Sudan on the brink of a fresh civil war

A new civil war is imminent in Sudan unless the international community presses for a radical shift in the way the country is governed, warns a new report.

According to the International Crisis Group, A strategy for comprehensive peace in Sudan, the country’s brewing conflicts and the implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) are being largely ignored as international attention has focused on Darfur.

The report examines how the 2005 CPA, which ended the 21-year war between the north and the south, is being extensively undermined primarily by the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) at the expense of the south.

According to the report, the CPA has been much less welcome in the north than in the south because it legally confirmed the unpopular NCP’s domination of government structures there. Many northern political parties are also uncomfortable with the self-determination referendum granted to the south.

Without the late Dr John Garang as an agent of change in Khartoum, and with Vice President Salva Kiir unwilling to confront it strongly on northern issues while he has so much to do in the south, the NCP has systematically maintained near total control throughout the north. This has been accomplished by legal and legislative manipulation, mainly the selective avoidance of constitutional oversight bodies such as the National Constitutional Review Commission.

“The SPLM’s failure to focus consistently on national issues and the failure of international actors – prominently United Nation Mission in Sudan, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (Igad) and the US, UK, Norway and Italy — to hold the parties to the letter of the agreement, has meant that the NCP has succeeded rather painlessly in avoiding the reforms it signed on to in the CPA,” says the report.

The CPA holds the key to transforming the oppressive governmental system that is at the root of all Sudan’s conflicts into a more open, transparent, inclusive and democratic one,” said David Mozersky, Crisis Group’s Horn of Africa programme director. 

“If the CPA fails — which is increasingly likely — Sudan can be expected to return to full-scale war, with devastating consequences for the entire region,” he added.

The report says the CPA contains the detailed provisions and schedule for governmental reforms and a democratisation process leading to national elections in 2009, which can be the building blocks for peacemaking in Darfur and elsewhere. However, it is in danger of collapse due primarily to NCP sabotage and international neglect.

The NCP views democratic transformation as a threat to regime survival and so undermined the CPA’s critical reforms. The NCP strategy is twofold: Partnering with the Sudan People Liberation Movement (SPLM) would strengthen its chances to survive democratic elections and, perhaps more importantly, eliminate the possibility of an SPLM-led alliance of marginalised political groups, including from the south, Darfur, the east, the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile, emerging to challenge its supremacy.

Though the SPLM is resisting an electoral arrangement, the parties agreed on some lesser implementation issues. The most important involves oil concessions in south, blocks B and 5a, where — in violation of the CPA — the SPLM had signed agreements with companies for areas that Khartoum had already sold.

The parties agreed to allow Nile Petroleum — the Government of Southern Sudan (GoSS) petroleum parastatal — and one GoSS-appointed oil company to participate in the consortium in each concession area. 

The transfer of oil revenue to the GoSS fell to $44 million in March from more than $90 million just a few months earlier. The resulting cashflow problem is limiting the operating ability of the GoSS, which has spent its reserves and is struggling to complete accurate civil service and military headcounts and reviews. 

On the security side, the parties missed their first major deadline, July 9, when all Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) troops apart from those in the Joint Integrated Units (JIUs), were to redeploy from the south. 

Equally, the SPLA has struggled with its own reorganisation process. Delays in completing headcounts and demobilising troops are becoming magnified, as the SPLA recently agreed to incorporate 31,000 to 51,000 fighters from the former Khartoum-aligned “other” armed groups, which joined it pursuant to the January 2006 Juba Declaration under the banner of the South Sudan Defence Forces (SSDF). 

The immediate challenge is to maintain such a large force, besides the allocation of SPLA leadership positions to top SSDF officers. There is also pressure for the GoSS to cut expenditure even with the priority to maintain stability in the south.

Increased insecurity in parts of the south, particularly since late 2006, is another danger. Attacks on civilians in and around Juba in October-November 2006 were meant to look like the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) carried them out. The SPLA eventually arrested and demobilised SAF officers but questions remain about the well-planned and co-ordinated operations. Some have pointed to disgruntled elements within the SPLA, perhaps unhappy with salary delays, though there is a general sense in Juba that the SAF and the NCP are working to undermine security in the South. 

Mistrust within the SPLM leadership in addition to financial constraints and an inadequate UN-led disarmament, demobilisation and re-integration (DDR) programme, has hampered military reorganisation.

SPLM is not without blame as it has focused on internal southern issues at the expense of the national agenda. 

Meanwhile, the risk of a new conflict is rising in Kordofan in central Sudan, in the far north and in the east.

A common set of problems drives conflict throughout the country and the threat of more war is very real,” says Francois Grignon, Crisis Group’s Africa programme director. “But the foundation for lasting peace is already entrenched in the CPA and does not need to be renegotiated; it merely needs to be enforced and implemented.”

“Lasting peace in Sudan requires a new strategy, one which tackles its multiple conflicts and potential conflicts in a consistent manner. The overwhelming international concentration on Darfur has come at the expense of the broader quest for peace in the country,” says the report.

While Darfur is Sudan’s most pressing regional issue, additional attention is also needed in Kordofan, where armed groups unhappy with CPA implementation threaten new conflict and may link up with insurgents in Darfur; in the far north, where the construction of dams has displaced and angered several communities, and the risk of major conflict is increasing; and in the east, where the 2006 peace agreement has only just begun to be implemented and could still fall apart. 

It does not help matters that international efforts over the past three years have lacked consistent leadership and been weakened by disagreements, particularly between Western donor countries and China, Russia and the Arab world. An informal contact group of these major actors plus the European Union , France, the African Union, the UN and regional countries, is slowly beginning to co-operate more effectively on Darfur, however, and has made some progress over the past four months towards renewing negotiations for a political settlement. 

This co-operation needs to be expanded to prioritise core elements of the CPA but growing problems with that agreement are receiving little attention, even though peace in Darfur and elsewhere can only be built on its foundation. 

The report observes that the common theme among these is disenfranchised peripheral communities taking up arms against a central government that is perceived as unfairly controlling the state’s power and wealth. The responses of the government and the international community have reinforced the idea among many that political gains can only be achieved through the gun. 

“For the CPA to live up to its billing as a truly ‘comprehensive’ peace agreement, it must overcome the perception that it is a two-party deal, which gives the NCP control of the North and the SPLM control of the South,” says the report.

To settle the many grievances against the government and bring sustainable peace, the national reforms and democratisation process leading up to elections it promises must be implemented in good faith. However, the report notes, those reforms pose a threat to the NCP, as they would break its monopoly over structures it has used to control the country.

The ruling party considers that its very survival is threatened by full CPA implementation. Whether Sudan is to know real peace depends on the outcome of the struggle between the regime’s efforts to maintain its authority and attempts to make government more inclusive, transparent and democratic, which must at least involve a change in how the NCP governs. 

Whereas the CPA offers the basis for national transformation, it is not a magical solution to all the country’s problems. It has been criticised by opposition groups throughout the north for giving too much power to the NCP there, and its power-sharing provisions — which grant 52 per cent of government and parliamentary positions to the NCP ahead of elections — have been and will very likely continue to be an obstacle to a peace deal in Darfur. 

The report notes that SPLM’s credibility in the north has also been weakened by the departure of two of its prominent northern officials in Khartoum, namely Abdalaziz al-Hilu and Yassir Arman, who have left for the US to study without a return date. This has frustrated the efforts of those interested primarily in reforming the central government. 

The CPA’s collapse would mean return to large-scale war in much of Sudan. Since the Khartoum-SPLA war ended in 2005, both sides have been rearming and preparing for possible resumption of hostilities.

Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia and Eritrea were all affected by the earlier war, just as Darfur is producing deadly spillover effects in Chad and the Central African Republic. Unlike the last war, however, this one would probably not be limited to the south, Abyei, the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile. It could easily connect with the conflict in Darfur and spread to other disaffected areas of the north, leading to Sudan’s first truly national civil war. The impact on all nine neighbouring countries would be devastating. 

“The threat is very real and requires an urgent international response,” the report concludes.