Summary

The government of National Unity of Sudan, sworn in on September 22, 2005, was the result of the January 9, 2005, Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that brought to an end the bitter and brutal twenty-one-year war between the Sudanese government dominated by the National Congress Party (NCP), and the southern-based rebels, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A). The CPA’s exclusion of other parties made it much less than its “comprehensive” title promised. Many critics of the CPA charge that the failure to include other parties and armed groups, and the fact that the government would only negotiate with the SPLM/A after two decades of armed rebellion, caused marginalized people elsewhere in Sudan to take up arms as a means towards power sharing otherwise denied them by what, under the NCP, has been effectively a one-party state.

It has now been almost six months since the National Unity government, in which the SPLM shares, was installed in Sudan. It would seem that, so far, the National Unity government has not yet provided the hoped-for changes to Sudan’s political life or its people. Certainly, the transformation that was supposed to take place at the national level through power sharing and reform of legislation has yet to occur.

As yet, this new government is still run by a single authoritarian narrowly-based Islamist party, the NCP, and has not become a new hybrid government in which marginalized Sudanese meaningfully participate and where equality among the country’s 35 million people prevails (entailing, among other things, an end to the “ethnic cleansing” war policy in Darfur). Unless the situation is drastically improved by NCP actions, it appears doubtful that all Sudanese will have their human rights upheld in this new political arrangement, which includes a provision for countrywide internationally-monitored elections after three years.

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