End to Sudan’s war draws tantalisingly close
By David White, Financial Times
Dec 27, 2003 — “People would like to go back. So we are waiting now for peace.” The speaker is Wol Amuk Guot, acknowledged chief of a sector of Wad al-Bashir, a camp for internally displaced persons outside Khartoum. He comes from southern Sudan, where six of his children live. He has not watched them grow up, and has not seen his mother for 14 years.
An end to Sudan’s 20-year war between the Arab Muslim government in Khartoum and rebels from the mostly animist and Christian south is now tantalisingly close. How many of these long-term refugees will be on the move again nobody can tell.
The camp, housing about 45,000, is an expanse of mud-brick buildings and temporary shelters made of sticks, sacking and cardboard. Water is sold from drums hauled by donkeys.
The war, one of the longest and costliest in African history, is reckoned to have claimed 2m lives and to have uprooted 4m people like these, making Sudan’s population of IDPs – or internally displaced persons – the largest in the world. Fighting this year in a separate conflict in the western Darfur region, bordering Chad, is thought to have displaced at least another 600,000 people. More than 500,000 others are refugees in neighbouring countries.
Peace talks in Kenya are on the verge of an initial agreement, under pressure from a “troika” of the US, Britain and Norway to reach a rapid conclusion. A ceasefire of sorts has been in place for more than a year.
The momentum of negotiations, under way for 18 months, revived in September with face-to-face talks between John Garang, chairman of the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, and Ali Osman Taha, Sudanese vice-president, at a lakeside lodge in the Kenyan resort of Naivasha.
Earlier this month an SPLM delegation, under heavy guard, was welcomed in Khartoum for the first time in two decades.
Once the outline deal is done, diplomats expect two or three months of detailed talks before a final agreement is signed. That will trigger a transition timetable: six months for a constitution, then six years until a referendum in the south, to decide whether it stays in Sudan or becomes a new landlocked African state. By all accounts, an overwhelming majority in the south would back secession. “This is the last chance to make unity attractive,” says an opposition politician in Khartoum.
Long marginalised, the south has a large part of the country’s vital water, oil, mineral and timber resources and perhaps 30 per cent of a total Sudanese population of 30m. The last census was in 1983.
There has been almost continuous fighting between north and south, barring an 11-year break, since Sudan’s independence in 1956. But some of the main planks for a deal are in place.
Agreement was reached last year on the referendum and the application of Islamic Sharia law in the north. Three months ago the two sides agreed a structure for postwar armed forces: two armies, with mixed units in parts of the south and other areas including Khartoum.
Most remaining issues are near to settlement, according to diplomats close to the talks. These include transitional power-sharing, with Mr Garang destined to become first vice-president under President Omar al- Bashir, and the status of three contested areas outside the south’s recognised boundaries: southern Blue Nile, next to Ethiopia, the Nuba mountains and the oil area of Abyei.
The main sticking point – and one of the reasons the south’s 1970s autonomy deal failed – has been the sharing of wealth, especially the Dollars 500m (Euros 420m, Pounds 320m) a year Sudan earns from oil. Tapped mostly in the south, oil has fuelled and complicated the war. With support from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, an outline deal has emerged.
Elections are planned half way through the transition period, the country’s first free contest since 1986. But some argue that a presidential election should wait until after the southern referendum, to avoid the possibility of a candidate winning who was opposed to the deal.
A final agreement would unlock western funding, of which more than Dollars 1bn is already pledged. The US is expected to lift some of its sanctions against Sudan immediately. But the long transition raises questions about donors’ stamina.
One northern politician says there is a risk the peace might turn out to be no more than a long truce.
“The deal is the easy bit. The implementation is going to be a nightmare,” a western diplomat adds. “The history of Sudan is littered with peace agreements.”
The camp-dwellers around Khartoum fear they will be overlooked in the new dispensation. Zealous town-planning has been destroying homes to make way for new development.
Buildings on the route of a planned road are marked with a white X, destined for bulldozing. But residents do not yet have anywhere else to go.