Sudan’s uncertain deal
Editorial, The Boston Globe
Jan 16, 2005 — Because Sudan’s National Islamic Front regime has earned a reputation for breaking promises, the peace accord it signed last week in Nairobi, Kenya, with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army should be regarded merely as a truce in the world’s longest-running, most lethal conflict.
Given the horrific suffering caused by that conflict since it began in 1983 — more than 2 million lives lost, more than 4 million people driven from their homes, and tens of thousands of Christians and animists of southern Sudan enslaved — it is certainly better to have the peace accord than not to have it.
If the terms of the accord are honored, southerners will participate in governing Sudan, the Arab north will desist from its murderous efforts to impose sharia, or Islamic law, on the south, and the revenues from oil and gas deposits in the south will be shared equally between Khartoum and southern Sudan. At the end of six years, southerners will be allowed to decide by a referendum whether they wish to stay in Sudan or secede and become an independent country.
Since this question of independence for the south was at the core of the long civil war, and since the cruelty endured by southerners during the last 22 years has only stiffened their resolve to break free of the Islamist regime in Khartoum, it is hard to imagine that regime tolerating a peaceful, legal process that could lead to independence for the south.
Sudan’s President Omar Bashir gave a predominantly Christian audience Monday in the southern town of Juba a glimpse of Khartoum’s vision of what should happen six years from now. “Our ultimate goal is a unified Sudan, which will not be built by war but by peace and development,” he said. “You, the southerners, will be saying: `We want a strong and huge state, a united Sudan.’ ”
Those southerners, as well as foreign governments eager to have their energy companies and contractors partake in Sudan’s anticipated oil bonanza, have to ask themselves: What is Khartoum likely to do once it realizes that a referendum will inevitably produce secession of the oil-rich south?
There is yet another cause for skepticism about Khartoum’s intentions. The Islamist regime blatantly prolonged negotiations over the peace accord with southern Sudan as a way of deflecting pressure to end its genocidal crimes against the tribal peoples of the Darfur region in western Sudan. But if there is no end soon of the horrors in Darfur — where, a UN official recently warned, there could soon be 100,000 deaths a month from starvation and disease — the peace accord for southern Sudan will not likely survive.
This is the moment for the outside world to exert the greatest possible pressure on Khartoum to end the Darfur genocide and keep the promises made in Nairobi.