SUDAN-POLITICS: Sound Of Rebel Movements Splintering — Again

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru and Nhial Bol

NAIROBI, Mar 27 1996 (IPS) - Southern Sudan’s fractious rebel movements, battling each other with even greater venom than they have the government army, have been hit by the apparent defection of key commanders to a grateful Khartoum.

This week, the Southern Sudan Independence Movement (SSIM), distanced itself from the arrival in the Sudanese capital of one of its founding members, Kerubino Kwanyin Bol, prepared to throw in his lot with the Islamic fundamentalist government.

“We have no connection with Kerubino Kwanyin Bol,” stressed David de Chand, the SSIM spokesman here. “We lost contact with him since we changed the name of our movement from Sudan People’s Liberation Army United (SPLA-United) to SSIM in October 1994,” he told IPS.

“Since then Kerubino has been an independent man, we have nothing to do with him.”

Bol was a founding member of the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in 1983 and second in command to Col. John Garang. But the two men fell out, and Bol was detained from 1987 to 1991. After his release, he joined SPLA-United, which had split from Garang’s mainstream SPLA in 1991.

Bol’s presence in Khartoum was confirmed in a statement by Dr Hassan Abdalla al Turabi, the leader of Sudan’s National Islamic Front (NIF), who said Bol had met him in his house over the weekend and was keen to negotiate terms to join the government.

Turabi, whose NIF is widely regarded as the de facto government of the Sudan, said Bol had arrived with his senior officers and had claimed that another two rebel leaders, Riak Machar and Lam Akol, were also on their way to Khartoum.

Turabi said he expected Machar, who heads the SSIM, and Akol, the leader of SPLA-United, to be reinstated in their jobs at the University of Khartoum if they renounced their rebellion.

Their defection would be a major coup for the government and according to George Maker Benjamin, a spokesman of an SSIM faction led by John Luk, Machar’s about-face would be rewarded with more than a university job. “His appointment as the second vice- president of the republic is the next NIF move,” he said.

According to Benjamin, Machar surrendered to the government garisson in Nasir, on the Ethiopian border, on Mar. 11. “Since that day, he has been tirelessly and fruitlessly trying to mobilise a popular support base for his capitulation.”

“Riak Machar called a meeting of all chiefs, elders and citizens of Nasir town to find logic for his surrender. This meeting failed miserably because all chiefs and elders boycotted it,” claimed Benjamin.

The chiefs have declared Machar a renegade in all the Nuer areas east of the Nile, Benjamin alleged.

A furious Chand described Turabi’s and Benjamin’s claims as “the biggest lie ever invented”. He argued Riak, who stands for the independence of southern Sudan, is Khartoum’s most dangerous opponent and would not betray the cause.

“He can’t and will never capitulate,” he said. “SSIM’s objective is to force Khartoum to accept the demand for self- determination through an internationally supervised referendum.”

For years, Garang’s mainstream SPLA has been claiming its bitter rivals, SPLA-United and the SSIM, have not only had contact with the Sudanese government but have been used as proxies to battle their forces.

The SPLA was formed in 1983 as a nation wide movement fighting for the repeal of Sharia (Islamic law) and greater political and economic rights for all marginalised areas of the country. By 1989, the SPLA controlled 80 percent of the largely Christian south and was operating in the Nuba mountains of the west.

In 1991, the SPLA was hit by the loss of bases in Ethiopia with the fall of the government of Mengistu Haile Mariam, and splintered in opposition to Garang’s autocratic control and, to an extent, along ethnic lines. The factions themselves later sub- divided. When Machar changed the name of his movement to SSIM, Akol refused to go along and took command of SPLA-United.

Despite the apparent defections of Bol, Machar and Akol, the 13- year civil war is unlikely to end, and neither is the faction fighting. Last week, the government reported there had been fierce clashes in February when the SPLA attacked refugee camps in Ethiopia under the control of Machar.

Machar’s movement is mainly Nuer-based from the Upper Nile, traditional rivals of Garang’s Dinka people centred on Bhar al Ghazal.

The SPLA, after taking a battering in the past few years, is undergoing a resurgence as neighbouring countries and international backers weary of Khartoum’s support for Islamic extremism and regional dissident groups. Late last year, it managed to roll back the government army from the Uganda border and is now within mortar range of the main southern town of Juba.

On Tuesday, a statement by the army general command said that it had lost two towns on the border with Ethiopia to the SPLA, assisted by Ethiopian mechanised units.

It claimed the Ethiopian army, “engaged in battles with our forces stationed in Yabus and Pochalla, resulting in the evacuation of our forces from these areas after coming under heavy bombardment and artillery shelling beside land attacks in which tanks and heavy weapons were used.”

Ethiopia has denied the accusation. But relations between the two countries are at an all-time low, with Addis Ababa accusing Khartoum of destabalisation and refusing to handover three Egyptian Islamic gunmen it claims were behind the assassination attempt on Egyptiam President Hosni Mubarak in Ethioipia last year.

Last year, of Sudan’s nine neighbours, three — Eritrea, Ethiopia and Uganda — cut diplomatic relations with Khartoum. Egypt has repeatedly clashed with Sudan over the disputed Halaib Triangle and is the exile home of several opposition figures.

The Sudanese opposition is calling for the overthrow of the government of Brig-Gen Omar al-Bashir and a national conference to which Garang would be invited to debate the repeal of Sharia law — imposed in 1983 — and Sudan’s return to a secular constitution.