Sudan faces fragmenting north, says scholar
By Daniel Van Oudenaren
January 18, 2009 (WASHINGTON) – An historian presented a report during a visit to Washington last week contending that “some of the factors unifying Northern Sudan have been seriously weakened” and that conflict is emerging in several regions of the country.
“The main lesson of Northern Sudan’s recent history is that diverse but mismanaged religious and ethnic identities are fragmenting under the pressures of a dominating centre,” wrote Dr. Edward Thomas in the report on safeguarding the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), published by the British think-tank Chatham House.
Time is running out for a peaceful transformation of Sudan before the interim constitutional period ends thirty months from now, he indicated in the report, referring to challenges ahead as a “gathering storm.”
During an event Wednesday in Washington marking the publication of the report, Thomas appeared with other Western observers of the Sudan.
The present dangers are acute, concurred writer Dr. Alex de Waal, who likened the pace of the country’s political process to that of the old Sudan railways, describing the halting journey made by trains across the vast plain from Nyala in Darfur to the Red Sea coast.
Pointing to a more than three-year delay in demarcating the oil-rich North-South border, Sir Derek Plumbly, the head of the CPA’s Assessment and Evaluation Commission, acknowledged that Sudan’s peace could de-rail. “Further delay will prolong uncertainty and tension in disputed areas and impact CPA implementation across a wide range of issues from redeployment to elections to the referendum,” he said.
The crowded timetable before the South’s 2011 referendum for independence seems likely to place the political process under considerable duress. At issue is not just whether the process has enough locomotion to avoid snagging on some of the wreckage from the country’s acrid past (and present: Darfur rebels on Thursday laid hold to Muhajiriyah, a town incidentally not far from the Nyala railroad). The more perturbing question is, rather, whether any real guide rails remain to keep the nation on a broadly viable political course.
FRAGMENTATION
“Without tangible changes, I think another trend will emerge and dominate,” said Thomas. “That is to say, the regionalization or localization of politics in Sudan. Local actors, often armed, often using ethnicity as a recruiting sergeant, and politically very immature, will start or perhaps have started to offer more political promise to impoverished ordinary people than the two CPA partners.”
The historical factors behind this trend, Thomas outlines in his report, include foremost the destruction of the sectarian patronage systems that had managed rural politics in the North without resort to extreme violence for much of the 20th century.
As the centre of the country modernized and developed a market economy, its diverse peripheries advanced slowly or not at all, managed by political parties linked to the state’s two main Sufi sects, the Ansar and the Khatmiyya.
But the rise of the modern Islamists, including those now ruling as the National Congress Party (NCP), all but eviscerated the traditional political mechanisms, using new commercial and oil resources to do so.
The traditional parliamentary parties, said Thomas, “do not have the financial resources any more and do not have the local influence to resolve the massive problems that are emerging there in this volatile post-conflict period on the southern borderlands and the volatile situation in Darfur as well.”
Consequently, he says, the localized or regionalized armed groups on the peripheries have become “more important, too important, perhaps,” and therefore the international community should have a role in helping them to unify and become more political.
De Waal has stressed, seemingly to the contrary, that attention to such groups merely bids up their price of loyalty, introducing imbalances into the political marketplace. In the case of Darfur, the undue attention prolongs the war, he suggested Wednesday.
Meanwhile, the forthcoming International Criminal Court indictment of Sudanese President Omer Al-Bashir has made the situation more volatile and apparently induced the NCP to be more accommodating. Thomas predicted accordingly that the next year will be dominated by the NCP’s search for domestic allies, and he advises the international community to help those deals become productive.
But whatever the situation in the north, the CPA should not be re-negotiated, warned Plumbly, who visited Washington in December, meeting with U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Jendayi Frazer, though he did not hold any such meetings during this more recent visit.
The British diplomat, whose role is to safeguard the agreement, cautioned, “It would in my view be rash in the extreme, to think, in the context of a north Sudan approach—which I agree is right—of re-opening the CPA, in order to accommodate the approach.”
This prospect of re-negotiating the CPA has generally only been raised in the context of reaching a political solution for the Darfur crisis. Plumbly disapproved of these suggestions, arguing that peace between North and South is “an enormous prize” not to be endangered.
Thomas concurred that although “the CPA has flaws,” the agreement should not be re-negotiated.
“It’s also very important that the SPLM continues to offer the possibility of competitive politics in Northern Sudan for Northern Sudan to make the best of these thirty months remaining,” said Thomas, referring to the southern former insurgency’s political wing in the north.
DISCUSSION OF U.S. INTERVENTION
A researcher from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where the policy event took place Wednesday, noted after the discussion, “We are expecting action by the incoming administration on the no-fly zone,” referring to statements Obama and his senior aides have made apparently committing to military action to enforce an offensive flight ban over Darfur.
While most panelists at the event generally predicted that aggressive U.S. policy choices would be either harmful or merely symbolic and irrelevant to the actual political processes within the country, former U.S. Special Envoy to Sudan Andrew Natsios raised the prospect that American military guarantees could be transformative.
“I think the United States should consider–only in the context of a larger political settlement for Sudan–security guarantees to the rebel groups in Darfur if they sign an agreement, and for the southerners.” He cautioned that the risk of this approach is that spoilers could deliberately drag the United States into conflict, referring particularly to hardliners in the southern Sudan People’s Liberation Army.
Yet overall Natsios envisioned the security guarantee as a way of empowering those who do not want to perpetuate conflict. He said that a security guarantee would protect the South and the Darfur region from a renewal of mass atrocities if they were to sign and implement a peace agreement.
Putting this on the table would “change the calculus in the negotiations, make them more serious–whether the new administration is willing to do that or not is another matter,” he commented.
Natsios also pointed to the diplomatic impact of his own visit to China and likewise that of southern former guerrilla commander Salva Kiir Mayardit. He explained that the visit annoyed the NCP, who did not want to see the U.S. working jointly with China, which is Sudan’s close ally and trading partner, and that Kiir’s visit had spurred Chinese interest in working in the south.
“I want to commend JEM for going to Doha,” said the former envoy, referring to the Darfur rebel movement that previously had demanded exclusive talks with the government before joining the mediation efforts in Qatar. The JEM rebels, whose representatives were in Washington last week, have declared their intention to topple the Khartoum regime. Their presence was worrying to Sudan’s government, who saw the visit as a sign of U.S. backing or an indication that Obama’s aides will focus on Darfur when they deal with the Sudanese crisis.
“There seems to be a spectrum between NCP accommodation and regime change,” Thomas observed. “I don’t think regime change is a possibility. I don’t think there is a Kitchener waiting in Egypt or Chad at the moment, and there’s not likely to be one,” he said, referring to the British general who destroyed the Mahdist state in the 1890s.
Thomas suggests, alternatively, that NCP has the power to arrest fragmentation by abandoning coercive politics, and that internationals should push the ruling party to identify their interests with wealth- and power-sharing.
Edward Thomas holds a PhD in the History of Sudan and has published on Sudanese politics. He has worked for the United Nations in Sudan, and with UNICEF in Khartoum as a child protection adviser.
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