Historical Backgound – Sudan
To understand Sudan, as noted in Emma’s War, (an excellent book that encompasses the greater issues of Sudan around an aid worker’s idealism) you need a layered map like one of those cellophane diagrams of the human body that used to be in encyclopedias. As you peel away the top piece of cellophane labeled Sudan, you would find a succession of maps lying underneath. A map of languages, and under that a map of ethnic groups, and under that a map of ancient kingdoms until it becomes clear the country is not really a country at all but many.
You need a similar kind of layered map to understand Sudan’s civil war. A surface map of political conflict, for example – the northern government versus the southern rebels; and under that a layer of religious conflict – Muslim versus Christian and pagan; and under that a map of all the sectarian divisions within those categories; and under that a layer of ethnic divisions – Arab and Arabized versus Nilotic and Equatorian – all of them containing a multitude of clan and tribal subdivisions; and under that a layer of linguistic conflicts; and under that a layer of economic divisions – the more developed north with fewer natural resources versus the poorer south with its rich mineral and fossil fuel deposits; and under that a layer of colonial divisions, and under that a layer of racial divisions related to slavery. And so on and so on until it would become clear that the war, like the country, was not one but many; a violent ecosystem capable of generating endless new things to fight about without ever shedding any of the old ones.
Sudan is the largest country on the continent and it has nine neighbors in Africa, which suggests why there is such a strong regional interest in what goes on and why so many cultures are involved. You may have read about the peace agreement recently reached between the north and the south or about the conflict in Darfur. Much has been proposed and attempted to address these problems. What I’d like to do is offer a bit of background for a more complete understanding of the country and conflict. Note that these words are mostly a synopsis and mix of the Assistant Secretary of State Robert Zoellick during a September 2005 Senate Foreign Relations committee and from the BBC website on Sudan.
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Sudan as a country has been marked by ethno-religious exclusivism since Khartoum (Sudan’s capital) traders and mercenaries first tried to carve out a state through conquest in the Nile Valley in the 19th century. Historically it’s been dominated by a very small clique of traders, soldiers and administrators. They tend to be drawn from three tribes that are north of Khartoum. An important point to note: Their orientation historically is toward the Arab world, so it’s to Cairo, Damascus, Saudi Arabia. In effect, Khartoum has been an Arab metropolis that’s been surrounded by impoverished sub-Saharan expanses.
In the South you have a traditional African tribal structure, animist and Christian communities. In the West, in Darfur, you’ve got a mixing of Arab and African tribes which have come over the centuries in waves.
This mix has led to a very complex mixture of Nomads and farmers that has created an economic condition that is very dependent on a rain-fed, boom-and-bust agriculture in grasses. This can create, and has created, an instability in the past.
In the north you’ve got a mixture of Arab tribes that predominate in urban areas. And the east has been a generally egalitarian pastoral group, the Beja, that has ancestral ties to Egypt.
Slavery had always been the business of Sudan. Sudan’s many ethnic groups historically raided each other for captives, especially woman and children. In Sudan, as in other African societies with few material possessions, people and livestock historically have been the most important forms of capital. The Arabs who spread out across the deserts of northern Africa in the Middle Ages gave this ancient trade a new tone. They brought horses and specialized cavalry operations that gave them an advantage over the local people.
Now, in the past, until 1989, the way that Sudan was run is you had a very weak center in Khartoum that co-opted these constituencies in the regions to create a power base. And indeed, there was an independent sultanate of the Fur dating back to the 17th century that was overthrown by the British in 1916. The name Darfur comes from “Homeland of the Fur,” because that was the key tribe there.
The history of British colonialism was an indirect rule system, so what the British did was they replaced this structure with an imperial native administration; they awarded homelands to paramount chiefs, and in doing so they displaced this older, more fluid social order. And a key point for the current conflict is that some of the nomadic groups didn’t get lands because they weren’t settled agriculturalists, and this has set a long fuse for the future. The nature of this rule depended on the effectiveness of local leadership and government.
Sudan itself achieved independence in 1956. This leads to the roots of the present-day conflict. Given this history, you have a very strong resentment on the periphery of the Muslim Arab domination in the center, and the southern groups really start to struggle at the same time of independence in 1956. There’s a peace agreement in 1972 that fails because it wasn’t fully implemented. The government of Sudan tries to impose Shari’a (muslim) law in ‘83. This resumes the civil war under the leadership of the late Dr. John Garang, a southerner who had been integrated into the army, studied in the United States and got his doctorate in agriculture and economics. This also is the first use of a counterinsurgency tactic, which is they start to mobilize militias, drawing, with a sense of cruel irony here, from the Darfur region of cattle-herding Arabs to lead their counterinsurgency strategy in the south. And it’s a very basic strategy and it’s a cruel one; it relies on brutality, starvation, robbery to wipe out the locals. There’s an estimated 2.5 million people that die in that conflict. It stretches across 21 years. And there’s millions more displaced internally and externally.
Around the same time – and it’s an important point to recognize – Darfur starts to have its first conflict in the mid-’80s and it’s based on the economic conditions. There’s a drought and famine. There’s a breakdown in migration. And at the same time, this is the era in which the Sudanese president at the time was trying to move into Chad, and so he tries to use this region as a backdoor into Chad. And for the first time in this mixture of sort – Darfur is all Muslim; it’s not like the Christian south – he starts to divide the societies by creating an Islamic Legion, and comes up with a racial ideology of Arabism that plays into the present conflict.
In 1989, General Bashir overthrows the government, establishes the Revolutionary Command Council for National Salvation to rule over Sudan. And the National Islamic Front is led by Dr. Turabi, who takes over as the leading party. In the late ’70s to early ’90s you have a hyperinflation that wipes out the middle class. And Turabi is the leader of the vicious war in the south. At the same time, he’s actually reaching out to Darfur and trying to bring in some of the sort of less-accepted Muslim communities, but he doesn’t have a real effect in terms of development.
In 1992, there’s a declaration of jihad in Kordofan against the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) – this is the southern group leading in the Nuba Mountains rebellion – and it’s a failure to create an Islamic state through force.
In 1998, again, the strategy of arming militias is starvation in the oil field zones of Upper Nile province in southern Sudan. During the ’90s, Turabi hosts Osama bin Laden. And with the United States’ attack in 1998, this is the start of a rethinking on the part of Bashir with Turabi. And in 1999 there’s a split in Khartoum, and Bashir arrests Turabi.
Here begins the effort that the United States launched in 2001 for a peace initiative. At this time, the focus is primarily on the north – south conflict. After September 11th, the government of Sudan recognizes the dangers that it sees. Bashir is fearful of his associations with Osama bin Laden and the terrorists. He also realizes he can’t defeat Garang and the SPLM militarily.
So this lies the context for the Comprehensive Peace Accord (CPA) agreement, a complex agreement reached between the north and the south in January 2005. This is important because it is really politics driven by exhaustion. The Khartoum government realizes it can’t beat Garang in the south. It’s worn down by decades of war. It’s had these ideological projects that have produced nothing. All this is combined with major U.S.- international pressure and an agreement is reached. The CPA was begun in 2002, signed in January 9, 2005. At heart, it tries to create a fair political relationship, where you have power and wealth-sharing, leading to national elections in four years.
The CPA accomplishes something very important. It creates a new pattern of power-sharing with this historical problem of geographically defined constituencies. It offers prospects of development. They’re coming up with oil, and so they start to realize there’s an interest in getting linked into the international economy.
Among the key points are an instilled ceasefire and protocols for power sharing and wealth. A national constitution and Government of National Unity for a six-year period are agreed to set up, which was just recently formed. A new institution of the presidency is established, where the Government of Sudan representative remains as president (representing the Arabic north), with the first vice president representing the south, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM).
This peace agreement also establishes the legal basis for the government of southern Sudan to create a legislature and a constitution. After the six year trial period, the south has the opportunity of breaking away and becoming it’s own independent state and country. The US government supports this initiative. Sudan has also recently become an oil exporter and both sides have agreed on the key issue of how to share out the revenue, which mostly comes from the south. The SPLA has secured a large share of Sudan’s oil money and lots of jobs – which may give a new incentive to rebellion in disgruntled regions elsewhere in Sudan.
Outside Khartoum there are two impulses regarding the peace agreement. There’s an impulse for equality, which you can implement through the CPA accord, and emancipation. And that pulls people in the opposite direction. So should the peripheries try to win the strongest possible representation of the center, or should they try to break away? This remains the fundamental question of Sudan.
Even as you have this negotiation going on with the north-south accord, Khartoum’s old habits and fears of separation are also in tension, because in 2002, some Darfurians start to complain about air militia harassment. The problem festers. Some of the rebels attack a police station in 2003, saying the government is oppressing black Africans in favor of Arabs. So even as Khartoum is negotiating with the South, it unleashes an army in this brutal counterinsurgency strategy in Darfur in 2003. There is suspect that some of the people in Khartoum felt that the negotiators in the north-south accord were giving away too much.
The Government of Sudan admits mobilizing “self-defense militias” following rebel attacks but denies any links to the Janjaweed, accused of trying to “cleanse” large swathes of territory of black Africans. Refugees from Darfur say that following air raids by government aircraft, the Janjaweed ride into villages on horses and camels, slaughtering men, raping women and stealing whatever they can find. Many women report being abducted by the Janjaweed and held as sex slaves for more than a week before being released. Sudan’s government denies being in control of the Janjaweed and President Omar al-Bashir has called them “thieves and gangsters”. After strong international pressure and the threat of sanctions, the government promised to disarm the Janjaweed. But there is little evidence of this so far. Over 2 million people are forced from their homelands. And the violence is carried out by a combination of government forces, air militia, the rebel groups.
In this context, the U.S. found that genocide occurred and stated so in September 2004. The U.N. then conducted investigation, and they came to a slightly different conclusion. They came – crimes against humanity, but they said that this was basically a definitial issue, and they had a statement that it was similar in its effect to genocide.
Now, as all this is happening, there’s a terrible blow to the process, in that Dr. Garang crashes in a Helicopter crash on July 30th. And there was communal violence that started to break out in Khartoum and in Juba and others. The situation calms shortly there after with comforts that the death was truly accidental.
But, it is now a very sensitive moment because of this. Dr. Garang was a very strong leader in the system. So his organization, the SPLM, is now trying to work through how to set up a government of southern Sudan, how to be represented in Khartoum, how to help in Darfur, and it’s a point of some stretch. On the other hand, you also have a challenge for the people in Khartoum. They worked out this arrangement with Dr. Garang, and now, they’ve got a new set of players. Some of them may be tempted to overreach.
There’s another important issue, which is that Garang was the one figure in the South that really stood for unified Sudan, and one of the questions will be whether his colleagues will remain committed to this.
In the grand scheme of things, there is a potential critical issue which is the connection of an upward or downward spiral. On the one hand, the Comprehensive Peace Accord does much more than settle the dispute between North and South. It actually creates a political and a constitutional framework for people to try to resolve the conflicts in Darfur and other regions. The US hopes that the SPLM involvement in the Government of National Unity could help us resolve Darfur.
And if successful, the backing that the United States and the rest of world has shown for the North-South accord, including financially, could create a positive incentive for these other regions to come to peaceful accords. So the upward spiral is the implementation of the CPA, a new Sudanese government, expanded AU mission on the ground, reconciliation in Darfur, all within this political framework.
But there is a potential downward spiral. If the international community can’t maintain peace and security in Darfur, improve the situation and move to a peace process, the ability for us to support this new hopeful government is going to be severely undermined.
Darfur’s livelihood now depends on a consistent supply of food and basic necessities. You’ve got some 2 million people that have been forced off their lands. At the same time improved security outside the camps and inside the camps is critical. But that’s basically – and for all the work that requires – that’s a holding action. It needs to be combined with a political reconciliation process bringing together the government, the rebel groups and various tribes, and that’s what’s going on right now in a Abuja, Nigeria, peace negotiation. To be successful, it’s going to have to be combined, if they reach a peace accord on paper, with some efforts to deal with the economic and social issues that drove the conflict.
So at present the CPA is in process and both sides are working on balancing power and resources. The South is reorganizing after the death of Garang and working to rebuild both its political and economical infrastructure and military. Much attention is focused on the peace agreement under negotiations in Nigeria regarding the Darfur conflict. It is volatile at this point because leadership for the Darfur rebels has been anything but consistent and united.
This is a problem that has a lot of threads. And while many people focus on Darfur, it is important that without looking at the north-south, you’re not going to see the picture. The international community has to work on multiple transitions: from war to peace; from centralization to a genuine federalism; emergency problems to development; and military rule to democracy. And there’s a chance for an upward spiral, where these pieces could fit together, or there’s a chance for a downward spiral.
This is a classic multilateral diplomacy problem. The US is working with the African Union, the European Union, the Arab League, and a whole series of partners and other allies to make it work. It’s not going to be smooth or a clear-cut path, but indeed there is a pathway ahead.