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Africa Confidential www.africa-confidential.com 27 June 2003 Vol 44 No 13 AFRICA CONFIDENTIAL SUDAN 2 SUDAN Getting away with it The National Islamic Front ‘Oppressive and totalitarian’ government is expert at double- The government threatens the Machakos peace process by holding speak but it is easier to persuade on to its Islamist state the outside world than the ‘Khartoum will never go back to being a secular capital and what forced us to execute the 30 June 1989 Sudanese. As the Machakos peace talks stumble, the strains coup was the conspiracy against Sharia and the attempt to abrogate it’. Thus, on 18 June, President Omer are showing. Hassan Ahmed el Beshir admitted for the first time why the National Islamic Front had made its coup d’état when it did. That ‘conspiracy’ was in fact a peace process so advanced that the whole Sudan was anxiously awaiting a meeting between Premier El Sadig Sadeeg el Mahdi and the Sudan People’s LIBERIA 3 Liberation Army/Movement leader, John Garang de Mabior. This peace process was very different Weird scenes inside from the current one under Western auspices at Machakos, Kenya. It involved all northern Sudanese parties (except the NIF, which opposed it), had no foreign mediators and envisaged the constitutional the gold-mine separation of state and religion. President Charles Taylor vowed to The Machakos talks were in trouble before Lieutenant General Omer’s address to the Popular fight on as LURD rebels were once Organisation for Defending the Faith and the Homeland. There has been theoretical agreement on again heading for Monrovia’s city holding a referendum on self-determination in the south but Khartoum is also saying it won’t allow centre and the Executive Mansion. secession. There is even less agreement on power-sharing, oil-revenue-sharing, the ‘marginalised areas’ Unless an exit can be negotiated, Taylor faces a choice between between south and north (Abyei, Nuba Mountains, Southern Blue Nile) and security (one army or two? fighting to the death and fleeing to AC Vol 44 No 12). One participant said it was ‘a bizarre experience’ to witness the SPLM negotiating the bush. with the mediators while the NIF sat in silence, monitoring. In the last round, which collapsed in May, there were no face-to-face meetings and minimal delegations. LIBERIA 4 Earlier this year, the NIF was talking as if peace were just around the corner, and discussing mechanisms and modalities. There was no sense though that wrongs were being righted or profound How the Ghana talks issues discussed. The make-or-break issue looks like being the relationship between state and religion: the NIF insists on its version of Sharia constitutional and criminal law but southerners of all parties will stalled never accept national unity in an ‘Islamic’ state. Omer’s address fuelled the fire. ‘We want a banner that The peace-brokering efforts of says this war is against Sharia and we will all come out for Jihad so that I can cleanse the misdeeds I Nigeria’s former military leader, committed in this life against myself and others and meet my God as a martyr’. He described some General Abdulsalami Abubakar at misdeeds: ‘We were oppressive and totalitarian and we used to arrest, flog and gaol people’, blaming them the Liberia talks in Accra were edging towards success but have on Hassan Abdullah el Turabi (then at the apex of his power) and his followers – most of whom are still been sidelined by renewed fighting in power, including Omer and the then security boss, Nafi’e Ali Nafi’e, now Federal Affairs Minister. in Monrovia. Now oppositionists are accusing their Ghanaian hosts The perils of secularist chatter of bias – for being too cosy with It did not sound as though the President’s priority was a peace deal. Indeed, he said war was preferable President Taylor’s officials. to renouncing Sharia. Omer is famous for his outbursts and the NIF is a master of uncertainty and contradiction; some apparent gaffes have later looked like decisive moves. He repeated his key points CONGO-KINSHASA 5 several times, suggesting he meant them: that the Machakos Protocol signed in August 2002 had completely resolved the issue of whether Khartoum was to be a secular capital and that Colonel Garang Nobody’s moving was trying to abort Machakos by raising the Sharia question. The constitution in fact opens anyone who The UN Security Council has discusses secularism to the charge of Ridda (apostasy), which carries the death sentence. ordered the political factions to The President also attacked political leaders: El Turabi (whose faction, now calling itself the Popular agree on a power-sharing Congress, renewed its pact with the SPLA/M on 3 June); Umma Party leader El Sadig el Mahdi (whom government in Kinshasa by 30 the NIF overthrew as Premier in its 1989 coup); and Mohamed Osman el Mirghani, leader of the June. Some Council members are also backing a bigger UN Democratic Unionist Party and Chairperson of the opposition National Democratic Alliance. On 24 May peacekeeping force in eastern El Sadig and Mohamed Osman, a lead figure in the 1988-89 peace process, and Garang signed the Cairo Congo, an arms embargo and the Declaration, which calls for national unity and a national capital treating ‘all religions and beliefs as prosecution of war criminals. equal’ (the nearest the two ‘sectarian leaders’ get to saying secular law). Secularism may be the issue on which Machakos fails or succeeds. POINTERS 8 In its 1995 Asmara Declaration, the NDA committed itself to the separation of religion and politics in the whole country, i.e. a secular constitution. The Cairo Declaration is the first public and united stirring Nigeria, Nigeria & of the leaders of the Islamic DUP and Umma (and of the northern part of the NDA) since the Machakos United Nations/Africa talks began in June 2002. Till now, NDA leaders, like the SPLM’s, have been afraid to criticise the peace talks for fear of being accused of war-mongering. The new declaration is a sign of the politicians’ hope 27 June 2003 Africa Confidential Vol 44 No 13 Getting away with it The National Islamic Front knows that, if it plays its cards right, the ● convincing outsiders it alone represents Sudan, Sudanese and Islam; parameters set at Machakos will continue. Few now question the ● convincing people its ‘project’ has failed, so peace is inevitable; government’s legitimacy; few now mention the Declaration of Principles ● convincing Westerners and Arabs that what Hassan el Turabi stands that it signed up to in 1997 under the Inter-Governmental Authority on for is no longer NIF policy; Development peace process, whose forgotten pillar was the separation of ● making people forget it that it had offered the south self-determination state and religion. Soon, it hopes, nobody will talk about democracy or (even secession: infisal) in 1989 and the 1997 Khartoum Peace Accord (in human rights. February 2003, Britain’s then Development Secretary, Clare Short, When asked about democracy, British Special Representative Alan called it a ‘breakthrough’); Fletcher Goulty said: ‘You have to make sacrifices to get peace’. ● transforming the debate about secular Sudan into one about the capital It is almost as if the NIF had a check-list of points to settle. Since the or part of it; Machakos talks began in June 2002, it has got away with: ● establishing moral equivalence at Machakos with the far less powerful ● presenting the war as the only issue; Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement; ● making people think a lasting peace can be established without ● taking over the economy in the guise of privatisation: we hear hundreds democracy or human rights; of NIF companies are moving to Indonesia and Malaysia; ● massacring civilians to clear oil areas in Upper Nile; ● convincing the International Monetary Fund and World Bank it’s ● air bombardment of civilians in Darfur; broke when it has the oil-money it needs for military expenditure; the ● getting rid of the effective United Nations Human Rights Special Bank’s Ishaq Diwan enthuses about a post-war ‘quick impact programme’; Rapporteur, Gerhart Baum; ● giving the impression it was reluctant host to Usama bin Laden and ● building the Western Upper Nile oil road it had agreed under Machakos Al Qaida, not part of the same Islamist strategy; to halt; ● making gestures of anti-terrorist cooperation; ● convincing foreigners it wants only power and money, not an Islamist ● confirming Egypt’s belief that an independent south threatens the Nile; revolution; ● convincing the Arab world the Sudan war is against Arabism and Islam. that Machakos could bring down the NIF. One scenario envisages nudging the NIF, which has ruled through Sadig returned to Sudan in 2000 after an agreement with Omer in terror for 14 years, back into polite pluralistic society. This ignores November 1999, which triggered Sadig’s split from the NDA. He now three fundamental points. Firstly, it is hard to imagine a Sudanese distances himself in turn from both government and opposition, public, after those 14 years, accepting the NIF as just another party all earning criticism from his own party and losing a faction of it to the over again. Secondly, international acceptance of the NIF would (and NIF. His cousin Mubarek Abdullahi el Fadl el Mahdi is now already does) send a brutal message when war criminals and torturers Assistant to the President. Sadig’s traditional and religious Ansar are being tried from Arusha to the Hague and international impunity followers unexpectedly attacked the NIF on 20 June; that was widely is slowly crumbling. Sudan’s torturers may yet face justice at home understood as support for a secular capital, which they prefer to the or abroad.
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