Haydar Ibrahim Ali

Director of the Sudanese Studies Center

 A vote for secession in the referendum on the future of Southern Sudan would fulfil the buried and dubious wishes of not only the ruling National Congress party, but also a large bloc within the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) and the Sudanese Islamist movement. However, the secession will only lead to the foundation of two failed states, ridden by internal power struggles and by unresolved territorial issues.

Separatist tendencies among supporters of the ruling parties already grew after the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005. The signing at Naivasha gave them some legitimacy and a taste of power.

They were unable to govern single-handedly, but the referendum and the subsequent secession will confer them the monopoly on power. The SPLM will be given free reign to govern the south, while the Islamists represented in the National Congress will establish their pure Islamic-Arab state in the north. Thus the secession option will pass, accompanied by a joy that is overwhelming in the south and kept under wraps in the north. Two failed states will be consecrated: a southern state resembling Rwanda, and a northern state whose exemplar is the Taliban-Afghanistan. We must not forget the totalitarian foundations of the ruling parties. The SPLM is an armed faction that gained its popularity from its military victories and does not fulfil the minimum conditions of a political party. The National Congress is originally a revolutionary movement. After the successful coup in 1989, the Islamist movement needed a political format and established the National Congress party.

If there is a vote for secession, many southern political forces will stand with the SPLM during the interim period, i.e. until July 2011. But the struggle over the participation in power will be unleashed and will assume a purely tribal character in the absence of any genuine political parties. The SPLM consists of the various branches of the Dinka tribe. The formation of the cabinet and the division of administrative and governmental functions will show who is really governing the south. Southerners other than the Dinka reiterate that they do not want to replace domination by the north with another form of domination. Observers have noted that the SPLM embarked upon a conspicuous process of marginalisation of non-Dinkas during the years of the interim period.

Political tension is mounting in the north, after the opposition charged the regime with responsibility for abandoning the south, then the failure of the Darfur negotiations, and finally the country’s difficult living conditions. Thus the opposition will try to exploit the crisis stifling the regime. The regime can be expected to return to its all time practice of repression and harassment; indeed, activists have already begun to be arrested. And what is the return to the whip if not a show of force and Shari’a intimidation? The agreement was obviously not comprehensive since it left out several core issues, probably due to the length of the negotiation process and the fact that the participants grew restless and afraid of failure.

The issue of Abyei was left pending, despite all its complexities. The problems of South Kordofan and the Blue Nile were transferred to an obscure process known as the “Popular Consultation”, which all parties now have divergent interpretations of. Most important is the crisis in Darfur, which has gone back (after all the efforts exerted) to the starting point, after the inscrutable regime withdrew from the Doha Platform. These are all time bombs that may go off at any given moment while the National Congress continues to manoeuvre and play for time.