THE SUDANESE HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY
Ad hoc periodical issued by
The Sudan Human Rights Organization
Cairo
Issue 31 Year 16th July 2010
Dividing a Nation
Our People Unified
Editor-in-Chief, Mahgoub El-Tigani
Editor, Safiidin Osman
Reports & Research, SHRO Secretariat
Cover design:
Ni’ma al-Rasheedi
THE SUDAN HUMAN RIGHTS ORGANIZATION - CAIRO
SHRO-Cairo is a voluntary non-governmental organization concerned
with human rights and is active within the area of Africa and the Middle East.
In addition to anonymous support by Sudanese people,
the Quarterly has been generously assisted by the
National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, D.C.
Contents
Editorial: Dividing a Nation our People Unified
Isn’t There a National Caretaker?Amna Basha & Abd-Allah Jack
Perspectives on the Sudan Dilemma, Safiidin Osman
Report to UNESCO, Mahgoub El-Tigani
The NDA was Bigger than Juba Conference, Samira Shanan
How Much was Done for Unity? John Majok
And How Much is Done for Separation? Musa Gadain
The Quarterly Readers
Editorial:
Dividing a Nation our People Unified
The expected decision of our People in South Sudan to either stay in a unified democratic Sudan or choose separation by referendum is not based on the referendum per se. Rather, the referendum itself and the expected outcome in the course of these long centuries, beginning with the notorious divide-and-rule policies and practices of colonial powers up to the notorious marginal placement of the South by most of the post-independence governments and dictatorial regimes of Sudan, the South has been accumulating ambivalent feelings towards the North, in general, and the Khartoum governments, in particular.
For one, many southerners believed they were Sudanese by origin in their Homeland, the Sudan, with its known borders. On the other side, an increasing population of southerners, especially those victimized by the devastating wars against them by the central governments of the North, were bitterly determined to break from the North by an independent state of the South.
It is difficult for the folk Sudanese to imagine that the South will cease to be part of the polity they have always known and lived in as a unified nation. It is equally difficult, however, for the victimized southerners to live with a non-accomplished vision that one day the South will be an equal partner, or even leader, of the North in politics, economy, and culture.
Equally importantly, it is not difficult for the external world to appreciate the determination of the victimized southerners, who lost their loved ones in millions and have seen with their own eyes ferocious attacks on their properties by the Khartoum transgressing troops and militias, to decide for themselves by themselves what relationship they desire with the North.
A significant part of the North-South population that is mainly composed of democratic opposition groups, including among others the important constituencies of the Union of Sudanese African Parties (USAP), the SPLM, the DUP, and the Communists have shown throughout the years of the NIF/NCP dictatorial rule a principled commitment to the NDA Charter and agreements to establish a unified democratic Sudan.
The exclusion of all these parties from the Naievsha negotiations and the ensuing peace treaty, except for the signing SPLM and the NIF/NCP peace partners, has virtually forced Sudan to move in the separation pathway, despite the fact that the CPA required the two peace partners to encourage full participation by all parties in national decision-making to make of the unity option a real possibility.
Nothing was done, nonetheless, to produce this venerated outcome. Contrariwise, the NIF/NCP and the SPLM became fully engaged in power struggles at the expense of the CPA unity provisions.
The scheduled referendum is about to occur within a few months of the April 2010 national elections which witnessed the biggest fraud ever experienced in Sudanese elections since national
independence (January the first in the year 1956). Almost 60% of the registered voters did not vote, and shameless rigging was openly practiced by the NCP government to win the elections at any cost.
To the dismay of international politics, the International Community made it clear that the elections “did not measure up to acceptable standards;” still the same sources sent confusing messages about “possible approval of the results”! The overwhelmingly authoritative African Union and Arab League were was the least honorable about the rigged results as they
claimed that, “the standards were practically workable”! The contender parties in the North, however, were major critics of the elections, as well as significant southerner leaders who announced that the elections in the South were done “at gunpoint.”
In the light of these facts, it is clear that the referendum need to be postponed until healthy climates would be possibly visible to allow fair implementation of the vote.
This proposed postponement is not a novelty. The designated CPA national elections were earlier postponed for almost 2 years. In the meantime, an All-Sudanese national constitutional conference must be carefully prepared and scheduled sufficiently before the referendum to decide on the state of affairs of the Nation under the auspices of the United Nations, the African Union, the Arab League, the European Union, and the USA Government.
Earlier on the 16th of November, 1988, the Sudanese Peace Initiative preamble between the DUP and the SPLM stated that the two parties were “Committed to the unity of the people and territorial integrity of our country.” One wonders how much of this commitment is still obligatory to these major groups, and what became of the NDA commitment to the Sudanese Peace Agreement that the democratic government of Sadiq al-Mahdi approved a few days before the notorious Islamist coup of Omer al-Bashir and Hassan al-Turabi came about in June 1989?
The Sudanese, in general, and the Southerner Sudanese, in particular, have suffered equally the NIF/NCP brutalities and dictatorial fantasies. It is time for the International Community to act fairly with full recognition of the NIF/NCP victims.
Isn’t There a National Caretaker?
Amna Basha & Abd-Allah Jok
For five years, the CPA experienced a non-principled implementation between the NCP and the SPLM peace partners who exchanged bitter hostilities, in addition to executive and political failures, in a climate of continuous disputes and mistrust.
The North-South troops of the two governing bodies rushed in military action repeatedly in Malakal and Abyie. The results of strenuous negotiations mediated by international committees and professional mediators were never honored by the Khartoum rulers regarding the Abyie borders, and serious accusations were continuously exchanged between the two governments on the corruption of state managers or the obstruction of the peace process, to mention a few.
The formal media played a destructive role in the relationships of the two partners, as the state-owned national T.V. and radio stations centered the bulk of their work on the NCP/SPLM jihad-oriented programs. The third party, namely the opposition democratic forces and civil society organizations, was harshly excluded from all state media programs.
Strangely enough, the NCP spokespersons asserted insistently that their party never denied the opposition umbrella the right to participate in national decision making. But he National Democratic Alliance (NDA) was evidently silenced in spite of the Cairo Agreement (2005) between the NDA and the Government of Sudan to realize the NDA role in the peace and governance process. The NDA apparently re-identified its presence in the political arena as a national observer of power in the name of the National Forces of the Juba Conference (2009).
These opposition groups were not formally recognized by the NCP/SPLM ruling partnership, although the SPLM is an active member of the Juba Conference (September, 2009). The pre-elections hostilities between the NCP and the democratic opposition never changed to a collaborative nature in the post-elections era; rather the opposition denounced firmly the elections’ fraud by the NCP elected government. while still recognizing the constitutional system of the country.
The hypocritical stand of the NCP towards the democratic opposition is a major factor to explain the persistence of unresolved difficulties in any principled path of peace and development for the whole country to overcome the North-South separation issue, the crisis in Darfur, the impoverishment of Sudanese populations, and the lacking of public freedoms and human rights.
Buried underneath these frustrating realities, however, millions of the southerner residents in the northern, as well as a sizeable population of northerners who live in the south maintain strong extended family relations. Major questions pertain to the needs and the aspirations of these significant populations.
True, many southerners expressed jubilant sentiments in massive demonstrations in Juba towards the achievement of a separate southern state from the north by the upcoming referendum. But these sentiments, as consistently emphasized by leaders of the SPLM, are not targeting the Sudanese people in the north. Rather, the bitterness of the southerner separatists is a natural reaction to the repressive governments of Khartoum.
Specifically, the Sudanese people of the south are fed of the central government of Sudan, especially the 20-year NIF/NCP system of rule that alienated the south from the north by prolonged civil wars, military actions, and ideological hostilities, and violent ethnic and religious cleavages.
Isn’t there a national caretaker to bring the Sudanese to their historical unity and shared dreams?
Perspectives on the Sudan Dilemma
Saffidin Osman
The history, present time, and future concerns of South Sudan have been exposed by the external world perhaps more than the Sudanese themselves did. Both Sudanese and western writers contributed with rigorous analyses to enhance the public awareness about the North-South conflict. Led by Evans-Pritchard, the early anthropologists centered their writings on the cultural diversity and uniqueness of the South.
The contemporary analysts, for example, Mohamed Omer Beshir, Francis Mading Deng, Mansour Khalid, Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, Ann Leach, and Richard Lobban, Jr., among many others, paid increased attention to the politics and development of the South with special emphasis on the right of the southerners to self-determination.
The in-depth academic and/or political analysis of the conflict was further expounded with a genuine national flavor by many southerner writers who offered a rich blend of scholarly works and political visions to end the conflict. Joseph Garang, Abel Alier, Bona Malwal, Francis Mading Deng, and Dunstan M. Wai, to mention a few, envisioned possible avenues to implement the South agenda on the issues of national unity with the North on the basis of federalism or regional autonomous rule versus a southerner decision to establish a separate state.
These creative solutions were strongly voiced at the Round-Table Conference by a group of southerner politicians led by William Deng, the founder of the Sudan African National Organization (SANO), following the triumphant uprising of the People of Sudan in October 1964.
The self-rule claims were met with cautious reservations by the conservative parties of the North that never projected an equalitarian engagement of the South in national affairs, as well as serious doubts by southerner politicians who witnessed the dehumanizing demolishment of the South by the military rule of the November coup 1958 for six consecutive years.
The Sudanese northerner parties and modernist thinkers, including Mahmoud Mohamed Taha of the Republican Brothers, Abd al-Khaliq Mahgoub of the Communist Party, and Sadiq al-Mahdi of the Umma Party supported the southerners to pass the self-autonomous rule for the South at this post-revolutionary conference.
This scholarly wave of the North-South political thought ensued in the issue of granting self-autonomous rule for the South. Since then, the arena was opened for the Sudanese democratic efforts to generate a variety of ideas to keep the country together with due respect to the right of regions to enjoy self-autonomous rule.
The failure of the succeeding governments of the country to honor these genuine visions, however, continued to destabilize Sudan with civil wars and the abhor rankings of second-class citizenships. In the 1980s, the second dictatorial rule of the May coup escalated the possibilities of civil war after a decade of peaceful application of the Addis Ababa Accords on regional autonomous rule (1972-1983).
The greed and recklessness of the center towards the political and ideological settings of the South paved the way for the SPLM/SPLA movement that was destined to develop the North-South conflict to a full-fledged movement of liberation for the whole regions of the country vis-à-vis the Khartoum dictatorship.
The SPLM/SPLA impact transcended the bilateral South-North dilemma to engage Darfur, East Sudan, Kordofan, and the remote northern provinces of the Nile in a feverish struggle with Khartoum for self-autonomous rule.
It is fair to say, nonetheless, that the SPLM/SPLA was not a prime mover of these enormous developments in the country as a whole. Rather, the SPLM/SPLA influence of national politics motivated the other political forces, including the Umma, DUP, USAP, and Communist parties to seek their own take in the developing events. A New Sudan in this regard was indeed on the make; and national-decision making ceased to be a monopoly of Khartoum.
In the 1980s and up to the early 2000s, the North-South political mould articulated in two distinct groups: the Islamist authoritative rule by the military coup of June 1989 that aimed to restructure the country into a Brotherhood imperial power, and the democratic opposition of the NDA that raised the banner of a newly unified nation by secular constitutional law.
The NDA Charter and agreements contributed a great deal to clarify the “New Sudan” dreams. But the NDA, including the major northern parties, southern USAP and SPLM/SPLA, did not have the power to force its program inside the country.
It was the external direct intervention to end the on-going conflict between the Sudanese democrats and the Islamists in Sudan that brought about an abrupt political settlement for the longest war in Africa by the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), 2005. This bilateral agreement between two peace partners, however, was not actually a “comprehensive” political agreement because it excluded the NDA from all negotiations and provisions of the text.
The CPA was cleverly designed to act as a short-term legal treaty to enable the South to prepare for optional unity or separation, the two ultimate goals of the treaty, through the apprenticeship of the Islamist ruling regime, albeit in the total absence of the major forces of the country.
The CPA handling of the deep-seated dilemma of the Sudanese center-region equation has certainly failed to bring the Nation together. The fate of Sudan is now wide open for all possibilities, including renewed wars and devastation, unless a national constitutional conference is allowed by the governments and the contending groups to strike a better deal for all.
Report to UNESCO
Mahgoub El-Tigani
In 2006, the Arab UNESCO invited this writer to submit a report on the cultural conditions in Sudan, including suggested recommendations to improve them in the country as a whole. The report is discussed in the subsequent sections with slight changes.
Six years later, the cultural conditions of the country could have only worsen under failing implementation of the CPA by the NIF/NCP government which showed only little interest in the issues of national unity compared to increased interest in oil revenues, as is clearly indicated in the subsequent follow-up sections.
Culture: Cultural displacement policies intended to reformulate the individual and societal personalities of people. The suppression of creative works and artistic practices, indigenous teaching and international norms to enforce the Islamist cultural and political indoctrination against the vast majority of citizens violated the multi-cultural, multi-religious, and multi-ethnic heritage of the nation.
Restrictions of all cultural activities of the modern urban sector as well as the physical genocide of many native groups dried out the once lively creativity of the Sudanese people with respect to dancing, singing, poetry, story telling and story writing, music, and theatrical art. The nation was challenged with the task of initiating a progressive movement of refined arts and cultural competencies based on a new mode of the freedom of expression.
Education: Sufficient budgets were not effectively increased or firmly utilized to boost multi-cultural education all over the country with due respect to the particular needs of indigenous groups and the other powerless minorities. Guided by international human rights norms and the interim constitutional provisions, the NIF/NCP Islamist state failed to implement a principled nationally approved plan to democratize the curriculum through a national democratic vision by the active participation of teachers and student unions, traditional pedagogies, and the civil society groups.