A Candle in the Tunnel of South Sudan Separation

By Al-Sadig Al-Mahadi

January 20, 2011 — In response to reproving queries by some of my Egyptian friends on why we were keen on the independence of Sudan, I explained that Mahadism was originally a unionist call that surmounts the boundaries of the country to unify Muslim countries. The uprising of 1924 against foreign occupation and the political unionist movement were both unionist but some well-known political reasons u-turned conditions and rendered all parties proponents of independence.

The ruling class in Egypt could not take in this consensus at the time and interpreted the independence bent as a British connivance, but the true reasons for it are the following:

• The ruling class in Egypt at the time proposed the relationship with Sudan on the basis of Egyptian sovereignty over the country, thus revoking the role of the Sudanese people and their freedom of choice. The independence call was therefore founded on the principle of Sudan for the Sudanese.

• At a later stage, when power was taken over by an elected unionist Sudanese government, the Egyptian government sought to control the decision of the government by applying its hegemony over an elected government might. This massive, added to the forceful popular mobilization for independence, steered the unionist movement towards independence.

• The deliberations revealed by documents pertaining to the Egyptian-British talks on the destiny of Sudan indicated that the official Egyptian side had based its argument on the interests of their state without taking into account that the people of Sudan have dignity, aspirations, interests and an exclusive nature that are attested to by its entire history.

While it is true that some Egyptian writers and thinkers had censured the official Egyptian position and assimilated the reasons for the Sudanese concurrence on independence in a more genuine and deeper form, the prevalent media line had failed to rise above the official interpretation.

Since the start of my engagement with the political concern, I used to distinguish between the position created by erroneous authoritative policies and the position dictated by the outreaching critical factors. I stated as much after my visit to Egypt, following my graduation from university in 1958.

During the second despotic rule (1969-1985), the Sudanese regime exploited its relationship with Egypt in cementing its despotic rule in Sudan, a matter that caused the position in Egypt and Sudan to be affected by that relationship. During the democratic government that followed the uprising of Rajab/April 1985, we vainly tried to re-establish relations with Egypt on new bases that were free from the ploys of the May regime of Numeiri.

At the first exile in 1975, I tried to join Al-Azhar. Arrangements proceeded smoothly from the technical aspect, but the Egyptian security blocked that avenue at the instigation of the Sudanese security service. At the second exile, I strove to open up the prospects of relationship with the Egyptian civil society, and consequently established links with the Egyptian political parties, trade unions, press, universities and economic circles in an unprecedented manner without slighting the official relationship with Egypt.

The springing point of my understanding was that the ties of our joint destiny with Egypt were derailed by erroneous policies.

Today, as we are getting set for the breakaway of the South, we are hearing a Khedivan-Sudanese smattering who ascribe it to foreign designs. But foreign wiliness cannot be ignored in all our conditions and can only achieve its ends through loopholes offset by the mistakes we make.

Self-satisfaction is one of the widest inlets to perversity because it sedates the mind and blocks us from learning from our mistakes. Self-criticism on the other hand takes on a special moral value and the sophist heritage therefore vied in associating self-accountability with spiritual sublimity. They said:

Do not aspire to see ‘Leila’ with an eye gazing at others and dry of tears! (Meaning you will not be forgiven unless you repent).

OMAR had stated in this respect that: “God have mercy on the soul of a man who made us a gift of our faults.”, in addition to the adage repeated in human heritage through the words of the German philosopher, Kant: “Criticism is the greatest means for Construction known by man.”

Yes, imperialism in Sudan had laid the foundation for racist segregation through the closed-region policy it adopted and by founding modern development in Sudan on the basis of cotton production and the infrastructures required for that production while marginalizing the other regions. Since the independence of Sudan in 1956, we have not managed to:

• Diagnose the developmental flaw to be able to draw up a strategy for alternative developmental balance.

• The country dissipated 80% of its independent life under despotic regimes that overruled political industriousness and disposed of the two important principles for self-building, namely freedom and justice.

• Partly in the regimes of November 7/11/1958 and May 25/5/1969 and throughout the regime of June 30/6/1989, the perpetrators of those coups applied unilateral cultures that intermingled with the aforementioned racist segregation and marginalization drifts, thereby drawing forth a counter action that was fed by cultural chauvinism that associated serfdom with black colour.

The unilateral cultural scheme reached a peak at the beginning of the 90s of the past century, culminating in October 1993 in a consensus by southern political forces on the self-determination demand. Before that date, the southern exclusiveness was content with revolving around the spheres of the regional autonomy demand, the federal system, the call for equitable shares in power and wealth and exemption from Islamic rules with the self-determination demand being raised by only isolated voices. But the concurrence of southern political parties without exception on the self-determination demand took place for the first time in 1993. Since June 1995, the Sudanese political opposition acceded to the self-determination principle as a price for peace, albeit the Asmara accord of June 1995 tied the deal with arrangements that can render unity attractive at the self-determination process and that can enforce an ideology and a governance system that align all the regions of Sudan with the South in respect of decentralization and equitable distribution of power and wealth. Driven by the motives of maneuvering and causing a rift within SPLM ranks, the ruling party was the first non-southern political party to agree to self-determination for southern Sudan at the Frankfurt agreement in 1992. This trend naturally assumed an official contractual aspect in the two internal peace agreements in 1997.

Self-determination was the most momentous item of the peace agreement concluded in January 2005. The two partners’ agreement obligates both of them by making unity attractive at the self-determination vote in January 2011, though numerous factors during the span of the past four years rendered separation attractive. The most important of these are the following four factors:

• Instead of basing legislations on citizenship and assigning provisions of religious content to Muslims, as would have been the natural course of things, the country was segmented on religious basis in the first protocol of the peace agreement.

• Instead of allocating the South a share in national wealth, the South was accorded 50% of its oil, which was an incentive for separation so that the South may appropriate the whole lot.

• The two partners to the agreement proceeded along two conflicting directions, one of which is a ‘civilizational’ (i.e. Islamic-Arab) trend and the other the New Sudan (i.e. Secular-African) drive.

• For recognizable reasons, the ruling party in the North drew the hostility of the west, particularly the United States, while the South was accorded special cordiality and goodwill.

These factors made separation attractive after being fed with historical bitterness. The most remarkable aspects of this bitterness are the following:

• Southern adoption of the bloody incidents of August 1955.

• A southern rancorous trend that led to reliance on armed struggle and unreserved pursuit of foreign support.

These southern positions and practices in turn fueled northern bitterness in two ways:

• A separatist racist trend in the North that held the South as a cancerous presence and a heavy burden on the body of Sudan.

• A northern unionist drift that argued that the South was a land conquered by Muslims and was therefore not entitled to self-determination because that would be sacrilege.

The above two inclinations, among other factors, explain the widely circulated contention in the South that it is under northern occupation and that it is aspiring to independence to rid itself of the clutches of that occupation.

The truth is that southerners were unanimous on the self-determination demand in 1993 and were almost unanimous on separation in 2011. The birth of the new state is surrounded with a boundless feelings of elation despite the fact that the South has been unified with the North out of the free will of its people, and it has virtually been independent since 2005.

That elation is corresponded by a similar sentiment by a few northerners who welcomed separation. But the majority of the people of the North are despondent about the breakaway of the South, albeit they accept it for two reasons: it represents the will of southerners and rejecting it would rekindle the civil war.

I am one of the latter category. My reflections on the subject have led me to the following conclusions:

• The southern separatist position is clarified by specific historical events, cultural modes of conduct and exclusionist policies.

• But that would not be an impenetrable barrier to relationship with the North nor a rejection of Islam and Arab culture since the human, social and economic ties between the population of North and South Sudan cannot be severed, considering that a third of southerners are Muslims and that Arabic is the language of communication among the bulk of the people of the South.

The North is left with two options for dealing with the overriding and happy inclination of the South towards separation.

The first option: reacting to the event by considering it a hostile slap on the face and countering that slap by publicizing that the South was nothing more than a burden to the North that held it back from self-realization; we will now cave in upon ourselves to realize it after the southern yoke has been broken.

This position will allow wide scope for hostile confrontations between the two parts of Sudan and will pave the way for the following setbacks:

• Reproduction of the southern scenario in the remaining part of the North and within the South.

• Paving the way for our strategic enemies to exploit our contradictions with devastating effect.

The second option: diagnosing the southern conduct in an objective manner that reduces it to its real size and acting in a manner that surmounts the negative aspects of the past and correctly discerns the positive aspects of the future.

Our entity is an extension of the historical assets of Sudan; a connecting link between the Sudanese of the North and the South across the borders from Um-Dafoug in the west up to Al-Rousairis in the east as well as a link between the two regions of Sennar and Ae Fasher. Our entity participates in the Sudanese perceptual irradiations that hold Sudan as a land with a mission since the times of Karma, Kush and Merowe; a land that accomodates diversity within its civilization and a mission that recognizes the human dimension of Islam and Arab culture and develops them in a creative engineering scheme for ranaging diversity instead of being subversive zeal that only manufactures confrontations. The mission of Sudan, which is a replica of the African continent, is actually a mission of a critical connector between the two parts of North and sub-Saharan Africa. However much we understand the reasons for separation and however much we dwell on them, we remain shaken to the core at its occurrence while loudly denouncing the factors that led to it:

If you depart away from people who anticipated not leaving them, it is them who actually departed

If we give reign to the factors of cold war between the two states of Sudan, we will have set the stage for nihilistic altercations that disserve its parties and attract all the hostilities of the African Horn, the Great Lakes, the Nile Basin, the Red Sea basin, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean. The potent enlightened forces in Sudan should come to their senses to realize that they are facing two options one of which is constructive and the other destructive. They should therefore leave aside the burdens of self and the party to assimilate the lesson learnt from South Sudan separation. It is a three-pronged lesson:

The first: the repelling factors that caused separation to avoid its recurrence in the North state.

The second: containing the causes of disparity between the two states of Sudan and instatement of a special complementary relationship between them.

The third: recognition of the impact of the international dimension and adoption of policies which are free from hostility and subordination to that dimension.

South Sudan will become a stage for a huge conflict of civilizations that presents numerous options for both the North and the South.

The state of the South will be faced with the historical choice of heading northwards or southwards. Some factors are drawing it to the north while others are drawing it southwards. Which will the leadership of the South opt for?

The following eight factors draw the South to the North:

• River and land transport and rails.

• The oil industry

• The Sea port

• The massive population intermingling along the borderline

• Inherited traditions in many fields

• The North is a market for equatorial products of the South

• The North is a gateway to the promising Arab world

• Historical participation of the South in formation of the Sudanese national identity since the leaders of 1924 revolution and the era that followed it as well as the conscientious component of many southern leaders who upheld the slogan of the New Sudan, many of whom later abandoned that call motivated more by despair of reform within the Salvation regime rather than by disbelief in the unity of Sudan on equitable basis. Dominance of either approach hinges on: level of awareness and capacities of the southern leaderships as well as the climate provided by the northern position in terms of management of diversity and bilateral relations in a positive manner.

Yes, the southern position will have an enlightened, competent and seminal role in future developments and the neighbouring regional factors and international policies will also have a tangible impact. But the ideology and the degree of open-mindedness of movement of the North will have the greater share in these developments.

If the North tarries on this role and rushes forth in pursuit of repelling policies and short-lived interests, it will be presenting a precious gift to the enemy, as ordained by the Holy Verse:

The enemies can not harm an ignorant the way he harms himself

(The good deed and the evil deed are not alike. Repel the evil deed with one which is better, then lo! he, between whom and thee there was enmity (will become) as though he was a bosom friend).

This is what we work for and seek to achieve, but only those who lend a disposed ear will heed our words

The author is the former Prime Minister and leader of the opposition Umma Party