Wake up call for Sudan

A threat by the secretary-general of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement to take his party out of the Sudanese parliament has called a referendum on the country’s future into question, writes Asmaa Al-Husseini
John Garang, leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), was once quoted as saying that “the Sudanese will not go to heaven or hell.” Asked how this was possible, he replied, laughing, that “on Judgement Day, the Sudanese will arrive too late, after the doors to heaven and hell have already been closed.”
Something similar is true of the situation in Sudan today, for the Sudanese have not been able to attain the unity they so desperately need. Sudan has spent a third of the transitional period trying to reach a peace agreement, but the country has not been able to achieve either separation, which had been thought by some in the north and south to be an easier solution than unification, or real unity. As a result, the Sudanese today are caught in the middle, neither able to reach heaven or hell, unity or separation.
Bagan Amum, secretary-general of the SPLM, has indicated that any postponement of the referendum in the south of the country will turn the transition in Sudan into a hellish period. The south is threatening to exit parliament early if the ruling National Congress Party (NCP), headed by Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir, puts obstacles in the path of conducting the referendum in 2011.
Amum has said that the SPLM is prepared to give the NCP until the end of the year to endorse the referendum. “If the southern Sudanese do not find unity to be in their interests, they will turn to secession,” he has said, “which would not be a difficult decision. Sudan previously experienced a parliamentary secession in 1956. The NCP is still not able to deal with the national and international political reality.”
Amum’s words have stirred up a storm both inside and outside Sudan, and they have raised concerns about the survival of the unified country. The NCP considers his words to be unacceptable and a departure from ordinary discourse, as well as an act of rebellion against the interim constitution. Political analysts, on the other hand, see the words more as an attempt by the SPLM to blackmail the NCP, in order to reap greater concessions. They think it quite likely that the SPLM will act on its threats if the NCP does not allow the SPLM to participate in the NCP programme.
As one analyst commented, “the possibility of secession has become more likely in Sudan, and it could happen at any moment, considering that the peace agreement created an independent south.”
Amum’s words have raised a variety of important issues touching on the background to the present crisis.
Firstly, the exiting of the south from the country’s parliament has been talked about before as one of the options facing southern leaders. However, Amum’s words represent the first official comment on the issue, even if he is not the first secretary-general of the SPLM to notice the growing trend in the south towards secession. It has long been said that 90 per cent of southerners would vote to secede if the referendum is not granted now.
Moreover, the present dispute between the two groups sharing power in Sudan is not the first, and it will not be the last. The relationship between the two groups over the past four years has fluctuated like the tide, with differences between them receding during the transition period because of the overwhelming problems facing the country and the details of the peace agreement signed in 2005.
There is also the issue of the different intellectual and political legitimacies of the two parties. The dispute reached its peak when the SPLM withdrew its ministers from the central government, refusing to return them until the government responded to its demands.
Amum’s statement also came after verbal attacks on him made by the NCP and its supporters after he spoke before the Commission on African Affairs of the US Congress. In his speech to the Commission, Amum urged Congress not to normalise US relations with Khartoum and not to take Sudan off the US list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Amum justified his comments by saying that “American officials requested that the NCP fulfil its commitments before relations are normalised with Sudan, including finding a solution to the crisis in Darfur, carrying out the peace agreement in the south, and working towards a transition to democracy in the country.”
The most recent disputes between the two parties concern the SPLM’s refusal to accept the electoral roll and proposals on how the referendum will be carried out. While the NCP believes that if the south wants to secede from Sudan, then a 75 per cent majority vote must be achieved, the SPLM thinks 51 per cent should suffice.
There is also a dispute over the right to vote in the referendum. The SPLM argues that only those southerners currently living in the south should have the right to vote, with those who have moved to the north being excluded from the referendum, while the NCP argues that even southerners in the north should be eligible to vote.
Furthermore, there is a dispute over voting centres and even over ballot boxes. Should there be two boxes, one for unity and the other for secession, or one ballot box? It has also not been decided who will conduct the referendum commission, nor the number of commission members, nor who will monitor the referendum, nor how the referendum will be conducted.
While Amum has been intensifying and escalating the conflict with the NCP, the reaction of SPLM leader Salva Kiir Mayardit has thus far been one of calmness and flexibility, though this leaves open the question of how far this is a tactic on his part and how far the difference of approach signals disagreement among members of the movement. Whatever the reason for the apparent contradiction, the SPLM has a history of putting pressure on the NCP to get what it wants.
As well as raising questions about the SPLM’s real motives, Amum’s statement raises the questions of what chances there are now that unity can be achieved and what the exiting of the SPLM from the government could mean for the country. It also raises the question of whether Amum had abandoned the SPLM’s official line.
According to Nasreddin Kushayb, chairman of the SPLM in Egypt, Amum’s threats of the south’s leaving parliament and not waiting for the referendum in 2011 are a natural reaction to the actions of the NCP, since the latter has been trying to make secession impossible for the south.
Kushayb added that the “unity of Sudan will not be achieved through oppression or coercion, but by making unity an attractive choice and then allowing the south to vote on it. In this way, the south would retain its rights and feel a part of Sudan and connected to the north.”
He said that the leaders of the SPLM were aware that secession would not be an easy process and that it could produce dire consequences for all Sudanese, in both the north and the south. Secession was not the SPLM’s goal, Kushayb said, but the party had been described as an extremist group by other parties, which were talking about the possibility of secession to the media.
He warned that if Al-Bashir’s party continued in its present direction, then this would provoke a more violent reaction from the SPLM. Kushayb criticised what he called the fierce attacks made by the NCP on the SPLM, and talked about the failure of the policies promoted by Yasser Arman, deputy secretary-general of the SPLM, which he criticised for not focusing on the main issues.
Amum had been attacked from within the SPLM simply for his candour and for telling the facts as they were and without equivocation, Kushayb said. Arman, Amum and others in the SPLM leadership have accused the NCP of being behind the recent tribal clashes in the south and of being behind arming the Murli tribe to fight the Dinka. According to Kushayb, “we have evidence of the involvement of the NCP in arming the tribes, particularly in Southern Kordofan.”
According to the Sudanese Islamic thinker Hassan Makki, president of the World African University, Amum believes in the unity of Sudan, despite his rivalry with the NCP, because he and Arman are against the separatists in the SPLM. However, both Amum and Arman differ from the NCP in that they want a secular state.
Leaders of the SPLM who want unity do not want to support it in public, Makki said, because this could risk their losing political support. If they appear to submit to the NCP’s unity agenda, this will leave them with nothing to negotiate with and will undermine attempts to put pressure on the Khartoum government to give the south special privileges.
For all that, the threat of the south’s secession does not seem to be inspiring as much fear as it used to about the fate of the country among the Sudanese political parties. Nor has it stirred up much intention to try to work against what may now be the inevitable fate of the country.
In fact, Amum’s threat of secession can be taken as an early warning of the kinds of problems that could come if such issues are left unattended. The issues that he has raised are only the tip of the iceberg, and there are deeper problems lurking below that could further threaten the country’s stability.
Such problems will not be solved without a true agreement among all the parties, including the opposition parties that are threatening to boycott the forthcoming elections.
An agreement of this sort would act as a rudder, steering the ship of Sudan safely to shore in the face of storms on every side.