommit itself to relentlessly adhere to without compromise. As the SPLM/A celebrates its 23rd birthday, it should also note that some parts of southern Sudan territories are annexed to the north. If the SPLM/A is keen so see that the right of self-determination is to be fulfilled, these territories must go back to the south through recognition of the North/South border commission. Accurate calculations of the south’s rightful share of the oil revenue also depend on that.
Power sharing is another disturbing challenge. The 25 per cent portion of posts in the federal civil service organs and institutions including those of Khartoum State as Sudan’s National Capital is yet be implemented.
The anniversary avails itself as an opportunity to renew the movement’s avowal of making this aspect of the CPA a living reality.
Other equally significant CPA issues deal with the new currency, Internally Displaced People (IDPs) and refugees repatriation, amendments of laws restrictive to human rights and full freedom of the press and expression, relocation of the southern universities to their original sites, and above all, the modernization of the SPLA personnel whose steadfastness, resoluteness and solidarity made it possible for the CPA to emerge.
Overall, the SPLM/A has excelled and triumphed upon itself by realizing the CPA in partnership with the NCP.
It has consistently and persistently stayed the course and goals it set 23 years ago under its visionary and peace loving founding father Dr John Garang de Mabior.
Please maintain the CPA and happy birthday to you SPLM/A.