The Root Causes of Sudan's Civil Wars

North and south

Although the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, in western Sudan, has captured international media attention, it is still hoped that events there will not derail the peace process, aimed at ending the civil war in Sudan, the longest-running of all African conflicts. The signing of a series of peace protocols in Naivasha, Kenya, in May, between the Government and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), the main rebel group in the South, may have appeared to augur well. But the Naivasha peace agreement solves few of the long-term problems of Sudan -- even of the South. The fact that Darfur's separate uprising has been met with characteristically brutal repressive measures shows that little has changed in the Government's treatment of dissent.

Douglas H. Johnson is a specialist in the history of the Nuer people of South Sudan; he writes with a degree of sympathy and compassion unusual among scholars, making his book a practical contribution to the search for peace. War in Sudan has in fact been almost continuous since independence in 1956. Most analyses interpret this state of conflict in terms of the deep differences between the Muslim and predominantly Arabized Northern part of the country and the non-Arab, largely non-Muslim South. The quest for peace has thus involved a search for some political, economic and cultural accommodation between the two regions that can serve to keep the country united. But this approach has never worked. The Root Causes of Sudan's Civil Wars seeks to go beyond this binary model, returning to the historical origins of the Sudanese state in order to understand its failure in the present day. As Johnson explains, until the twentieth century there was no state called Sudan. The country was a geographical entity that had never come fully under any government, let alone a single, united government.

The nineteenth-century Turko-Egyptian invaders brought the Arab and Islamic tribes of Northern Sudan under their control to some degree. So did the Anglo Egyptian Condominium that followed and ruled Sudan until independence. But even during the Condominium, South Sudan was never fully under a central authority. The tenuous pacification that was achieved during the fifty years of British administration was through indirect rule. Armed resistance continued up until the 1930s. Since the 1950s no attempt to subject the people of the South to direct authority has worked.

The critical period for the future of the entity called Sudan was the final decade of the Condominium, from 1946 to 1955, just before independence, when the colonial powers imposed the notion of a unitary state that yoked the North and South together. Before this, the relationship between the two parts of the country was one in which, as Johnson characterizes it, the North had, for generations, preyed on the South for slave soldiers and food supplies. South Sudanese contend that the raids for slaves and natural resources have not ended, even now.

Unfortunately, most Northern Sudanese believe to this day that the Arabization and Islamization of Sudan was interrupted by colonialism and that it should be resumed. As Johnson explains, the attempted incorporation of the South into the Arab-Islamic polity has been pursued by a divide-and-rule approach: successive governments have engaged in tactics aimed at securing themselves in power, rather than resolving the fundamental inequities in the country, playing one group of Southerners off against another, with offers of limited access to state privilege.
No Northern government has seriously tried to find a formula of sharing the country with the peoples of the South.

Now, with the peace agreement in Kenya, there is a danger of the same thing happening again. The agreement is between just two belligerents, the Islamist Government that has ruled Sudan since 1989 and the principal armed southern rebel group, the SPLM/A. Here Johnson's clear vision of the importance of the South in the national question is blurred somewhat by his view of the negotiations, which seems overly influenced by the policies of the SPLM/A and other so-called liberation movements. In my view, these armed Southern factions do not present clear choices for the people of South Sudan.

On the central issue of the conflict, the SPLM/A has always been ambivalent. Is it fighting for the independence of the South or for the transformation of the entire country into something its leader, Dr John Garang, calls "New Sudan"? In the areas controlled by the SPLM/A a Stalinist system of administration has evolved that has left the military wing of the liberation movement almost a tribal entity of its own among the many tribes of the South. Leaders of the SPLM/A have economic and political interests that depend on war, which means that their interests are not the same as those of the people of the South. The fear is that the recent peace agreement will merely consolidate these interests. Any talk of a civilian administration in the liberated areas of the South in the prevailing circumstances is a political fiction. In the North also, the governing National Islamic Front, with its history of violent suppression of political dissent, cannot be held to represent anything except a narrow section of the population. The critical issue for all Southern Sudanese must be whether the South will finally be able to exercise the right of self-determination and final independence from the North. This is what most Southerners have been fighting for. The peace agreement specifies that a referendum will be held on this issue in six years' time. Yet the Khartoum Government clings to the idea of the unity of Sudan; it concedes the right of the South to self-determination only as a negotiating tactic. Six years provides a long time in which to undermine the agreement, something at which the Government of Sudan is expert.

It is hard, then, to share even Douglas Johnson's guarded optimism concerning the peace negotiations. As he himself points out, an agreement that excludes other political forces of the North and the South will not be peace for the whole country. So, like previous peace agreements, it is unlikely to endure.

Bona Malwal was Editor of the now-banned Sudan Times. He is the author of "People and Power in Sudan: The struggle for national stability" (1981)

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