SUDAN-POLITICS: No End of Civil War in Sight, Despite Accord

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Nhial Bol and Moyiga Nduru

KHARTOUM, Apr 12 1996 (IPS) - There is no sign that Sudan’s 13-year civil war is coming to an end. Despite the government-sponsored fanfare accompanying the signing of a political charter between two southern rebel factions and the Islamic regime this week, few here seem to be taking the accord seriously.

“It is a joke,” said a top official of the banned Ummah party, whose leader Sadiq al Mahdi was deposed in 1989 by current strongman, Lt-Gen. Omar Hassan al Bashir.

Bashir, who is backed by the country’s Islamic fundamentalists, has described the charter as the first step to yet another attempt at a negotiated settlement of the Sudanese conflict.

The two rebel leaders, Riak Machar of the Southern Sudan Independence Movement (SSIM) and Kerubino Kwanyin Bol of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA-United) held a joint press conference here Wednesday to explain the reasons for abandoning the bush war.

“In the history of human struggle, war is never an end in itself but rather a means to express frustrations, grievances and dissatisfaction. Without any doubt, the current civil war in the Sudan has delivered this message of discontent loud and clear. It is time that a peaceful solution to the conflict is pursued with vigor, and now,” said Machar.

“In order to avoid resorting again to armed confrontation in the future between the people of the south and the central government as a way of resolving constitutional, political and other differences, elaborate legal and constitutional procedures ought to be worked out and agreed upon for the ascertainment through a referendum of the views of the people of southern Sudan,” he said.

Bol stressed he was the one who started the current conflict but now he wanted to be the one to end it. “We took up arms for genuine reasons and now we are laying them down for genuine reasons,” he said.

The colourful signing ceremony was however marked by the absence of Southern politicians. More importantly, the main southern rebel movement, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) of Col. John Garang, has dismissed the accord.

“It’s a total surrender,” says Pagan Amum, the SPLA spokesman in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.

But David de Chand, the SSIM representative in Nairobi, disagrees. He said the signing did not mark capitulation, “it also does not mean that the SSIM/A has become part of the government of Sudan. The SSIM/A is still an independent entity, capable of making decisions for the interest of the people of south Sudan.”

He appealed to the international community to support the initiative. “The people of Sudan have shed blood for the last forty years. Thus, this peace initiative is the best hope for Sudan and its suffering people. Peace is better than war. We hope that nobody on earth would be anti-peace.”

The current conflict erupted in May 1983 when a garrison in Bor, 100 km north of the main southern town of Juba, mutinied. The mutineers, commanded by Bol, was joined by Garang who was then on leave in his hometown.

Their later justification for the launch of the SPLA, after a 1972 peace agreement ended nearly two decades of secessionist struggle, was that the then government of Jafar Nimeiri had imposed Islamic Sharia law throughout the country — including the non-Muslim South — under the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The SPLA were also opposed to the redivision of the South which was also announced in the “September laws” on the grounds that it was intended to weaken the region.

But the SPLA, unlike its ‘Anya Nya’ (snake venom) rebel predecessor, never declared it was a secessionist movement, although many of its supporters backed the idea. Garang instead argued that the SPLA was fighting to liberate all marginalised areas of the country from the political and economic domination of a Khartoum-based elite, not just the black African South.

By the late 1980s, he was in control of more than 80 percent of the South and the Nuba mountains in western Darfur province.

Bol was Garang’s deputy until 1987 when he was arrested and detained for insubordination. He was set free after a group of senior officers, led by Machar, split from Garang in August 1991 in opposition to what they declared was his “autocratic tendencies.”

“Garang humiliated us, imprisoned us and some of our colleagues died in his hands,” said Bol.

The new faction, at least in public, demanded independence for the South.

Bol said he took up arms to fight the government in Khartoum to achieve a better life for his people. “Instead we have witnessed sufferings of all kinds…the death toll among our people has reached intolerable proportions.”

“I believe that the time has come to put an end to the suffering of the children in the South. We want our children to go to school, have access to medical treatment and normal life should resume in the South like in other parts of the Sudan,” he said.

Soon after his release, Bol joined SPLA-United before its name was changed to SSIM by Machar in October 1995. He retreated to his home area of Gogrial, in Bahr al Ghazal region, with the intention of dislodging Garang’s forces.

Both he and Garang belong to the Dinka ethnic group, the largest in the south. Machar is backed by his Nuer people, the second largest in the region and traditional rivals.

That rivalry has led to the deaths of thousands of ordinary villagers in fighting by both sides whose intensity has surpassed the conflict with the government army.

Garang is unlikely to join the peace initiative unless the government agrees at least to repeal Sharia. He has instead teamed up with northern opposition groups determined to overthrow the entrenched regime.

The amount of military pressure the SPLA will be able to put on Khartoum will depend on whether the Nuers will go along with Machar. If they do, Garang’s forces will remain pinned in the Equatoria region on the border with Kenya and Uganda.