By Bul Garang Mabil
The present situation in the Sudan—marked by the upcoming January 2011 referendum on self-determination in Southern Sudan as defined in the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) signed in Kenya between the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) and the Government of Sudan’s National Congress Party (NCP)—poses complex questions to many people. With many speculations now pointing toward possible independence in Southern Sudan in 2011, many people in the international community and the Sudan alike have began to expressed a growing fear, “not only over a possible resumption of the North-South civil war, but also over the likelihood that the newly independent state will not prove viable.” (The East African: Monday, February 8, 2010). The reasons commonly cited for this pessimistic prediction are insecurity and the potential for tribal fragmentation in Southern Sudan.
Yet there are countless grounds on which this prediction can be refuted. For this logic, I would like to first acknowledge that the history of the Sudanese people as a whole from time immemorial has been the struggle of the masses of the people against internal and external oppression. Ancient Egyptian records from the third millennium B.C. tell of thousands of slaves and cattle captured in the African lands to the south, which is the modern day Sudan. Sudan’s centuries of association with Egypt formally ended in 1956, the joint British-Egyptian rule over the country ending in Sudan’s independence. The British attempt to allow Southern Sudan to join newly independent East African colonies was thwarted by leaders in Khartoum. Since then, Sudan has been at war with itself up to the present time.
This protracted conflict is rooted in the cultural and religious divides that characterize the country today. The Northerners who have traditionally controlled the country in Khartoum have sought to unify the country along the lines of distinctly radical forms of Arab-Islamic principles, in which sharia law is regarded as the supreme law of the land, despite the opposition of non-Muslims, moderate Muslims, southerners, and marginalized peoples in the west and east of the country. As a result, the regimes in Khartoum have time and again employed various policies and methods of destroying or weakening the just struggle of the Sudanese people, including the most notorious policy of “divide and rule,” in order to maintain power in the country.
It is this policy that has been the country’s lot and the one that is currently being pursued by Omar Hassan al-Bashir’s governing party (NCP), in order to try to undermine the January 2011 referenda in which the people of Southern Sudan will go to the ballot box to vote between unity or separation, and the people of Abyei, an oil-rich area on the border between the South and North, decide on whether to become part of Southern Sudan or remain part of the North. The people of Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile, on the other hand, are to hold “popular consultations.”
In keeping with these agreements, therefore, the referendum is an obligation for the people of Southern Sudan and Abyei. The people of Southern Sudan and Abyei must be allowed a free and fair referendum. The people of Southern Sudan have been denied this right by the different regimes that have ruled the Sudan since its independence as a sovereign state.
While the CPA provides principles to make unity attractive to the people of Southern Sudan and all the other marginalized areas of the Sudan, the Khartoum government has never acted in such a way as to make the unity of the country seem an attractive option.
It is now imperative for the international community, especially the countries that helped negotiate the CPA—the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) and the “troika members” (the United States, Norway, and the United Kingdom)—to unify efforts and support to help and sustain the process leading to the 2011 referendum, drawing lessons from the recently concluded elections so as to assure the serious and peaceful completion of the CPA. The current atmosphere in Southern Sudan suggests that the peaceful conclusion of CPA will only prevail when the people of Southern Sudan are allowed to exercise their inalienable right to self-determination.
The idea of self-determination is not a new phenomenon in the international arena that should be used to scare people off from making decisions on their political status; self-determination is a political human right for the oppressed people in the world today. Eritrea, East Timor, and Kosovo are among the recent countries that benefited from this right. During their struggles, these countries stood always for separation, from day one to the end. In the case of Southern Sudan, it is the general exploitation, oppression, and neglect of the Sudanese people by the successive regimes in Khartoum that will be expressed at the ballot box this coming January 2011 in what was supposed to be a united New Sudan.
In case of a vote in favor of secession, the Khartoum-based regime must face the consequences of not transforming the country democratically—Southern Sudan must be declared an independent state on that very day. The international community must be ready to support a massive program of state-building and development in the event of this decision. Sudan’s bordering countries’ choices in supporting and respecting the vote of the Southern Sudanese will also be particularly important. As a recently released International Crisis Group Report (May 6, 2010) explains in detail, each of Sudan’s neighbors (Kenya, Uganda, Egypt, Ethiopia, Libya, and Eritrea) has had a role, in one way or another, in Sudanese history and in the negotiations that led to the CPA. In the same way, each one of them has different “interests at stake and will be directly affected by either peaceful separation or a return to conflict.” They will thus have to consider very carefully what they can or should do, as a renewed conflict in Southern Sudan would inevitably bring war and instability to the entire region, creating more humanitarian crises like the recent one in Darfur. The United States’ peace process and counterterrorism policies in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa would also be endangered.
It is not too late to help, now is the time to make that happen, if anything has been learnt from Sudan’s past history of dishonoring too many agreements. Friends of Sudan who care about the future peace of this country should write or call President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton, their senators and congressmen and urge the peaceful implementation of the 2005 Peace Accords in Sudan, brokered in part by Senator Danforth, himself an Episcopal priest.