Long history of war
The Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that ushered in a new era in Sudan was a result of protracted negotiations held under the auspices of the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (Igad) and chaired by Retired Kenya Army Commander Lt.Gen. Lazarus Sumbeiywo. Though seen as a panacea to the north-south problem, the CPA may not hold due to Sudan’s long history of civil wars.
Sudan has been virtually at war with itself since it emerged from colonial rule in 1956. By then, the stage for conflict had already been set by the British and the Egyptians by way of a scenario of glaring inequalities between the north and the south, with much of the country's resources and the instruments of policy-making concentrated in the Arab north.
The first war, known as the Anyanya, led by Emillio Tapeng, broke out in 1956 and ended in 1972 with the Addis Ababa Accord. A decade of relative peace and stability soon followed, with the south enjoying a large degree of autonomy as granted by the Accord, besides rapid economic growth. But all this ended abruptly in 1983 with the onset of the second phase of the civil war, which was caused by the economic marginalisation of the south, especially over natural resources and its deliberate exclusion from centres of political power.
The mainly Christian and animist south had been fighting the government in Khartoum since 1983 after the then president, Jaffer Numayri, dissolved the regional government and imposed “Sharia” [Islamic] law nationwide.
But from 1994, the regional Igad– which groups Eastern and Horn of Africa nations-started to broker peace between the SPLM/A and the government. Signs of peace, however, came in 2002 when, for the first time, President el-Bashir met Garang in Kampala, followed by the signing of the Machakos Protocol on 20 July 2002 in Kenya.The protocol commits the Sudan government to confining “Sharia” law to the north and grants southern Sudan a six-year period of administrative autonomy, after which the population can decide in a referendum whether to stay in a united Sudan or secede. After the Machakos Protocol, came various accords, which culminated in the 9 January 2005 CPA. “My presence here today in Khartoum is a true signal that the war is over”, said Garang, who returned to Khartoum after a hiatus of 22 years. President al-Bashir also gave an assurance of his commitment to peace, in a speech to mark the 16th and last anniversary of his revolutionary leadership. He also offered peaceful overtures by releasing from detention all his political enemies, including opposition leader Hassan Al-Tourabi.
The final peace accord brought to an end a war in which 2 million people died and 4 million others displaced. Still, doubts abound on the survival of the CPA. For the history of southern Sudan since 1841 is a history of war. The first rulers were Turks, who lacked the resources to administer the Upper Nile, except for a few river posts. Beyond them, the land was the domain of powerful corporate slave traders who followed the channel of Salim Qapudan to the interior, opening the period of the Nilotic slave trade and of forty years of depravations and death, which accompanied the institution of involuntary servitude. The Turks were followed by the Northern Sudanese of Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi whose jihad not only drove the Turks from the Sudan in 1885 but whose successor, the Khalifa Abdullahi, continued the jihad for the conversion of southern Sudan, but with little success.