SUDAN-POLITICS: Push for Southern Autonomy Splits Rebels

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Dec 16 1996 (IPS) - Farouk Saleh Mohamed Abdalla quit the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) earlier this month after six years in the bush aiding its rebellion against the Islamic regime in Khartoum.

A top member of an SPLA ally, the banned Sudan Communist Party (SCP), Abdalla (49), left the SPLA citing racial discrimination, a scourge which has pitted Sudan’s Arab majority in the north against the African minority in the south, since independence from Britain in January 1956.

“The magnitude of the discrimination is so bad that I survived seven attempts on my life in six years. I had been detained by (the) SPLA many times. I had been physically beaten, abused and so forth. All because I’m an Arab and a northerner,” said Abdalla.

According to Abdalla, the most recent incident occurred in 1994 while he and colleagues were fleeing a government army attack on Pageri, a garrison town 30 kms from the border with Uganda, when an SPLA officer ordered him shot by his troops.

“It was evening and I, taking advantage of the cover of the darkness, ran and jumped into a stream of water. I stayed in the stinking water which filled up to my chin, for six hours, braving deadly mosquitoes,” he told IPS. “The soldiers stayed in the area for about five hours shooting a barrage of bullets over my head and everywhere. Thank God, I survived.”

That same night, Abdalla surrendered to a Catholic priest at Loa Mission, five km south of Pageri.

According to Abdalla, 73 northerners have left the SPLA following cases of alleged racial discrimination since the organisation’s formation in 1993.

Among the others who have defected are Badr el Din, a musician, who joined the SPLA in 1991 and quit three years later, and Lt. Hafis Ibrahim who joined in 1985, but left after nine years. Ibrahim is now a businessman in Wad Medani, 100 kms south of the Sudanese capital, Khartoum.

Abdalla, who originates from Atbara, 300 kms north of Khartoum, said only several northerners remain in active service in the SPLA, in southern Sudan.

One of them is Commander Yasser Said Arman, a broadcaster with an opposition radio station in Asmara, capital of Eritrea, a tiny Red Sea state backing an alliance of Sudanese opposition groups against the Islamic Mullahs in Khartoum. The others include Commanders Yasser Jaffar and Abdel Bagir, in the ‘New Sudan Brigade’, another Sudanese opposition group in Eritrea.

“The elements of northern Sudanese within the rebel movement are confined within the SPLA Headquarters in southern Sudan as a way of subjugating them to surveillance,” said Abdalla.

Abdalla alleges that “many” northerners in the SPLA were killed by southern fighters for “dubious” reasons. Among them were three top renegade northern army officers, killed by the late SPLA Commander William Nyon in 1995.

Another, Dr. Zein el Abdin al Muthadar, was killed when a prison in which he was being kept at Pageri was bombed by a Sudanese military fighter plane in 1993, Abdalla said.

Abdalla, who was trained but had never been deployed to any unit, said that the SPLA kept two major camps for prisoners of war (POWs) in southern Sudan.

One at Natinga, on the border with Kenya, accommodates 73 soldiers and senior army officers, who were captured by Nyon in April 1995. The other, on a mountain near New Kush, a remote garrison post on the border with Uganda, accommodates over 100 soldiers and civilians.

“They live in a very appalling situation,” he said.

Abdalla’s defection on Dec. 9 comes six months after the Nuba, members of the largest black minority in northern Sudan, broke away from the SPLA in June.

Nuba poet and novelist Mohamed Haroun Kafi who formed the SPLA/Nuba Mountains Movement in late June says his people are angry at the way the SPLA has treated them, although thousands have given their lives for its 14-year insurgency against Khartoum.

Thousands of Nuba, attracted by Garang’s vow to “liberate Sudan from the minority Arab clique” joined the rebel group over the years and many died fighting the Sudanese army in the south.

The crack in the Nuba-Southern Alliance surfaced after three top rebel officers broke away from Garang in 1991. The final stroke came when Garang, to the chagrin of the Nuba, signed an accord with north Sudanese political exiles in Asmara last year, whereby the northern opposition recognised the SPLA’s demand for self-determination for the south.

Kafi, who has now returned to Khartoum, sees this as a sign that the SPLA is concerned only with the future of southern Sudan and intends to leave the Nuba to their fate.

“Later we discovered that we were being used by the southerners to fight their war,” said Kafi. “Every agreement signed, the south wins. What’s going to be the fate of the Nuba? We feel that the Nuba have been betrayed.”

Kafi supports the controversial Political Charter calling for a peaceful settlement of the Sudanese conflict, signed in Khartoum in April by Riak Machar and Kerubino Kwanyin Bol, respectively the leaders of the Southern Sudan Independence Movement (SSIM) and of the SPLA Bahr el Ghazal Group.

Abdalla, who is planning to return to Khartoum soon and has joined Kafi’s group, said: “I have now decided to direct my efforts and energy towards the realisation of peace and unity in the current Sudanese conflict through dialogue and other peaceful avenues.”

Abdalla is sceptical of continued northern support for the SPLA: “I doubt it. No one will join it.”

However, SPLA backers in Nairobi where Abdalla temporarily resides have slated him as a Khartoum government spy.

“Nonsense,” he quipped. “I have decided to quit the movement because it has veered away from its original intention. In other words, the SPLA has veered away from its Manifesto of 1983, and there is a lack of observance of its basic provisions in the areas of justice, freedom of equality for all Sudanese.”