Sudan: An Exhausted Country

By: Gerard Prunier, Professor, associated to the Centre of African Research, Paris

Sudan has recently reappeared in the news because of the freeing of over a thousand slaves by the Swiss-based NGO Christian Solidarity International. Unfortunately this is not another piece of journalistic sensationalism but a relevant way of looking at the war which is still tearing apart the largest country on the African continent.

Sixteen years after this conflict started, it does not seem to be nearing any form of reconciliation even if battle fatigue might actually bring it to an inconclusive end in the not too distant future. The war itself is not at present a major shooting war any more. Regular skirmishes occur either in the South (Eastern Equatoria) or in the East (Southern Blue Nile Province) but both the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army (SPLA) guerrilla organization and the government forces are exhausted, dispirited and short of cash.

Regional warlordism
The main area of confrontation has switched to the western province of Bahr-el-Ghazal where a famine broke out last year. This famine, at times wrongly presented as a "natural" sahelian dry-zone phenomenon, was in fact largely a by-product of the military activities of Kerubino Kwanyin Bol, a notorious local warlord. Kerubino, a former SPLA high-ranking officer, fell out with SPLA leader Colonel John Garang in 1987 and was jailed for six years. After he escaped he joined the anti-SPLA splinter group led by Riak Machar, in alliance with Khartoum. But in January 1998, after having wrought havoc on his native province at the government's behest he suddenly switched sides and attacked the provincial capital of Wau. His assault failed but brought further devastation to the region. A few months later, Kerubino fell out again with Garang after confused wrangling in Nairobi where the two men traded mutual accusations of attempted murder. Kerubino fled back to Bahr-el-Ghazal and is now trying to reorganize his mercenary force, all the while courting again Khartoum's favour.

The famine which developed during the summer of 1998 in Bahr-el-Ghazal as a result of three years of almost constant depredations led the humanitarian organizations to negotiate a local cease-fire between the SPLA and the government. This cease-fire, still theoretically in force today, was at best partial. In spite of it the attacks of the Murahaleen Arab militiamen on the African Dinka pastoralists who support the SPLA never stopped. Although it arms and equips them, the Khartoum government pretends not to be responsible for the Murahaleen raids. They have caused a lot of havoc and are responsible for most of the slave captures recently reported in the international media. This is a very old pattern. The Murahaleen raiding parties (ghazua or razzia in the English form) are made up of nomads from the Rizzeyqat and Missiriya tribes. They have been raiding for slaves among the African Nuba and Dinka groups since the 16th century at least. This practice was only stopped by the British after 1898. But when the second civil war broke out in the nineteen eighties it was resumed under the "democratic" government of Sadiq al-Mahdi. The present regime merely followed the path of least resistance by allowing the nomads to keep raiding.

Slave raids are not the only paradoxical aspect of the present low-intensity phase of the conflict. Another is the fighting in the Muglad-Bentiu area of Wihda Province between the various southern forces "loyal" to the government. Apart from Kerubino's men there are two other groups, one led by a long-time Nuer collaborator with the Arabs, Paulino Mathiep, and the other by Riak Machar, also a Nuer but from a different clan, and a former challenger of Colonel Garang for the control of the SPLA. Since the area of the fighting is the zone where the new oil pipeline should start, its control will bring centre stage importance for whoever controls it. For the time being the Sudanese Army seems content with biding its time and waiting to deal with the winner. Although the government is keen on getting the oil out, it knows that under the present circumstances with a barrel at US$9.50 on the international market while Sudanese crude production costs are between US$13 and US$14 a barrel, it cannot export it. A small refinery is being built in the northern Khartoum suburb of al-Jayli for domestic use and the war for the control of the oil fields is more at the level of a local clash than at that of a major international oil war. This brings little comfort to the civilian population which bears most of the consequences of the fighting.

Confused civilian politics
If the war has disintegrated into regional warlordism civilian politics seems equally confused and uncertain. Starting last October, the Khartoum regime equipped itself with a new Bill which was called in the western media the Political Organizations Bill. The Arab wording was a lot more ambiguous. It was called tanzin at-tewalli as-siyassi which could be roughly translated as "law of the politics of continuity" . In other words, the Islamist regime was planning to authorize political "organizations" (not parties) which would be tewalli i.e. in line with the original objectives of the "30 June (1989) revolution" *. Organizations considered not tewalli simply would not be registered. But the regime hoped other "friendly" organizations would flourish and steal the electorate of the former democratic parties. This was a ploy to try to pass off its authoritarianism as democratic, a ploy which was not without some media impact since press agencies wrote dispatches about the "new multi-party bill" . But if the move was to be more than simple window-dressing there had to be a number of splits within the then exiled opposition parties (illegal since the 30 June 1989 coup) which would be betrayed by splinter groups from within the country. This did not happen.

Apart from a small number of people led by Sharif az-Zeyn al-Hindi, calling themselves the "Democratic Unionist Party" (DUP) and pretending to usurp that real party's name, all the other parties were either tiny groups without a following or simple emanations of the ruling Mutammar al-Watani (Patriotic Congress, the former single party). This left the Islamist leadership in a state of complete disarray, with a severe conflict developing between Hassan al-Turabi, the regime ideo-logue and intellectual father of tewalli politics on the one hand and President Omar Hassan al-Beshir on the other hand. To many observers' surprise, it was Beshir who managed to swing the majority of the ruling party's heavyweights behind him. After a short power struggle between November 1998 and January 1999, Turabi lost control of the State and Party apparatuses. But if this did mean something at the personal level, it did not at the ideological level since the winners of the power struggle did not dare to backtrack and so went on with the tewalli pseudo-opening previously decided by Turabi.

The "victorious" hard-liners had criticized tewalli politics from the point of view of realism, saying that given its impopularity in the country, the regime might not be able to control even a modest and limited form of political opening. It soon appeared that they had been right. On 1 January 1999 a major demonstration followed the sending of a petition to the President asking for real multipartyism and democracy. All the banned parties re-started to operate in the open without even bothering to register as they had said they would in their petition to the President. By mid-February even the hard-liners did not know what to do any more. To try to shift the burden of proof to their opponents they created a Commission for National Dialogue hoping that, as they had done before, the exiled leadership of the democratic parties would refuse to take part in it. This time, they accepted. Caught between this acceptance from outside and the pressure from inside the country, the regime is at present incapable of initiative.

Potentially the major loser could be the southern movement. There is already a historical precedent. In 1977, the then President Jaafar al-Nimeiry called back the exiled parties in an exercise called musallaha al-Watani (Patriotic Reconciliation). Both the regime and the exiled parties were dominated by Arabs and the political cost of the operation was paid by the African Southerners, thus leading indirectly to the second civil war a few years later. The same thing could happen to the SPLA and Colonel Garang has been very active of late, discussing frantically with everybody from the US Government to Colonel Gaddhafi by way of the Israelis and the Eritreans to try to obtain guarantees that an "Arab" reconciliation will not take place on the back of his people.

This is a distinct possibility since the US, the present regime's main enemy, could easily content itself with such an agreement. In addition this "solution" has the enthusiastic support of Cairo which hopes for a "quick fix" peace in order to re-open the work on the Jonglei canal and to start new water projects in Southern Sudan. Egypt needs the water and does not trust the SPLA. Of course such a "solution" would not solve anything and would only lead, sooner or later, to a third round of fighting between Northern and Southern Sudan.