Sudanese enemies unite in search for peace
Jonathan Steele reports from Leer, south Sudan, as hopes rise of an agreement
LEER, Nov. 25, 2003 — On the dusty veranda of an abandoned house, where bats career through rooms which long ago lost their doors and window frames to looters, two ceasefire monitors are boiling water on a Primus stove. They sleep in adjacent tents, wear the same khaki uniforms of the newly created verification monitoring team, and by chance even share the same name.
Yet not long ago they were outright enemies. Gasim Mohammed Elamin, an Arab from Khartoum, is a former major in the Sudanese army. Gasim Idris, an African from Rumbek, is a former colonel in the guerrilla force which has been fighting the government for 20 years in Africa’s longest-running civil war.
Now they patrol together as peacekeepers on the internationally sponsored team which set up its first base in south Sudan last week. The concept of joint patrols by former belligerents is unique in Africa, and rare for conflicts anywhere – as though members of the IRA and the Ulster Defence Association were to deploy together in south Armagh or along Belfast’s Shankill Road in the hunt for troublemakers.
Along the zigzagging frontlines of the war in south Sudan the monitoring teams are already having a calming effect, a stereotype-defying piece of good news out of Africa. Much of central and west Africa is racked by war, but peace in Sudan is suddenly a genuine possibility.
The monitors’ presence in the small town of Leer is the first tangible evidence on the battlefield that high-level talks between the two sides, which have been going on under Kenyan mediation for several months, are bearing fruit. Officials believe a deal can be signed by Christmas.
“There is no need for negotiation. Now is the time for decision making,” General Lazarus Sumbeiywo, the chairman of peace talks, told the Guardian in Nairobi. “When the talks resume on November 30, if they agree the three remaining issues can be disposed of, I don’t see why they can’t have a global agreement.”
As we sat down to tea in their new base camp, the monitors expressed the same optimism. They had just returned from a visit to the nearby government garrison, where the commanding officer let them address the troops. Gasim Idris of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) said he was greeted with startled looks when he got up to tell his one-time enemies they were all Sudanese and must work for peace. Gasim Mohammed added: “These people want peace. They say, we want to see our families. We spend nine months in trenches, full of mosquitoes – what’s the point?”
Across south Sudan, from the vast Sudd swamp beside the Nile, a barrier to the palm-dotted savannah further west, the civil war has had devastating consequences for civilians. Both sides have raped and abducted people and press-ganged young men into uniform. Tides of people have fled the fighting or been forcibly displaced by bombing raids by government aircraft, particularly in oil-rich areas. International aid work has been disrupted.
Last week the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, put Sudan top of a list of the world’s 21 most vulnerable and war-torn countries in his annual appeal on behalf of the UN’s humanitarian agencies. Some 4 million Sudanese have been uprooted inside the country and around 570,000 refugees live in neighbouring states.
The country’s infrastructure is in tatters, and shattered or bombed schools and hospitals are visible everywhere. Thousands of people have succumbed to disease.
The struggle between the Arab north and African south has been complicated by older rivalries between the main Nilotic tribes, the Dinka and the Nuer, by the emergence of warlords who frequently change sides, and by endemic and murderous cattle raiding between clans.
It is not just war-weariness on all sides which has prompted progress in the peace talks between the government and the SPLA at a holiday lodge beside Lake Naivasha in Kenya. Oil and international pressure have played a key role. The government in Khartoum has been anxious to get international companies to develop the fields which mostly lie to the south of the demarcation line which the British drew in 1956, splitting Sudan into two administrative zones. The SPLA has done its best to thwart it by intensifying its attacks in the oil region since 1997.
Washington has taken a growing interest in the conflict. Sanctions which were initially imposed on Sudan during the Clinton administration because its Islamist government was deemed to be a supporter of terrorism are now being used by the Bush administration as a lever to get concessions from Khartoum in the peace talks. Sudan’s neighbours, in particular Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda, are wary of seeing the south secede and have urged the SPLA’s veteran leader, John Garang, to settle.
The two sides agreed on the general outline of a deal last year. It stipulated that the government and SPLA share power and oil revenues for an interim period of six and half years, followed by a referendum on whether the south should secede. But the accompanying cessation of hostilities was heavily violated this winter, as the government tried to gain more ground around the oilfields.
There were no monitors who could cry foul. Hence the agreement in February to set up a verification monitoring team, consisting of representatives of both armies, plus two internationals, one from the region, and one from the western nations which have taken a close interest in the peace process. The verifiers are unarmed, but most have military backgrounds. They began this summer by making forays from northern Kenya, but the new base inside south Sudan at Leer is the first of four which are planned. A second will open in the government-held town of Malakal by the end of the year, and two more follow early next year. At a later stage a full-fledged UN observer mission is likely to replace them.
“I see our role as peace-building, though our first priority is military – confirming which troops are where, and at what strength, so we have a database,” says Phil Russell, a British monitor at Leer. The second task is to organise meetings and create dialogue between commanders of both sides. The verifiers will also coordinate de-mining and start the process of disarmament.
Leer was chosen for the first base because it is in the middle of south Sudan and sits on what Mr Russell calls a particularly “intense and contested faultline between the SPLA and the government over ownership of oil resources”. The two armies here are less than two miles apart. “Nowhere in south Sudan is neutral but we’ve got agreement that Leer should be neutral. It’ll have an important symbolic effect.” A peaceful Leer could be a magnet for redevelopment and for hundreds of returning refugees.
Hopes of a peace deal next month could still founder on the fate of three large areas, currently administered by Khartoum but which the SPLA says belong to the south. But few expect failure. There may also be difficulties in reining in the militias and, when the referendum is held, splits could emerge in the south.
John Garang, the SPLA leader, is an authoritarian who has allowed too little scope for civil society and opposition voices. Under the imminent deal he is expected to become vice-president of a unified Sudan as well as leader of an autonomous south. “Garang is very unionist. He’s more unionist than most southerners,” Gen Sumbeiywo told the Guardian.
Sudan is Africa’s largest country
Population 37 million, black African (mainly in south) 60%, Arab 35%
Independence 1956 after half-century of Anglo-Egyptian rule
First civil war 1956 to
Second civil war 1983 until today
War toll 2 million dead, 4.5 million homeless
Oil deposits discovered in 1978
Peace progress Agreement signed last year to hold referendum in 2010 on secession of the non-Muslim south. Latest talks have produced ceasefire and plans for sharing power and oil