Long road to peace
This is according to a new report by the International Crisis Group (ICG), an independent, non-profit, organization working through field-based analysis and high-level advocacy to prevent and resolve deadly conflict. Titled Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement: The long road ahead, the report says that whereas the agreement ended one of Africa’s longest and bloodiest civil wars, it was an agreement between only two parties, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) and the ruling National Congress Party (NCP), and continues to lack broader support throughout the country, particularly in the North.
‘The current equation for peace in Sudan is a worrying one: the NCP has the capacity to implement but lacks the political will, whereas the SPLM has the commitment but is weak and disorganised. There is a real risk of renewed conflict down the road unless the NCP begins to implement the CPA in good faith, and the SPLM becomes a stronger and more effective implementing partner’, says the report.
The implementation process has been an uphill task, with the NCP exploiting the gaps within the CPA and the weaknesses of its junior partner, the SPLM, to delay and frustrate the process, notes the report. Following the death of SPLM Chairman Dr. John Garang in July 2005, the SPLM vision has blurred, and the NCP has abandoned its strategy for a political partnership with the SPLM. It is increasingly clear that if this does not change soon, then all peaceful paths forward in Sudan – full implementation of the CPA, comprehensive political solutions to the conflicts in Darfur and the East – will likely lead to eventual regime change and an ousting of the NCP either via free and fair elections, or by simply whittling away its control of the structures of government to a minority stake.
Under growing pressure, the NCP is attempting to manage all these challenges to ensure its own political survival. It has largely succeeded in keeping the international community at bay over Darfur by facilitating increased chaos on the ground and promoting divisions within the rebels. It is achieving a similar containment of the international community on the CPA by selectively implementing elements of the agreement without allowing for any weakening of its grip on power or fundamental change in the way the country is governed. Yet these strategies are not sustainable, and will ultimately lead to renewed or increased conflict. The NCP must begin to implement the agreement in good faith to help assure its political future in a peaceful Sudan by making partnership an attractive option to the SPLM, and unity an attractive option to southern Sudanese.
According to the report, the SPLM is facing enormous challenges which are severely undermining its ability to function as an effective partner in government. The SPLM faces two simultaneous tasks: as the lead party in the new autonomous Government of Southern Sudan (GoSS), and the minority partner in the new Government of National Unity (GNU). Wracked by internal divisions and contradictions, and with no functional party structures or party decision-making mechanisms from mid-July 2005 through late February 2006 the SPLM has been completely overwhelmed thus far, unable to successfully or consistently challenge the NCP on most issues relating to implementation. This is most apparent in Khartoum, where the minority SPLM controls only a handful of Ministerial or State Ministerial positions, as well as the 1st Vice-President position, but does not yet have any members integrated into the national civil service or other national institutions. Consequently, it has been losing an uphill battle to implement the CPA and begin to change the policies of a government that still faces active civil wars in the East and West.
The SPLM is in disarray, still coping with its transition from a rebel movement to a government and from the untimely death of its late Chairman Dr Garang on 30 July 2005, just three weeks after he had been sworn in as the 1st Vice-President. It currently lacks the strategic vision to consolidate its place in the national scene as the natural umbrella for all the marginalised and the oppressed and as the guardian of the democratisation project that the CPA envisions. Former SPLM security chief Edward Lino painted a grim picture of the situation in a recent interview, noting “one year after the signing of the CPA, the NCP continues to have a firm grip on all the details of the state, institutions are impregnated with it, a iihadist army, a security apparatus that the NCP’s actions around implementation have damaged the envisioned partnership”.
However, the report notes that the SPLM is faring better in the South, as the GoSS slowly inches forward in the face of enormous physical and structural challenges. The 8 January Juba Declaration to integrate the bulk of the government-aligned southern armed groups operating within the umbrella South Sudan Defence Forces (SSDF) into the SPLA will help consolidate peace in the South, though implementation of the agreement will be difficult. But the GoSS is also facing some acute threats, most noticeably from the lack of progress on reorganising the SPLA into a professional army, and the extended delays in paying its troops and civil servants. These delays are creating an environment exploited by the Ugandan rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), which is allegedly still receiving support from the Sudan Armed Forces and has significantly expanded its activities in Western Equatoria, threatening to become a home-grown Sudanese problem.
But there are early signs that the SPLM is beginning to overcome some of its internal challenges and refocus its efforts on implementation of the CPA. Without a functioning and effective SPLM, there is little chance that the CPA will hold. Yet in the face of all of this, the international community has remained largely silent. Heavy on monitoring but weak on follow-through, the international community – particularly the key countries involved in the negotiation of the CPA – has not yet embraced its role as a guarantor of the CPA, and continues to lack a consistent, coordinated approach to dealing with the parties, particularly the NCP, let alone holding them to their respective commitments. More consistent, proactive and forceful engagement by the international community is another required ingredient to see this agreement peacefully through the pitfalls that lie ahead.
The 9 January 2005 CPA was the culmination of more than two and a half years of negotiation between the insurgent SPLM/A and the NCP. It provides for a six year interim period with democratic elections by 2009, and an autonomous southern government, followed by a self-determination referendum for the South. In the interim, it mandates power and wealth sharing arrangements aimed at ending decades of political and economic marginalisation of the South and guaranteeing its representation in Sudan federal government’s branches proportional to its population.
The report laments that the ongoing conflict in Darfur has played into this dynamic, distracting international attention and the parties from the CPA. Though international efforts have been depressingly ineffective at improving the situation in Darfur, the international outcry has been noted by the NCP, much of whose senior leadership is being investigated by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for the atrocity crimes carried out by the government forces in Darfur since 2003.
The strategy of the IGAD mediation team and its international partners was to balance the NCP’s expected reluctance to implement by having a strong SPLM minority partner in the national government, and by using the continued engagement of the international community to guarantee the agreement. Whereas the strategy pushed by the NCP aimed at establishing a strong political partnership with the more popular SPLM by drawing it away from its historic allies in the opposition, so as to allow the NCP a peaceful path to continued power and completion of its rebirth from a pariah state to an accepted member of the international community.
Neither strategy is working.
According to the CPA, the SPLM controls 70 per cent of the appointed positions in the GoSS until elections, the NCP 10 per cent, and other southern parties the remaining 20 per cent. At the level of the GNU, the NCP maintains 52 per cent of the appointed positions, the SPLM 28 per cent, other northern parties 14 per cent, and other southern parties 6 per cent. The SPLM must also establish 10 new state governments in the South (where it will maintain its 70 per cent control, with 20 per cent going to the NCP and 10 per cent to other parties), and fill 45 per cent of the positions in the state governments of Blue Nile and Southern Kordofan, and 20 per cent in all other northern state governments.
Still, the CPA is a long and complex agreement, and hence difficult to monitor effectively. With more than 50 national bodies and commissions to be formed, multiple systems and levels of governments (with the GoSS and southern state governments to be formed almost from scratch), the parties, partners and observers are understandably overwhelmed. Without universally accepted criteria for assessing implementation, there is an active debate amongst both the parties and observers on the interpretation of the implementation process – for while much has happened little has changed.
Though optimists point to the progress made, the pessimists appear to be closer to the truth, for the picture that emerges is of a pattern of NCP attempts to systematically undermine, delay or simply ignore the elements called for in the CPA that would fundamentally alter the status quo and its grip on power. It is also noteworthy that the bulk of the agreement was directly negotiated by then 1st Vice-President Ali Osman Taha and Dr Garang, aided by a small group of trusted aides, and the two leaders counted on their positive personal relationship to overcome obstacles.
To the UN, World Bank, U.S., UK, Norway, Italy, other Donor Countries and IGAD Member States, the report recommends that financial support and technical expertise be channelled in the short-term to combat the greatest immediate threats to the CPA, by funding and helping to operationalise key commissions such as the Ad Hoc North-South Boundary Commission, the National Petroleum Commission, and the National Civil Service Commission; and neutralise potential spoilers by supporting the implementation of the Juba Declaration.
The report also recommends to the international community to provide the SPLM with the technical expertise and information, as required, to help it attain its fair share of oil revenue, and develop the capacity to manage the oil sector in the South.
‘The NCP should immediately cease all inflammatory rhetoric designed to mobilise the Misseriya people against the Ngok Dinka and the Abyei Boundary Commission Report, and cease efforts to unconstitutionally administer Abyei from Southern Kordofan State’, the report concludes.