How much longer will Sudan peace deal hold?

November 2, 2007 - Khartoum should have seen it coming. For nearly a year now, anger has been building up in the South over the National Congress Party-led (NCP) government’s refusal to implement the peace agreement. 

The NCP has rejected the recommendations of international experts assigned to draw the boundary of the oil-rich Abyei, yet the Comprehensive Peace Agreement bound the two parties to the experts’ decision. And rather than withdrawing to the north, Sudan’s armed forces have reinforced around the oil areas, yet they should have moved by July 9.

The north-south borders — which have a profound impact on the census in February and the elections and referendum afterwards — are yet to be demarcated, partly because Khartoum says some documents got burnt.

The north refused to agree to a reshuffle a Sudan People Liberation Movement (SPLM) ministers, yet the CPA gives powers to the SPLM chairman to dismiss or appoint SPLM ministers. 

A week after Southern Sudan announced that it had recalled its ministers and presidential advisers serving in the Government of National Unity, I strolled along the dirt road to the plush venue of the SPLM meeting. 

Upstairs, in a meeting room, officials held discussions late into the night as they hammered out positions on the communiqué they would issue a week later. After opening th e meeting, Southern Sudan President Salva Kiir went to tour the states bordering north Sudan.

The air smelled of impending doom.

“We are going back to war,” a security official remarked. “Salva Kiir has gone to mobilise.”

Word spread, even before the meeting ended, that the partnership between the SPLM and the NCP had ended.

President Kiir had, indeed, gone to tour the states bordering northern Sudan, but it was to assess the impact of floods, not mobilise for war.

Five days later, the SPLM Political Bureau recalled its ministers and presidential advisers in the national government.

“Our ministers will not report to work until these contentious issues are resolved,” SPLM Secretary-General Pagan Amum told journalists.

That day, Juba stood still. Not from a stampede nor from war rhetoric and a call on people to mobilise for war. It was a stillness borne of a feeling that something new was on the way.

People curled by battery-powered radio sets, whose broadcasts were drowned in the blare of the generators that power much of the town. Still, the town was calm. It was the sight of a nation psyched up for war, a nation that has been waiting for this war.

By some estimates, more than half the population of Southern Sudan has seen only war. Old people have never seen peace, except the lulls immediately following the signing of peace agreements. The 1972 Addis Ababa Agreement ended in 1983 after then President Jaffer Numeiri’s administration abrogated the truce. The truce in 1997 with South Sudan President Dr Riek Machar’s South Sudan Defence Forces, a breakaway rebel group from the Sudan People Liberation Army, ended in 2000 after it became clear that the mainly Arab north was only interested in it as long as it served its interests of subjugating the black and the largely animist south. 

As a result, many people in Juba see the CPA, signed in Naivasha, Kenya, merely as a temporary lull in an ongoing war.  They have got accustomed to waiting.

On the other side of town, President Kiir moved about much more like a statesman than a commander-in-chief faced with an impending war. 

While walking out of a meeting with investors planning what is perhaps this region’s largest project — $1.5 billion in three years,— Kiir stopped briefly at a restaurant to share a joke with a journalist and other SPLM officials. 

Throughout this standoff — at a church service and while addressing demonstrators — Kiir has maintained that the SPLM will not go back to war

But if there is fighting, the South Sudan President said, “We can fight, and what is wrong with that?”

The South does not need a war with the north, so why fight unless attacked? The issue that triggered the last wars — oppression — has nearly been eradicated. With the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the south not only runs nearly all its own affairs, but also has the right to determine its destiny in a referendum come 2011. Khartoum doesn’t appoint the South’s ministers, governors (except one state that is shared with the SPLM), commissioners, or president.

It’s the National Congress Party that needs a war to reverse any gains made by the south. But the signs are — and nearly everybody here agrees — that the NCP can’t afford a war front with the south.

In the west of the country, Darfuris, who fought the Arabs’ war against the black south, are fighting their own war for self-determination. The people of eastern Sudan are fighting the NCP government. The Nuba Mountains in the north is restive. And in Khartoum, the Islamists are furiously knocking at the door, hoping to rid the country of the moderate wing of the NCP government.

It’s the south that is holding the northern government together, much in the same way Darfur and Eastern Sudan held successive Khartoum regimes together against the south.

Another war would also be costly for the NCP because the south is much more united. Southern tribal quarrels still abound, but with remarkably reduced rancor, and with less likelihood they would degenerate into gun battles as often happened during the civil war, when rival tribal militias fought a long each side.

When I arrived in Juba a year ago, anti-Dinka feelings were so strong that at one time, chiefs met and decided to chase the Dinka out of Equatoria.

But when one has been here long enough, one understands the venomous anti-Dinka feelings, especially in South Sudan’s capital town: The town was part of the NCP machine during the war, and it was only natural that people resisted the reversal of dining table roles that favoured the tribe that formed the bulk of the rebel outfit. Anti-Dinka feelings have since subsided.

Many agree that the unity among Southerners owes much to Salva Kiir’s pragmatism. For instance, it is widely held in Juba that Kiir’s ascendancy to power forestalled a war that was about to break out because then SPLM chairman, John Garang, was not ready to reconcile with Southern militia who fought alongside Khartoum. This included the largest group, the South Sudan Defence Forces, commanded by Lt Gen Paulino Matip.

It is said that when Garang went to Khartoum, he initially refused to meet Matip, whose militia operated in the oil-rich states where he hails from.

Kiir, on the other hand, embraced Matip, and even made him deputy commander-in-chief. Some people believe that Khartoum wanted Mat ip to destabilise the SPLA from within. If that is true, then the reverse has happened.

This southern unity Kiir seemingly sought to enhance when, a day to the SPLM Political Bureau meeting, he promoted the Speaker of the Southern Sudan Legislative Assembly, and easily the most revered figure in the three states at the lower end of the south, to SPLM deputy chairperson, alongside Vice-President Riek Machar, and Maliik Agar, governor of Blue Nile State in the north. Machar had in July lost his post as Housing minister, partly because quarrels with Dr Garang’s widow, Rebecca Nyandeng, were seen as destructive to the nascent gove rnment.

The quarrels sank to a level where Nyandeng refused to recognise Machar as vice-president. Machar has clout in the northern regions of Southern Sudan.  Meanwhile, Agar’s promotion was largely seen as an attempt to woo the northerners in the Nuba Mountains who supported the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), but who have been complaining that the south dumped them immediately after it climbed up the ladder.

If the south has moved ahead — no matter how slowly — to mend historical tribal divisions, the north does not seem to have noticed.

For example, when Kiir sent the ministerial reshuffle list to Khartoum, President Omar el Bashir asked him why he wanted to move Foreign Affairs Minister Lam Akol, according to one source. Bashir sees Akol as effective, the south sees Akol as a man who has sold his soul and the region to Bashir. Bashir proposed the names of those he believed Kiir should reshuffle. When Kiir declined and Bashir didn’t reshuffle the ministers, Kiir recalled some of the SPLM ministers, one by one, and reassigned them different posts. The problem with that strategy was that he couldn’t swear in replacements.

It is surprising that al Bashir even considered asking Kiir to submit a different list. But by so doing, he has played right into the hands of a pulsating independence wave sweeping across southern Sudan. The secessionists have one more weapon to use against unity: the north, despite the constitution and the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, is not prepared to look at them as any more than former ser vants supposed to do the its bidding.

Khartoum, Southerners say,  has hang-ups from the 60 through the  90s when the south was good only as long as it was divided and they could rule it.

During the current crisis, it seems the north’s strategy has been to paint the south as disjointed and divided. Two days after the south’s walk-out from the national government, a presidential adviser told the press in Khartoum that the South was divided over the resolution, yet only one state minister had cried out — not against the decision, but that he didn’t know how to survive without a job.

Bashir met Joseph Okello, the leader of the Union of Sudan African Parties, a secessionist political party that proclaimed itself mediator, but he first declined to meet Machar, whom Kiir sent with the South’s resolutions. Perhaps with the assurance of people who knew they had the upper hand, Machar’s team left the resolutions at the Republican Palace in Khartoum and headed back to Juba. Machar was stopped just as he was leaving; Apparently, Bashir had had a change of heart and would meet him. But Bashir had no choice. Even the political party that offered to mediate later supported the SPLM; it would be political suicide to oppose such a decision in the South.

In return, Bashir announced a ministerial reshuffle ahead of a meeting with Kiir.

After a four-hour meeting, Kiir and Bashir disagreed. Kiir flew back to the South. The reshuffle, Presidential Affairs minister Luka Biong told national television, “is at the bottom of our demands”.

His comments are an apparent reaction to sections of the international community and analysts who, to the surprise of many, reduced the confrontation to a disagreement over a ministerial list. In such reports, which reduce the confrontation to a petty quarrel over posts while silent on the major concerns, some Southerners sense that sections of the international community are trying to arm-twist the South into returning to government.

Arabs and Arab governments openly work against secession because it chips away at the Arab empire. And whether true or not, Southerners feel that the current US administration’s policy is for unity, so that the South can serve as a counterpoint to plots by Islamists to overrun Sudan.

Despite backing by sections of the international community, Khartoum’s failure to read the South’s reaction is its Achilles’ heel.

This is not to say that the south doesn’t have its own Achilles’ heel. The South’s is its failure to diversify its sources of  income. It depends entirely on Khartoum’s goodwill to send the monthly oil money on time. Every month, the ministries wait for the fluctuating oil money — between $60m and $120m — to fund the government’s entire budget.

This could be Khartoum’s weapon against it. Bashir’s government could ignore the south and punish it by withholding the monthly budget.

That, however, would be a direct violation of the peace agreement. And with the people psyched up for secession, it a decision to withhold oil money would only lead to what the south is cl amouring for: A unilateral declaration of independence.

After living in Juba for a year, I have not found a single Southerner who wants unity. The mistrust of the Arabic north won’t die tomorrow just because that is what sections of the international community want.

To keep the country together, the north must rebuild trust. One way would be by the ruling party fielding a Southerner for president in 2009. But the north is currently not winning over any Southerner by its failure to implement key aspects of the peace agreement.

Khartoum could be tempted to react to a declaration of independence with war. But wars for independence are rather difficult to defeat because they tend to galvanise the population behind the insurgents. Perhaps nothing in the South unites the people like the word “Jallaba”, as they call Arabs because of the brown skin, but voiced with deep anger.

“With a war, it’s not the weapons that count,” Nhial Bol, editor-in-chief of The Citizen, said. “It’s the people, and they decide, they can fight whether it is with sticks and stones.”

The Biafra insurgents lost largely because the Cold War politics was stacked against them, with the West interested in them only as long as they remained part of Nigeria to provide a check against the Nigerian central government. With the Cold War over, not many powers would put themselves on the line for another country embroiled in a civil war, which explains why the Yugoslavian and Eritrean wars succeeded.

A war could also disrupt the oil supplies on which Khartoum relies to fight on its other war fronts.

It’s not lost on Southerners that Khartoum can’t go the war road. Nor is it lost on them that the Arabs are stalling over the peace agreement. The Arabs, the Southerners say, want to resolve the Darfur war quickly, which would free them to fight another war with the South, rather than implement the peace agreement.

As news filtered through from Khartoum that Kiir had walked out of the meeting with Bashir without agreement, Juba seemed to erupt into a celebratory mood.

“This is the best decision they have ever made,” Luka Mariak, a deputy communications officer at the Presidency, said of the refusal by the south to rejoin government even after Kiir’s meeting with al Bashir. “This is the right time to take that decision.”

The south has given the north up to J anuary 9, the anniversary of the signing of the CPA,  to respond. That date could as well read Independence Day.  A unilateral declaration of independence by the South could see the other marginalised groups in Darfur, Eastern Sudan and the Nuba Mountains unilaterally seek independence.

And with the oil supplies possibly disrupted in the south, the NCP regime would not have the resources to buy political loyalty and fend off the Islamists in Khartoum, who are possibly baying for President al Bashir’s blood, annoyed that he has sold out to the US.

Considering the wave for independence, the international communit y has two options: Push for Sudan’s unity and risk a messy backlash, or force Khartoum to implement the peace treaty to the letter and hope that this wins the South’s trust and reign in the pro-independence wave.

The south’s walkout of government is not a checkmate, still, it’s a check. The chips are so stacked against the NCP — to say otherwise is spurious — this time round that, perhaps for the first time in Sudan’s history, the north has one choice: do the South’s bidding. The alternatives would be ugly.

Africa Insight is an initiative of the Nation Media Group’s Africa Media Network Project.