African-American executive gives advice on Sudanese peace

DAKAR, Senegal, Jan 12, 2005 (PANA) — To move forward, leaders of the southern
Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) need to focus on
consolidating the gains from the peace agreement signed in
Nairobi last Sunday, advises an African-American executive,
Melvin P. Foote.

Foote, the Founder and Executive Officer of the Washington, D.C.
based Constituency for Africa (CFA) told PANA in an electronic
interview that the SPLM needs not to “worry too much now whether
they should remain united with the Arab North.”

According to the CFA executive, who visited Khartoum (Sudan),
Nairobi (Kenya) and the southern SPLM stronghold in 2001, there
are a lot of national building activities which will be required
to make Africa’s largest country work for all of its citizens.

The CFA is a coalition of organisations and groups dealing with
African issues. Its mission is to educate the American public
about Africa and African development issues.

In his personal capacity, Foote believes his work made a
significant impact in changing the US policy towards the over
two-decade civil war in Sudan.

But Foote does not underrate the hitches ahead and predicts that
John Garang’s SPLM would face “a lot of pressure to spend the
next six years preparing to separate from the north.”

Under last Sunday’s comprehensive peace accord, inhabitants of
southern Sudan will determine, through a referendum after six
years of self-rule under SPLM’s leadership, whether to secede
from the rest of Sudan and create a full-fledged new state.

Part of this pressure on Garang’s armed movement would come from
oil interests and people seeking to exploit it, the CFA executive
noted.

Foote, whose team in 2001 interviewed many stakeholders in the
southern Sudan civil war, told PANA that there are many different
agendas making up the south and that various groups “will be
pitted against one another for profits for external forces.”

“The signing of the peace accord is historic and long overdue.
However, the road ahead will be treacherous for the Sudanese,
both in the north and south,” cautions the CFA official, who
briefed the US National Security Council and the Africa-Sub
Committee of the Congress on his return from the fact-finding
mission four years ago.

He also met the now outgoing US Secretary of State, retired
General Colin Powell, presented his findings and a course of
action, including the appointment of a special envoy to the
Sudan.

A shift in the US position “from one of pro-South to one of
comprehensive peace, which would mean more of a mediating role”
was one of the key recommendations Foote made to Powell.

This neutral position enabled the sole remaining superpower to
play a key role in pushing the Sudanese protagonists to sign the
peace accord last Sunday, after more than two-years of strenuous
negotiations.

Under ex-General Powell’s influence, President George W. Bush’s
administration bought the arguments put forward by Foote,
although the US Congress maintained a pro-South strategy.

In Foote’s view, this strategy by the Republican Party-dominated
Congress was counter-productive because it “meant a continuation
of the war, and continuation of the suffering of the (southern
Sudanese) people.”

The Congress was guided by the “Sudan Peace Act” legislation,
which unfortunately punishes the Khartoum government, but does
not talk to the other warring parties,” he remarked.

But, according to Foote, “both sides had a stake in solid peace,
but getting to that point would require some help from outside,
especially from powerful friends like the United States.”

American national interests, particularly the urge to keep
radical Islamic groups out of Sudan, a bridge between Africa and
the Middle East, explains why Washington, D.C. has keenly
followed the southern peace process, whose negotiations were
spearheaded by the regional Inter-Government Development
Authority (IGAD).

Apart from watching the diverse “oil interests”, Foote also
suggests careful monitoring and management of lingering tensions
between Garang’s SPLM and Reik Marchal’s group and other southern
armed groups.

Such tensions and those created by the presence of northern
Uganda’s rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and many other
interest groups could create a volatile mixture that would
present some challenges as well.

“Some also accuse Khartoum of using the splits in the South to
further its interest in destabilisation. I think that there is
some truth in this,” the CFA executive officer affirmed.

To prevent the collapse of the historic peace agreement to end a
civil war that has killed an estimated 2 million people and
displaced about 4 million others, it is important to create a
platform for the development of Southern Sudan.

Only the active involvement of the African Union, United Nations,
the US, European Union and Sudan’s neighbours would ensure civil
war does not recur in the vast area mainly inhabited by
Christians and animists.