Sudan Divided

Continuing Conflict in a Contested State

Gunnar M. Sørbø, Abdel Ghaffar M. Ahmed

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137338235
• eBook ISBN: 9781137338242
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The 2011 secession of South Sudan spurred hopes for a more just, democratic Sudan, but was followed by new wars and growing unrest. This book examines how the Islamist project has shaped these developments in Sudan, with a particular focus on how divisive policies have driven regional violence as well as the fight against continued marginalization.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Sudan’s Durable Disorder

Gunnar M. Sørbø and Abdel Ghaffar M. Ahmed

For those favoring southern independence, the secession of South Sudan in July 2011 initially looked like the successful culmination of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement signed between the Sudan government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) in January 2005. Despite the pain it caused, the division of the country also gave rise to expectations in the north—encouraged as well by the Arab Spring—of a new beginning that might lead to a more just, peaceful, and democratic Sudan.

The reality soon came to look quite different. South Sudan celebrated its independence before the terms of divorce had been agreed upon. A number of issues remained unresolved, including disputed borders, citizenship issues, fees for shipping southern oil through northern pipelines, and the future status of the Abyei area on the border. There was also the problem of the aborted popular consultations in South Kordofan and Blue Nile States. In June 2011, a new war started in the Nuba Mountains in South Kordofan. Three months later, war also broke out in southern Blue Nile following President Omer al-Bashir’s refusal to accept the SPLM’s northern branch (SPLM-North) as a political party in Sudan. Inspired by the Arab Spring and fearful of a looming economic crisis, people in the cities, particularly Khartoum, took to the streets, where they met with a harsh response by the police and security forces. In Darfur, violent conflicts continued despite a 2011 peace deal signed in Doha, Qatar, between the government and one of the rebel movements. The divisions within the Islamist camp between reformists and traditionalists also came increasingly to the fore. The loss of oil revenue from the south hurt the Sudanese economy badly, especially after South Sudan’s closure of its oil fields in June 2012.

In South Sudan, the economic situation also became increasingly precarious, and the country continued to suffer from internal strife and weak governance. A cooperation agreement was signed between Sudan and South Sudan on September 27, 2012, but there were serious problems of implementation due to the new wars and continued mutual mistrust. Both parties saw the resolution of security arrangements in the border areas as the necessary prerequisite for reaching agreements on all other outstanding issues.

While being accused by the opposition of losing almost a third of Sudan’s territory, including its most fertile and productive lands, the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) saw the separation as an opportunity to strengthen its grip on power and further its Islamist agenda. President Bashir’s public speech in Gedaref on December 19, 2010, widely quoted in the Western press, was seen by many as a landmark signaling that approach. He declared,

If South Sudan secedes, we will change the constitution and at that time there will be no time to speak of diversity of culture and ethnicity. Sharia and Islam will be the main source for the constitution, Islam the official religion and Arabic the official language.

The presidential statement conveyed the message to non-Arab and non-Muslim communities in different parts of northern Sudan that they should either submit to an inevitable cultural assimilation, that is, abandon their non-Arab and non-Muslim identities, or face continued marginalization and even exclusion. For many of those fighting the Sudanese army in Darfur, the Nuba Mountains, and southern Blue Nile—most of them now allied in the Sudan Revolutionary Front—the wars are a direct result of Khartoum’s declared policy. In brief, the political dynamics since South Sudan’s secession have exacerbated rather than tempered conflicts in the country.

Some critics have claimed that the current problems in Sudan are due in large part to a flawed approach to peacemaking. They argue that the top-down, foreign-directed approach disregarded the interests of the non-gun-carrying majorities in the north and south, ignored the link between sustainable peace and democratic transformation, and overlooked the need for structural change in both Sudan and South Sudan (J. Young 2012, 363). Also, by dealing with one conflict at a time, the international community ignored, and continues to ignore, the multiple issues that have fueled Sudan’s interlocking wars (D. Johnson 2011).

There is clearly a need for an approach to peacemaking in Sudan that can address multiple arenas and sources of conflict in a much more integrated way than has been done so far, and several chapters in this book deal with the role of international actors. However, the principal focus of the book is on internal factors, that is, on how the current regime and its Islamist project have shaped developments in Sudan. Divisive policies at the national level, as well as locally and regionally, have created a confrontational and polarized political environment characterized by intercommunal violence and renewed struggles against continued marginalization. Agreements that are made, often with external input, continue to be dishonored, and the contradictions between (and within) the center and its peripheries have intensified. This casts doubt on the attainability of peace as well as on the sustainability of the NCP-dominated government and even the continued unity of the country.

Development and Conflict: State Building in Sudan

Two related themes have been salient in Sudan’s postcolonial development. The first is the persistent attempts to unite the disparate peoples and regions of Sudan around Islam and Arabism as ideological identifiers under the domination of a northern elite narrowly based in the riverine region around Khartoum. All national governments since independence have pursued policies with this aim, accompanied by centralization of power, the use of the state as a vehicle by special interest groups, militarization, and authoritarianism.

The second theme is the resistance of Sudan’s peripheries to these made-in-Khartoum policies. For a long time, the most common strategy of peripheral elites was to attach themselves to elements of the central elite, providing votes or militias in return for positions or commercial opportunities. However, in the case of southern Sudan, they launched their own state-building project in opposition to Khartoum; Sudan was plunged into prolonged violent conflict that extended to other regions and is still raging. The result so far is the independence of South Sudan. Whether the process of fragmentation stops here is an open question.

While the Islamist regime that has ruled Sudan since 1989 must take major responsibility for an increasingly polarized and violent political environment, the combination of instability at the center and center-periphery inequity has been present since Sudan achieved independence in 1956. The result has been what Alex de Waal (2007a, 19) calls “perpetual turbulence.”

Uneven development among regions and groups is a basic ingredient of Sudanese conflicts. It was a major feature of the colonial economy, when the British set up the world’s largest irrigated scheme under one management in the Gezira area, south of Khartoum, for the cultivation of export crops, mainly cotton. The growth of an urban sector was promoted simultaneously in Khartoum and its environs to provide the required services and administration. Little was done elsewhere, and the resulting unevenness translated into gross disparities in the development of productive forces in different regions and in the standard of living of their inhabitants. Not much changed in this regard during the postcolonial period: Economic policy followed the colonial blueprint, and inequality was in many cases exacerbated. The resulting tension was a catalytic element in the political conflicts that followed. It is not surprising that the areas and groups most disadvantaged in development were also the ones that had the least access to the state, and the ones where dissidence and rebellion have flourished.

The process of uneven development and economic dislocation gained momentum in the 1970s. The shift from subsistence agriculture to export-oriented, mechanized agricultural schemes had its greatest impact in the expansive, fertile lands between north and south—in southern Kordofan, southern Darfur, Blue Nile, and along the Sudan-Ethiopia border (D. Johnson 2011). These areas are currently on the border with South Sudan and are where new wars have started. An important factor in increasing insecurity was the passage of laws undermining the control that local authorities and local people were able to exert over land. The 1970 Unregistered Land Act abolished customary rights of land use and the authority vested in the “native administration” with respect to land allocation, thereby allowing the state to lease large tracts of lands to private interests. Successive governments used this practice in their drive to modernize agriculture (through mechanized rainfed and irrigated schemes), mostly to their own and to their followers’ advantage. Land dispossession led to impoverishment and displacement of large populations and to political mobilization and conflict in several parts of the country.

The traditional political parties in Sudan have their roots in the colonial state, which chose collaborators from various elements of society, primarily the principal religious movements (Woodward 1990, 235). After independence, the Umma Party and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), linked to Mahdism and the Khatmiyya Sufi order respectively, came to dominate the political scene. They eventually were challenged by the Gaafar Nimeiri regime, which came to power in a military coup in 1969, and later by the ascendancy of the National Islamic Front, which assumed power in another military coup in 1989. As the state was the gatekeeper for much of the economy, different political forces competed for wealth within the framework of the inherited neocolonial economy (234).

As Peter Woodward argues (1990, 236), the central state’s limited capacity to dominate its territory forced a reliance on patron–client relationships as a means of state building from the outset of British rule (1898–1956). This encouraged intense competition between rival movements in Sudan, accentuating the heterogeneity of Sudanese society. Along with the developing inequities, the failure of any one of the several contending elites to take effective control of the state rendered Sudan chronically unstable and prone to intractable conflict (de Waal 2007a, 9). The country experienced three short parliamentary periods, 1954–1958, 1964–1969, and 1985–1989, and a longer stretch of three military regimes: 1958–1964, 1969–1985, and 1989–2011. The last includes the interim period for implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), from 2005 to 2011.

Other main features of Sudanese politics have been the powerful influence of religion and the narrow ethnic base of the Khartoum elite. Islam has been the principal base not only of legitimacy for the major political parties, their principal instrument of domination, but also of rivalry. Politics has been dominated by factionalism, not just between partisans of an Islamic order and a secularist order, but also between the main politico-religious parties (E. Ahmed 2007, 190). The Islamist elite that now rules Sudan is part of an “ethnocracy” (Mazrui 1975) that has dominated the country socially, politically, and economically since independence. Members of this elite largely belong to three riverine groups: the Ja’aliyyin, Shaygiyya, and Danagla.

The Islamist Ascendancy

As Atta El-Battahani explains in chapter 2, a realignment of forces within the northern ruling elite led in the late 1970s and early 1980s to a slow yet steady ascendancy of Islamists in the north.

In 1969, President Nimeiri came to power through a military coup. Without much preparation, he embarked on a state-led transformation of the economy, including a program of nationalization. After an aborted coup in 1971, he broke with the communists who had joined his government and executed their leaders. Seeking a new direction for the country’s economy, Nimeiri promoted Sudan as the “breadbasket” of the Arab world, and Arab investment backed by Western technology flowed into the country. However, as a result of poor planning, inefficiency, and corruption, these projects yielded little more than large debts from which the country still suffers (El-Battahani and Woodward 2012, 280).

Nimeiri made peace with the southern rebels in 1972, but the political capital he achieved by signing a peace agreement was not sufficient to build a viable power base for the regime. Beleaguered by growing economic problems, he found his influence diminishing and chose to reconcile with his former enemies, including the Umma Party led by Sadig El Mahdi and the Muslim Brotherhood led by Hassan al-Turabi. The “national reconciliation” in 1977 represented a political breakthrough for the Islamists. To build an effective political machine for long-term objectives, they adopted a strategy of trading principles for pragmatism, and Turabi joined the government as attorney general.

In September 1983, Nimeiri introduced sharia laws. At the same time, he was working to undermine the south’s elected regional government to ensure the national state’s control over the newly discovered oil fields in that region. The combination of national debt and other economic problems, Islamization, and interference in the south all contributed to renewed civil war in 1983 (El-Battahani and Woodward 2012, 280). As Abdelwahab El-Affendi argues in chapter 3, the Islamists moved from the margin to the center of Sudanese politics as a consequence of these developments.

When Nimeiri was toppled in 1985, the SPLM and its armed wing, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), led by John Garang, refused to join the political process. As El-Affendi describes, the Islamists tried to exploit the schism between the SPLA and liberal forces in the north, portraying the SPLA’s intransigence as an attempt to blackmail the “Sudanese people” and accusing northern parties seeking to engage with the SPLA of treasonous association with the enemy. The ruling Transitional Military Council sided with the Islamists, laying the basis for the future alliance between Islamists and sections of the military. It also transformed the conflict in the south into a focal point of political contestation and popular mobilization. In the process, the National Islamic Front (NIF), as it was then called, moved away from advocating Islamization in the narrow sense to champion presumed “Arab” interests in opposition to the “African” viewpoint championed by the SPLA. As El-Affendi explains, a narrative of threat to Sudan’s “Arab–Islamic identity” was developed in opposition to the SPLA’s narrative, which emphasized the marginalization of non-Arab Sudanese.¹

The SPLA scored a string of military victories in 1988, heightening the general sense of insecurity faced by northerners. To complicate things further, the government of Sadig El Mahdi, which came to power through elections in 1986, began to arm “Arab” tribes in the border regions for “self-defense” against the SPLA. This revived old ethnic rivalries and enmities, giving new meaning to the “Arab against Black” conflict. The army began at the same time to support southern tribal militias opposed to the SPLA, thus adding to fragmentation and disorder (Mohamed Salih and Harir 1994, 186–283).

The development of the Islamist movement was facilitated by the availability of new sources of finance. Particularly important was the Islamic banking movement, established during the 1970s and enriched by the oil price rises of that decade. These banks encouraged the growth of an Islamist small business sector, which undercut the commercial and financial base of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Chapter 1 Introduction: Sudan’s Durable Disorder
• Chapter 2 The Post-Secession State in Sudan: Building Coalitions or Deepening Conflicts?
• Chapter 3 Islamism and the Sudanese State after Darfur: Soft State, Failed State, or “Black Hole State”?
• Chapter 4 The National Congress Party and the “Second Republic”: Internal Dynamics and Political Hegemony
• Chapter 5 Sudan after the South’s Secession: Issues of Identity
• Chapter 6 Oil and Politics in Sudan
• Chapter 7 Changing Dynamics in the Borderlands: Emergence of a Third Sudan?
• Chapter 8 Six Years after the Eastern Sudan Peace Agreement: An Assessment
• Chapter 9 Darfur after Doha
• Chapter 10 Conflict and Nation Building: Lessons for Darfur from South Sudan
• Chapter 11 Back to War in Sudan: Flawed Peace Agreement, Failed Political Will
• Chapter 12 Shifting Loyalties and Ethnic Violence: The Case of the Fulbe in Southern Blue Nile
• Index