REVIEW: The Fate of Sudan: The Origins and Consequences of a Flawed Peace
Process - By Alex de Waal
May 9, 2013
John Young, <
http://zedbooks.co.uk/node/9488> The Fate of Sudan: The
Origins and Consequences of a Flawed Peace Process, London, Zed Books, 2012.
One of the truisms about Sudan is that the more you know about the country,
the harder it is to write anything that makes sense. Those who have hardly
been there have no difficulty in writing reams of text, those who have spent
half their lifetimes working in the country find it a painful process to try
to organize their material into a cogent story. John Young has spent 25
years working on Sudan and its neighbors and the result is a book rich in
detail, but also an account that struggles to achieve narrative and
analytical coherence.
The strengths of this book lie in its frank account of the political actors
in Sudan. Young has no illusions about the government in Khartoum and the
northern Sudanese political establishment. Neither has he any illusions
about the SPLA. He grapples with and punctures the Garang myth-the notion
that John Garang was a democrat with a clear vision for the future of Sudan.
Young describes the twists and turns of the negotiations that led to the
formulation and signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA),
including the stratagems, short-cuts and deceptions used by both the
negotiators and the mediators. There are many fascinating details here,
notably the dynamics surrounding the signing of the Machakos Protocol in
2002, the foundational text of the CPA, and the beginning of the direct
talks between Vice President Ali Osman Taha and Garang a year later.
Young plausibly argues that Machakos represented a significant narrowing of
the terms of the Declaration of Principles (DoP) adopted by the
InterGovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD, the grouping of north-east
African countries) in 1994, and a successful maneuver by Salva Kiir to
simplify the Sudanese crisis to a north-south crisis with the secession
option as the implicit but inescapable end-point. Garang surely knew this
would hobble his political aspirations, not least because of his weak power
base inside southern Sudan. Garang's visit to the Nuba Mountains and
escalation of the Darfur war in the months following Machakos must be seen
in that light.
One of Young's key points is that when they signed the key agreements in
2002 and 2003, neither the government nor the SPLA expected them to be
honored. The negotiators on both sides were playing a complicated game of
position, each expecting the worst of the other. As the core documents
expanded to become the protocols that ultimately constituted the CPA,
detailed legalistic provisions filled in for the lack of trust or even a
common understanding of the basic intention of the CPA. Indeed the CPA
merely translated the political struggle between the protagonists to a new
dimension.
The ambiguity of the CPA is captured in its title: itifaag al salaam al
shamil. To English speakers, "comprehensive" implies that the agreement has
covered all issues and refers to an intention to become inclusive of all. To
Arabic speakers, shamil has a very different resonance. Shumuliya is
totalitarianism, and al itifaag al shamil implies a closed, exclusive deal.
This was the root of the undoing of the Darfur negotiations: while the
mediators envisaged the Abuja agreement as a mechanism for bringing the
Darfurians into an inclusive democratic transformation of Sudan, the
Darfurian rebel leaders were focused exclusively on what share of posts and
cash they would be allocated in the transitional carve-up.
Young is correct to conclude that the NCP, the SPLM and the U.S. colluded to
restrict participation in the peace talks. They kept out the northern
civilian parties in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), the emergent
Darfurian opposition and the South Sudan Defence Force (SSDF) and other
non-SPLM southerners, and marginalized the Nuba and Blue Nile members of the
SPLM. Between 1999 and 2003, Justice Africa campaigned hard to bring these
groups into the peace process, but without success. I coordinated this
project, and we believed that Sudan's best chance was an all-inclusive peace
process, and I can attest to the obstacles we faced. Young overlooks the
irony that certain Clinton administration officials were instrumental in
this blockage, and then went on to lead the international outrage over the
Darfur war that resulted.
Elections are the centerpiece of democratization, and voting in elections or
referenda has become the "graduation ceremony" for most
internationally-sponsored peace processes. Given Young's central thesis that
democratization was Sudan's central challenge, he gives considerable
attention to the conduct of the April 2010 elections, the January 2011
referendum on self-determination in southern Sudan and the May 2011
elections in Southern Kordofan. He provides a deeply cynical account of the
general elections, and the depth of manipulation by the National Congress
Party. It is all eminently credible, including the disorganization and
unpreparedness of the opposition and the take-no-chances approach of the
NCP, which was on course for a win under any scenario, but ultimately
managed a wholly non-credible landslide. Against this background, Young's
account of the Southern Kordofan elections a year later, and his conclusion
that the SPLM failed to win, needs to be considered very seriously.
Over the years, Young has developed a particular expertise on the southern
Sudanese militia that in the early 2000s comprised the SSDF. The reader is
in danger of becoming lost in the details of the gyrations of enmities and
alliances among the numerous factions during the war, the negotiations and
the post-secession rebellions. Young is surely right to observe that the
exclusion of the SSDF from the CPA was a potentially fatal flaw, which
risked an internal civil war in southern Sudan. The SSDF was more numerous
and better armed than the SPLA, and the legacy of internecine strife among
the southerners provided plentiful reason for fearing the worst. Garang's
predilection during the war years of striking first and hardest against
internal competitors in southern Sudan, meant that when the war ended he had
more enemies in the south than in the north. The enormous and enthusiastic
crowd that welcomed Garang on his return to Khartoum in July 2005 dwarfed
any comparable reception in Juba.
Garang's death and Salva Kiir's commitment to an inclusive government
created the conditions for averting this imminent intra-southern conflict.
The January 2006 Juba Agreement between Salva Kiir and Gen. Paulino Matiep
(a short and simple document, the product of a genuine relationship of trust
between the principals) was, for southerners, just as important as the CPA
itself. It was Salva's finest hour. But the deal proved to be a buy-off,
funded by oil monies, and the SPLM's failure to develop governing
institutions, let alone democratic institutions, mean that the danger of
internal armed conflict remains.
These are all compelling descriptions and the inadequacies of the CPA are
exposed. But does Young's central hypothesis, that the peace process itself
is significantly to blame for Sudan's enduring crisis, hold up? Would the
inclusive approach championed by Justice Africa, and myself, more than a
decade ago, have resolved Sudan's conflicts and engineered a democratic
transformation? I like to think it might have done so, but the
counter-arguments are also persuasive.
International mediators and their supporters were not uninterested in
addressing the deep problems of the Sudanese state. The 1994 IGAD DoP,
drafted by the Ethiopian Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin and his advisers,
addressed this issue square on. But the Sudanese Government rejected the DoP
for three years, accepting only under serious military and political
pressure, and making clear its reservations. It was quite capable of
stalling, if need be indefinitely. By 1998 Sudan was on the brink of
becoming an oil exporter and anticipated, correctly, that it could expand
the national budget tenfold. This bonanza would deliver a decisive military
and political advantage over the SPLA, and both sides knew it. For the
Sudanese government, the principal reason for taking the IGAD negotiations
seriously was that success promised normalization of relations with the
U.S., which would bring a major oil company with technology capable of
increasing the extraction capacity from Sudan's oilfields substantially.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of the SPLM fastened onto the right of
self-determination as their promissory note, and framed all other
negotiating positions around that. Garang pursued the IGAD negotiating forum
as the least preferred of his three parallel options, the other two being
nationwide insurrections that would bring down the regime and regime change
through the joint efforts of a popular uprising by the northern parties
alongside the SPLA's military advance.
The "troika" of the U.S., Britain and Norway went along with the joint
NCP-SPLM insistence on exclusive bilateral talks because at least it
promised something other than a continuation of the war. As Young
acknowledges, it was the internationals who insisted on multi-party
elections during the transitional period, against the preferences of both
parties. During the first part of the transitional period, the
internationals took the elections more seriously than the parties
themselves-and more seriously than the northern opposition parties, which
stood to gain most from even a modicum of pluralism.
When the African Union took over the Darfur mediation, it envisaged a Darfur
peace agreement as a pillar to the CPA, a means of bringing the Darfurians
into the national democratic process. Neither the NCP nor the Darfurians saw
it that way: their focus was on dividing the spoils of office. In 2009, the
African Union High-Level Panel on Darfur (AUPD) defined the Darfur crisis as
"the Sudanese conflict in Darfur," and identified inclusive democratization
as the priority.
The AU Peace and Security Council, when it adopted the AUPD report and set
up the AU High Level Implementation Panel (AUHIP), specified that the
Panel's new mandate was "to assist in the implementation of all aspects of
the AUPD recommendations, as well as to assist the Sudanese parties in the
implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) and other related
processes, as part of the democratic transformation of the Sudan." For six
months, the AUHIP concentrated on rescuing the electoral process. It didn't
succeed. None of the political parties was committed: the NCP and SPLM
wanted only an imprimatur of legitimacy on their respective commanding
majorities, and the northern opposition parties wanted the elections
cancelled or delegitimized as soon as they realized they would lose. Only
the southern civilian parties were serious about democratization, because
they saw it as a means of restraining the militarism and authoritarianism of
the SPLM.
Young is aware of all of this (though Darfur is largely neglected in his
account). His response: "if the combatants will not accept a commitment to
democratic transformation, then the mediators should withdraw." (p. 359)
I am not ready to accept this course of action.
First, the Sudanese parties would, as soon as they sense that their mediator
demands a commitment to democratic transformation, make that commitment, and
then find a hundred ways to delay or derail it. In fact this is precisely
what they did over the CPA and during the Darfur peace talks.
Second, when the IGAD countries walked away from the mediation in 1994, they
did not walk away from engagement. On the contrary, three of the four
governments (Eritrea, Ethiopia and Uganda) sent their troops into Sudan and
actively supported the opposition, forcing the Sudanese government back to
the table. Unless any would-be mediator has comparable pressure to exert,
walking away is not an option. The U.S. had no such option over Darfur: the
kinds of threats it made were puny compared to the Ethiopian brigades that
crossed into Sudan in 1995-97, defeated the Sudanese on the battlefield, and
withdrew without advertising their actions. There were no such options for
anyone when Sudan and South Sudan fought in Heglig in April 2012 and stood
at the brink of all-out war.
Third, and related to this, what should a mediator do when walking away
entails standing by while Sudan (and South Sudan) plunge into a crisis with
potentially disastrous regional repercussions? This is precisely what was
threatened in 2011-12. The AUHIP mediators were well aware that the crisis
between Sudan and South Sudan was not ripe for resolution: there were plenty
of influential people on both sides who wanted war rather than peace. But
the AU also knew that if the conflict were not managed it risked a far worse
outcome, including dragging in the entire region, from Egypt to Uganda.
Mediators do not usually have the privilege of choosing their parties or
their circumstances: they must take them as they find them.
Young is certainly right that the Sudanese peace processes of the last
fifteen years have been riddled with mistakes. But Sudan belonged to the
Sudanese (and today the two Sudans belong to the Sudanese and South
Sudanese), and the main crimes and blunders have been by the Sudanese
leaderships. The international mediators undoubtedly made their own
mistakes, as well as achieving some unanticipated successes. As I mentioned
above, I would like to believe that an inclusive peace process was possible.
And I believe that, had the mediators and the Troika listened to the
Darfurians in 2001 and 2002, as Justice Africa demanded at that time, the
chances of the disaster in Darfur would have been reduced. But I am not
confident that, even if IGAD and the Troika had insisted on bringing in the
diverse northern and southern political parties, armed groups and civil
society organizations, that the outcomes would necessarily have been better.
Both parties had the option of fighting and were ready to carry on doing so.
Would another decade of war have brought a better peace? I don't know, but I
wouldn't like to have been part of the experiment.
Alex de Waal is Director of the World Peace Foundation. This piece was
originally published by the <
http://sites.tufts.edu/reinventingpeace/>
World Peace Foundation.
<
http://africanarguments.org/2013/05/09/review-the-fate-of-sudan-the-origins
-and-consequences-of-a-flawed-peace-process-by-alex-de-waal/fatesudan/>
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Received on Thu May 09 2013 - 16:28:42 EDT
