THE IMPASSE IN THE CIVIL WAR.

• Author: Lesch, Ann M.

THE CIVIL WAR IN THE SUDAN is at an impasse. The government and the Sudan Peoples Liberation Movement (SPLM) remain at loggerheads. Moreover, the government and opposition are dividing into warring factions, epitomized by the power struggle between Islamists and the defection of the Umma leader from the opposition National Democratic Alliance (NDA). Meanwhile, the fighting has caused almost unimaginable human suffering and devastation. More than half of the population of the south has died or fled their homes. War-induced famine has been caused by the government and its militias, which burn villages, steal cattle and human beings, and destroy stored food grains. The contestants also struggle for control over vital oil fields located in the south.

Although the civil war began in 1983, its intensity and human devastation have increased since the National Islamic Front (NIF) seized power in 30 June 1989 through a military coup d'etat. The Islamist government transformed the civil war into a religious jihad (holy war) in which soldiers have the duty to kill those who fight against its authority. The fatwa (Islamic legal opinion issued by religious scholars) states: "He who is a Muslim among the rebels is an apostate, and non-Muslims a heathen...both standing in the face of the Islamic call (dawa), and it is the duty of Islam to fight and kill both categories." [1] In addition to the proclamation of jihad, under which soldiers swear the baya (religious oath of allegiance) to President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the Penal Code of 1991 based criminal law on Shari'a (Islamic law). [2] Residents of the south are only exempted from five of the 186 articles of that code, those that relate to enforcing certain provisions of the hudud (religiously prescribed punishme nts). Non-Muslims who live in the north have hudud applied to them, and all citizens must abide by Shari'a commercial and civil codes. The constitution promulgated in 1998-99 affirms that Islamic public law applies to all Sudanese citizens, even though a third are not Muslim and even though many Muslims object to its rigid provisions and in-built discrimination.

The SPLM rejects this religious-based system. It calls for the separation of religion and state and for a constitutional system that accords legal equality to all citizens. The SPLM insists on the restoration of democracy and the devolution of power to the regions. Moreover, the SPLM maintains that unity is conditional: In the absence of democracy, equality under the law, and the separation of state and religion, the marginalized peoples must have the right to secede. This right to self-determination must be operationalized by a vote in a referendum during the interim period, which would give the southerners and other marginalized peoples their choice between remaining within the Sudan and establishing their own state. [3] While a few members of the government accept the idea that the south could secede, as a means to create a cohesive Muslim state in the north and to end the drain that the war causes on manpower and the economy, [4] the dominant view is that the south is an essential part of the Sudan, an i mportant arena for proselytization, and a link in the longterm goal of the Islamization of Africa. [5] Moreover, the Upper Nile region, at the least, must be retained due to its valuable oil resources.

The views of the government and the SPLM could not be further apart. Their political visions are completely antithetical. The only potential overlap relates to the idea of decentralization. Under the SPLM's proposed confederation, the south and north would establish their own constitutions, with a common non-religious political system in the capital city. Although the SPLM proposal is far removed from the government's offer of selective "exemptions" to the south, it does open up the possibility of a two-system country in which Shari'a might be retained in the north. Absent serious negotiations, these ideas remain slogans rather than operable programs.

Neither side has the power to impose its will decisively on the other. The government controls the state institutions, armed forces, and security services, and has vastly expanded a variety of popular militias that include tribal forces and religiously-motivated volunteers. Money, arms, and security personnel from China, Malaysia, Qatar, Iran, and Iraq have strengthened its grip on power. [6] Revenues from oil exports, which began in August 1999, bolster its ability to prosecute the war and even develop its own arms industry. [7] And the government has split the northern exiles, by winning a reconciliation agreement with the former prime minister al-Sadiq al-Mahdi and thereby removing the influential Umma party from the NDA.

The SPLM functions in the southern countryside, although not in the towns of Wau and Juba or in much of Upper Nile. But the SPLM lacks the resources to restore agricultural production, devastated by war and famine, and is beset by intra-southern ethnic tensions and the depradations caused by ambitious local warlords. Its alliance with the northern exile opposition through the NDA and military support from neighboring Uganda, Eritrea, and (until recently) Ethiopia enhanced its strength in the mid-1990s. [8] The allied forces even opened an eastern front through Eritrea and Ethiopia. But the recent border war between Ethiopia and Eritrea led to a rapprochement between Addis Ababa and Khartoum at the expense of the NDA, which undermined its positions in the east. Overall, the SPLA remains a guerrilla force that lacks air power and heavy weapons and can do little more than harass the armed forces. Moreover, mistrust between northern and southern elements in the NDA affects its tactics and complicates long-range planning.

As a result, each party in the conflict thinks it has the potential to win by force or by attrition, or at least to stave off defeat. Each believes it can find new allies that will help it checkmate or counterattack. Along with the profound political differences, these beliefs provide disincentives to negotiate and make the serious trade-offs required to end the civil war.

CIVIL STRIFE BEFORE 1989

The Sudan has suffered from civil strife ever since it achieved independence in l956. [9] Southerners' disaffection with their forcible inclusion into a centralized state, their discontent with government demands to transfer southern soldiers to the north, and their resentment at government efforts to Arabize the southern educational and governmental system fueled guerrilla warfare that lasted from 1955 until the Addis Ababa Agreement in 1972. That agreement granted the south political autonomy with a regional executive and legislature. The southern region gained some control over its economy and educational system as well as freedom of religious expression. Those measures led to a decade of relative calm and considerable socio-economic development. Nonetheless, the same president who had signed the accord annulled its terms in 1983. Unable to tolerate the relatively free-wheeling political life in the south and increasingly beholden to northern politicians who opposed the Addis Ababa Accord and pressed him to base the constitutional system on Islamic law, President Ja'afar Nimeiri unilaterally redivided the south into three provinces and then imposed Islamic public and criminal law on the whole country. The timing of Nimeiri's actions was also influenced by the discovery of oil in Bentiu (Upper Nile); he could not tolerate the idea that oil revenue would primarily benefit the south. His moves, which were backed by militant Islamists like Hasan al-Turabi, angered southerners so much that fighting immediately resumed. Colonel John Garang and other officers founded the Sudan Peoples Liberation Movement/Army (SPLMISPLA) in May 1983 and violence swept across the south. In contrast to the rebels of the 1950s and 1960s, who demanded that the south secede, the SPLM called for the end to Islamic law and the creation of a decentralized political system based on equality before the law and the fair sharing of power among all the Sudanese peoples.

When a popular uprising in Khartoum overthrew Nimeiri in April 1985, it appeared that the interim government would annul Nimeiri's decrees and sign a peace accord with the SPLM. Nonetheless, neither the interim government nor the government elected in April 1986 took effective steps to start negotiations with the SPLM. Fighting even spread into the Nuba mountains (South Kordofan) and Ingessana hills (Southern Blue Nile). Prime Minister al-Sadiq al-Mahdi sought military aid from Arab and Muslim countries, which he attracted by defining the war as an African attack on Sudan's Islamo-Arab identity. Al-Mahdi also failed to rescind Nimeiri's Islamic decrees, even though he had denounced them in 1983. He merely offered southerners exemptions from a few of their provisions. [10] His perspective therefore remained firmly Islamist and Arabist, far from the aspirations of the SPLM.

Other northern politicians, however, did reach out to the SPLM to bridge the political differences. The northern and southern participants in the Koka Dam Conference in March 1986 called for a national constitutional conference that would restructure the legal and political system in ways that would be fair to all the peoples." Most importantly, Mohamed Osman alMirghani, head of the Khatmiyya religious order and leader of the conservative Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), signed a pathbreaking agreement with Garang in November 1988 that called for freezing Nimeiri's Islamic decrees and affirmed that political differences must be resolved by democratic dialogue in a constitutional conference, not by force. [12] Freezing Islamic law was a major concession for this leader of a religious-based political party; the gesture won Mirghani widespread support in the north as well as the south. In reaction, alMahdi joined...