There will be no Self-determination in 2011 in South Sudan
By Sudan Today*
Issue No.1, July, 2006
The people of Southern Sudan must now live with the fact that there will be no referendum on unity or separation by January 9th, 2011.
This hypothesis is based on two veritable facts: One, the road to referendum is rough and tough and takes only a visionary leader on the helm to chart the way. This kind of leadership is terribly lacking in the SPLM at the moment. Two, it is now common knowledge that the late SPLM leader Dr.John Garang was slain by a Power and Money cartel.
In other words, those who saw him as a threat to their power ; those who wanted his power; along with killers on call for money, teamed up together to end his life, and with him- the Comprehensive Peace Agreement – the CPA. Now that Phase One of the plan- the slaying of John Garang- has been achieved, the cartel is vigorously ripping the SPLM apart as part of Phase Two, aimed at destroying the CPA in a systematic but astute manner.
In this first issue of Sudan Today, the modus operandi of the cartel will be uncovered for the benefit of the Sudanese people in general and Southern Sudanese in particular.
MULTI-PRONGED STRATEGY
After the successful removal of John Garang from the political scene, the immediate anathema that the cartel had to deal with was Garang’s dual legacy: the CPA ; and the immense popularity that the SPLM had created in the North and South. To deal with this anathema, a multi-faceted strategy was developed to contain the SPLM by:
ensuring that the movement does not play a role at the national level, Dar Fur being the case in point.
dispiriting, and if necessary, physically eliminating hardcore elements within the SPLM.
ensuring that the South is steeped in corruption, instability and misrule
stalling the CPA so that its main provisions are not implemented.
The above strategy is being strappingly implemented in Juba and Khartoum, thanks to the dissolute tools of Power and Money. In Khartoum, it is being executed by a trio of hired-guns Messrs Telar Ring Takpiny Deng, Minister of State for Presidential Affairs, Dr. Lam Akol , Minister of Foreign Affairs and Major General Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim Aradeib, a bloody intelligence officer now masquerading as an SPLA General and a close friend of First Vice President Salva Kiir Mayardit. General Aradeib is currently a commissioner in Khartoum State on SPLM ticket. Each of these hired-guns has been assigned a carefully designed role. Sudan Today will shed light on roles of two of these hired guns, leaving the third goon for the next issues.
TELAR DENG
Telar’s sundry role involves dwarfing the SPLM into a regional movement concerned only with the South. In this context, the new political theory that is being promoted to replace the two-decade old SPLM policy goes as follows:
Since the South will vote on separation after the interim period, there is no need for the SPLM to engage in any political confrontation with the National Congress Party (NCP). The SPLM should therefore rubberstamp NCP policies at the national level and should not even contemplate working with other political parties in the North.
This was precisely why Telar was overzealous in his destruction of the SPLM’s Northern sector. He used his power in the office of the First Vice President to mete out a mean treatment on the head of the Northern Sector, Commander Abdul Aziz Adam El Hilu until Abdul Aziz was so disgruntled to quit the SPLM. Even as SPLM colleagues struggled to persuade him to return from America, Telar went to the media to spoil their efforts by announcing that El Hilu had quit the SPLM.
The removal of such a strong leader, representing an entire constituency of the Nuba Mountains from the SPLM, was a victory to the NCP.
This success raised Telar’s stakes in the NCP eyes as a trustworthy minion. After he kicked Abdul Aziz out of the movement, Telar then turned viciously to the Northern sector and succeeded to destroy the sector completely. Cash-strapped, the activities of the sector, including organization and political recruitment, came to a standstill. Telar further finished the chapter off by deliberately embarking on abusive North-South discourse to alienate and eventually expel Northern Sudanese from the movement. His strategy proved successful as Northern Sudanese began resigning en mass. First, it was Abdul Aziz, then Dr. Al Wathiq Kameir, Col. Waleed Hamid and many others. The medani office of the SPLM is now closed as thousands of members renounced their membership.
To millions of Northern Sudanese who had long cherished SPLM objectives, the movement has now turned into a Southern Sudanese party. This is the perfect image of the SPLM that the NCP has always wanted to present to the Sudanese people. The NCP has always wanted to isolate Salva from the national scene and reduce him into a small Southern Sudanese leader. A small but important illustration of this point could be seen in an episode that occurred on Saturday July 15th. A top NCP official said as he teased an SPLM friend:
Why didn’t you to go to the airport to receive your President (meaning Salva)?.
“And why didn’t Ali Osman go to receive him?”, replied the SPLM official.
No, replied the NCP official, adding:
“Sheikh Ali cannot go to receive Salva as long as Telar can do the job!
True, it was Telar and a handful of SPLM ministers who were at the airport on Saturday 15th when Salva arrived from Juba. There was no single NCP minister to receive Salva. This was a perfect example of how Telar has reduced the office of the First Vice President of Sudan into a mockery.
In the eyes of Jallaba-minded NCP officials, the First Vice President Salva who was received by Telar as he stepped out of his jet in the evening of July 15th 2006, was nothing less than a 21st century archetype of the disdained and Southern Sudanese chief of 1940s.
The big questions that must now be asked are:
Now that the SPLM has failed in the North, who will benefit from this failure?. Can the CPA be implemented better if the SPLM is active only in the South? Or when it is active in both the South and North? If the national scene is not important as the hired guns would have us believe, then, what are the SPLM ministers doing the Government of National Unity in Khartoum? Why not stay only in the South?
Another dangerous role assigned to Telar by the cartel, is to mislead the First Vice President Salva into signing every document given by the NCP. Examples are many, but the most visible is the example of the Oil Commission which has successfully been paralyzed by Telar.
As will be recalled, the SPLM leadership consoled itself and the public opinion when they lost the Ministry of Energy to the NCP by telling the people that the Ministry itself was no longer important since most of its powers will be given to the Oil Commission in which the SPLM would be well-represented. This turned out to be big lie. What happened later was that the Cartel asked the Energy Minister Awad Al Jazz to write by-laws for the Oil Commission. When Al Jazz wrote the laws, he appointed himself, by virtue of his office, as the rapporteur of the commission and retained most powers for himself. The commission was thus left without powers as stipulated in the CPA. Naturally, the SPLM rejected these by-laws and a meeting that ended acrimoniously. Later on, the cartel employed the trick that they know best: Awad Al Jazz passed the document to their hired-gun in Salva’s office. Telar, hold your breath, did not throw these laws into dustbin as any patriotic Southern Sudanese should have done. Instead, he gave the document to Salva to sign, which he did! Poor Salva, according to Telar’s own admissions to friends, does not bother to read any document containing more than two paragraphs. Thus, Salva did not know that he had signed away billions of dollars in oil money to Awad Al Jazz.
But to his credit, he later retracted his signature after meeting President Bashir. This single document was retracted, but what about other documents worth millions of dollars that Telar had fooled him into signing?
Until this day, the oil commission is totally paralyzed and SPLM officials , and of course the people of Southern Sudan, will never know anything about oil contracts as long as Telar is in Salva’s office.
One final question that should be asked is: It is well known that General Salah Gosh of the State Security calls Telar on the phone daily, some times twice a day. What do they discuss?
GENERAL MOHAMMED IBRAHIM ARADEIB
If Telar is merely a hired-gun and a minion used by the cartel, General Aradeib is a more dangerous figure who emerged from obscurity into the SPLA affairs. Aradeib who graduated from the Sudan Military College in 1970, batch 22, was dismissed from the army in 1972. Since then, he made a career in the murky world of espionage and dirty money. Like Telar and Lam, he has been assigned a specific two-fold role. Firstly, to gain access to highly classified information about the SPLA which the cartel can use in the future to deal a final but deadly blow to the SPLM/A. Secondly, to run a corruption syndicate that will involve everybody in the SPLM including the Vice President Salva himself. The reason of getting everybody involved in this corruption syndicate is part of the efforts by the cartel to disgrace and distract SPLM officials from the main issues of contention with the NCP.
Aradeib first pocked his nose into the SPLA affairs in 2003, after years of spying on the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in Asmara.
According to a retired military intelligence Brigadier, Aradeib was implanted by the Sudan Military Intelligence within the opposition Sudan Alliance Forces (SAF) under the command of Brigadier Abdul Aziz Khalid.
As a member of SAF, Aradeib studied the weakness of the organization thoroughly and quickly succeeded in passing sensitive intelligence to the Armed Forces, resulting in a series of defeats to SAF forces in Eastern Sudan. He also fostered differences within SAF and finally succeeded in rattling the organization. His spying skills were crowned with the arrest and deportation of Abdul Aziz Khalid while visiting the UAE in 2004.
After the success of his mission in Asmara, he was ordered to work on SPLM issues in coordination with Ambassador Saraj El Din Hamid, then Sudanese ambassador to Uganda.
A military intelligence source told Sudan Today that it was no coincidence that Aradeib was chosen to work with Sir El Edin Hamed, one of the security personnel of the National Islamic Front, who were sent to the Foreign Ministry in early 1990s. Siraj El Din is famously known as the facilitator of the terrorist organization of the blind Egyptian cleric Omar Abdul Rahman who attempted to bomb the World Trade Centre in 1993. He fled New York after the FBI foiled the attempt. The FBI found evidence that Hamed had supplied the terrorists with vehicles carrying diplomatic plates to smuggle bombs into the Word Trade Centre.
His close friendship with Aradeib was therefore an espionage relationship. This was evident in his numerous visits to Southern Sudan during 2003/4. It was during this period that he made personnel friendship with Commander Salva Kiir, who was then in Yei. Aradeib himself brags publicly that he used to help Salva with cash when he was hard up in Yei from 2003 until 2005. In all fairness to Salva, he did innocently accept Aradeib’s cash, not knowing that it was dirty money coming from the Sudanese embassy in Kampala. Aradeib also dished out some two millions dollars to some people around commander Salva to facilitate the famous Garang-Salva crisis in 2004 which was successfully resolved in Rumbek in December of that year. Sudan Today will reveal the names when the time comes.
CORRUPTION SYNDICATE
Apart from his main job of gathering sensitive intelligence about the SPLM/A, General Aradeib is currently running a corruption syndicate in Khartoum as part of the grand strategy to embroil SPLM officials in corruption scams and thereby tarnish their public image and also deflect their attention from main issues of the CPA. Here are a few examples to substantiate this fact.
In April this year, Aradeib persuaded Salva to buy a plot of land to build a house for himself in Khartoum. After securing the approval of his friend Salva, Aradeib approached a wealthy businessman in Khartoum II who owned a plot near his residence in the area. The businessman asked for 1.8 million dollar for his plot but Aradeib in turn asked him to top up the price to 3.8 millions. The stunned businessman topped up the deal to 3.8 million and made an initial written offer. As Aradeib took the offer, he asked the man to pay him some 25,000 dollars for “people in Salva’s office to speed up the deal”.
The man paid the cash. Unfortunately for the burglarized businessman, Salva rejected the offer and asked Aradeib to get a lesser offer. As Aradeib went widely about in search of the plot, the entire Khartoum’s real-estate business community heard the news of the deal. Everybody began chasing the big bonanza. It was the talk of the town and Aradeib did not even bother to protect the name of his good friend. He eventually found a 2-million dollar offer which Salva accepted. However, Aradeib did not pay back the 25,000 dollar which he took from the businessman. Naturally, the burgled man ran after his money as Aradeib continued to doge him until Sudan Today picked up his story. Even as a house is being currently built for Vice President Salva, Aradeib continues to inflate bills and the by the time the house is completed, millions of dollars will have been fleeced. Reliable sources in the Khartoum real-estate community have revealed that it was Aradeib who bought the plots of lands for Dr. Justin Yac and Telar Ring in the affluent neighborhood of Riyadh. Justin’s plot was bought for one million dollars while Telar’s 2000-square meter plot was bought for 800,000 dollars. Sudan Today will provide the documents as soon as they become available. Aradeib has also recruited a handful of associates to hang around the offices of SPLM Federal Ministers to perform various duties including asking commissions from investors in the name of these ministers.
One question that every Southern Sudanese should put to First Vice President Salva is: Does he really need to be associated with people like this? The vast majority of Southern Sudanese respect Salva as a true product of the SPLA. Now that he is holding a big position in the country, why does he want to destroy his own image by associating himself with security agents and thieves like Aradeib?
CPA NO LONGER A PRIORITY
The experience of the last 11 months in office has shown that First Vice President Salva has invariably ceased to be an effective player at the national scene. We have shown through just two examples how Kiir is effectively disabled by the cartel through his own aides. The role of Lam Akol and other hired-guns will be dwelt on in later issues of Sudan Today. However, the fact that the people of Southern Sudan must know is that there is no to follow up for the implementation of the CPA. There can be no CPA without a day-to-day follow up of its core issues such as democracy, civil liberties, formation of Abyei administration etc.
The NCP is currently refusing to hear anything about Oil Commission. It has already killed the Border Commission by denying it any funds. By killing the Border Commission, the border between the South and North will never be demarcated and therefore Oil revenues will never be divided fairly as the North claims some of the currently productive Oil fields in the South. Elections in 2009 will not be held in disputed areas. Consequently, referendum on self-determination will be postponed because borders will not have been demarcated.
In Juba, Kiir is equally held hostage to the voracious greed for money by the notorious corruption syndicate led the Tsar Justin Yac and his corruption lords Arthur Akwien and Isaac Makur. The Modus operandi of this syndicate who have thus far fleeced over 200 million dollars will be dealt with in the next issues.
In conclusion of this issue, Sudan Today would like its readers to ponder on the following questions as they digest the credibility of the information contained in this dossier:
Why does First Vice President Salva Kiir surround himself with several hired-guns who are clearly undermining his own leadership? Doesn’t he want to succeed as a leader? Is he really innocent or does he know exactly what is happening?. What does he want to do with the CPA? Why does he allow corruption syndicates to stash away millions of dollars from the coffers of Southern Sudan while he looks on? Does he believe in the Bona-Justin-Lam theory that Southerners should withdraw from the national political scene, standby idly and wait until the referendum comes in 2011?
Well, judging from the thorough investigation that Sudan Today has made, the Bonas , the Justins and Lams will not be among mourners in 2011 when undertakers carry the putrid corpse of Southern Sudanese hopes for self-determination. From what we know of their connections with cartel in Khartoum, they will not shed tears for the betrayed South Sudan because they have never been genuine patriotic Southern Sudanese nationalists of the stature of Ali Batalla , Aggrey Jadden , Saturino Lupe and many others. These heroes were psychologically divorced from the North and did not even fancy the idea of living in Khartoum, let alone building palaces for millions of dollars stolen from petro-money of the impoverished people of Southern Sudan.
To the Bonas, Telars, Lams, Justins, the struggle was all about Power and Money. Forget about the CPA or Self-determination.
Since Garang was killed, can anyone recall the last time Bona Malawal, Justin Yac, Lam Akol, Arthur Akwien or any of the present syndicates that have taken over the affairs of Southern Sudan, made a strongly-worded public statement about self-determination and separation of South Sudan?
* Sudan Today is a Dossier for Truth and Transparancy
It is compiled by wachdogs in Juba and Khartoum.
Names of the authors will be withheld for obvious reasons. Readers can send their comments to [email protected]