Agreement paves way to end war in Sudan
By William Wallis
KHARTOUM, May 27, 2004 (Financial Times) — The Sudan government and its rebel adversaries from the south cleared the way yesterday towards a final agreement to end Africa’s longest running civil war.
After agonising last-minute haggling, Ali Osman Taha, vice-president in the Arab-led government in Khartoum, and John Garang, leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, settled the remaining issues standing in the way of a comprehensive deal between the two sides.
A spokesman for the southern rebels said the negotiations in Kenya, which have been going on for more than two years, had now dealt with “all the burning issues that led us into war”.
But Kenyan mediators said the two sides still needed to work out detailed arrangements for a permanent ceasefire, including provisions for international peacekeepers, before a final and comprehensive peace accord could be signed.
International representatives and observers, including Charles Snyder, the US State Department’s top official for Africa, who had gathered at the Kenyan lakeside resort of Naivasha for yesterday’s signing, were kept waiting until late into the evening as negotiators wrangled over the future distribution of administrative jobs.
The haggling was typical of a negotiating process that had been several times on the brink of completion in the last six months.
“I’ve been doing a little shouting and yelling, everyone has done a little shouting and yelling,” Mr Snyder told reporters.
Colin Powell, US secretary of state, telephoned Mr Garang to discuss the delays, a western diplomat at the talks was quoted as saying. The US State Department said the signing would trigger a process leading to the normalisation of relations with Sudan if certain conditions were met.
Yesterday’s deal resolved how power will be shared, the legal status of non-Muslims in Khartoum, the capital, which is currently governed by Islamic Sharia law, and the future of three disputed regions in the centre of the country.
It followed previous agreements allowing the rebels to maintain a separate army, the south to share revenues from local oil production, and southerners, most of whom are either Christian or animist, to vote after a six-year transition on whether to become independent from the predominately Muslim north.
A year ago, a peace agreement between the government of Sudan and its rebel adversary Mr Garang might have prompted a groundswell of optimism in the region and provided a timely diplomatic success story for Washington. But the mood surrounding the talks in Kenya has been more cautious than euphoric.
Encouraged partly by powerful Christian lobby groups which have long supported the southern rebel cause, the US government has played a leading role in pushing Khartoum into a negotiated solution to the conflict, which has claimed an estimated 2m lives since 1983. But celebrations, as the promise of peace in the south grows stronger, will be muted by the humanitarian disaster now facing the west of the country.
In part as a response to the negotiations over the future of the south, disaffected African groups in western Darfur, this time Muslims, took up arms against the Arab-led government 15 months ago.
The reaction by the army and allied Arab militia enlisted to fight the rebellion has forced more than 1m people from their homes and has left the government facing fresh allegations of war crimes after what the United Nations has called a “reign of terror”.
Regional analysts have long argued that Sudan’s chronic instability could only be resolved sustainably with an inclusive approach to Khartoum’s stranglehold on power.
But in the view of many, the Kenyan talks were between just two warring factions.
President Omar el-Bashir’s government initially used the peace process to revamp its credibility at home – where a decade of cliquish military rule and repression in the name of Islam fuelled widespread opposition – and abroad, where its tolerance of international terrorist groups and conduct in the civil war had earned it pariah status.
Until recently that attempt proved relatively successful. Washington was offering the prospect of lifting its wide-ranging sanctions and pouring in aid, hoping in return to score a rare diplomatic success within the Arab world.
There was also considerable optimism among the Sudanese that a system that has favoured a small ruling clique in a country the size of western Europe could be changed through the negotiations.
The challenge of implementing an agreement between the SPLA and Khartoum and selling it to the Sudanese is now far harder. “The only way to change the system is to overthrow the government,” says a sympathiser of the Darfur rebels, in Khartoum.
While militarily contained by the government, according to most reports, the rebels are now enjoying a swell of sympathy among African ethnic groups affected by the violence.
In this context, many northern politicians fear that Mr Taha, the government’s chief negotiator, has made too many concessions to the southern SPLA.
“The agreement as it stands gives priority to secession,” says Sadiq al- Mahdi, the former prime minister who leads the opposition Umma party.
“It may be that in the short term this will stop the fighting. But in it is also the potential for many other fights to start down the road.”
The concern in Khartoum is not so much that the south will sooner or later claim its independence, and take with it much of Sudan’s oil reserves of 1bn barrels or more, it is more the precedent of a region winning terms which allow it to secede. With this comes the threat that other marginalised and disaffected groups will be encouraged to follow suit.
Those in Darfur may have already done so.