Peace deal is only the start

By Alex De Waal, The Financial Times

Jan 13, 2005 — This week’s peace agreement in southern Sudan is Africa’s best news in a decade. Former bitter enemies, John Garang, commander-in-chief of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, and Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Sudan’s president, are now colleagues in the government.

Southern Sudan is one of few places in the world where people were better off 50 years ago than they are today, and this week’s agreement brings to an end a 22-year civil war. The peace deal is also a triumph for international mediation. For 30 months, a Kenyan-led team of negotiators toiled away on the minutiae of how to share power and wealth in Africa’s most diverse country, how to demobilise the armies and settle conflicts that have spilled over into northern Sudan. An international troika of the US, the UK and Norway ably supported this effort – bringing President George W. Bush a rare foreign policy success.

Sudan’s peace deal, named for the Kenyan town of Naivasha where most negotiations took place, is one of the most complex in history. The schedule of the implementation agreement alone runs to 101 pages and covers six and a half years. Another marathon of international engagement is needed to keep this peace on track.

However, there are three main dangers. First, the deal does not include Darfur, where a vicious war has unfolded over the last two years. It is unclear whether the southern settlement will help or hinder the search for peace in that western province. The Naivasha text includes provisions for decentralising power and elections – some of the Darfur rebels’ demands – but it also specifies quotas for government posts to be shared among the parties, and the Darfur groups are not represented. Rejecting the Naivasha deal, the Darfur rebels have said they will fight on. Concerted international pressure is needed when the Darfur peace talks reconvene under African Union auspices next month. Unless there is rapid progress, the north-south deal is in jeopardy.

Closely related is the threat of war in eastern Sudan. The Beja people of the Red Sea Hills took up arms 10 years ago, protesting against marginalisation. There has been little fighting for five years, but Beja guerrillas are still in neighbouring Eritrea. Darfurian fighters are there too, drawn from the more than 1m Darfurians who migrated to find work in eastern Sudan. All is quiet now, but the tinder is dry. A conflagration could be easily triggered by an embittered rebel commander, perhaps encouraged by Isseyas Afeworki, the capricious Eritrean president, or by a government clampdown. A second challenge is that ordinary Sudanese are expecting a peace dividend. Sudan is rich in oil and farmland, but most people are desperately poor and services and infrastructure are negligible. Sudanese count on aid and debt relief to rebuild their country. Until the Darfur war is settled, Khartoum will not get much of either.

But the main challenge is that Sudanese capitalists have grown rich mining rural resources and investing in Khartoum. The capital’s economy represents half the country’s wealth – an Arab city in a sea of poverty. One way the commercial elite makes money is through mechanised agriculture, which is as socially disruptive as it is ecologically damaging. It was the southward march of tractors, ploughing up smallholders’ farms, that drove many Sudanese peasants to join the rebels.

Will the opening up of the country’s most fertile plains, closed by war for 20 years, simply mean the carpetbaggers resume their expropriations? Without equitable rural development, the seeds of conflict will again be sown. The South’s referendum on self-determination is the cornerstone of the peace. In 2011, southern Sudanese can vote on whether to remain in a united Sudan or form a separate country. Without this vote, there can be no peace, but the referendum is itself a threat to peace. The deal was reached because Mr Garang, the SPLA leader, is a committed unionist. The premise is that six years of peace will persuade southerners of the benefits of unity. But any straw poll indicates a big majority favour independence – and memories are long. As the referendum approaches, it would be irresponsible not to plan for the possibility of separation. Peaceable state divorce will demand agreements as long and complicated as the Naivasha protocols. The mediators’ job is not done yet.

The writer, director of Justice Africa, a UK-based organisation, is author of Islamism and Its Enemies in the Horn of Africa (Hurst 2004), and Famine that Kills: Darfur, Sudan, (Oxford University Press), republished this month.