It is crucial to view current peace initiatives in the Sudan through the prism of its post-colonial history, which has been that of multiple and simultaneous political struggles and civil wars.
The murder and mayhem in Darfur reveals many of the limitations of the agreement between the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army (SPLA) and the government of Lieutenant General Umar al-Bashir. It has been described as a ”peace between two minorities” or ”peace without democracy” because of who and what it excludes.
A number of Sudanese intellectuals point to all the political forces in the country — especially a host of important repressed northern parties — left out of talks on the future on their country.
The first civil war in the south began on the eve of independence, but other regions later created their own movements to challenge the concentration of power and resources in Khartoum. The Darfur Development Front, for example, was established in 1960 to challenge the neglect of the Fur region. The Beja Congress followed in the East, the Nuba formed their own movement and the Nubians established their own ethnic organisations. Many of these groups took up arms. The neglected Darfur region has witnessed numerous rebellions and even uprisings by senior politicians of the region against Khartoum.
The current regime’s language of Muslim brotherhood empowered neither the elite nor the ordinary people of this vastly Muslim region. On the contrary, the region was subjected to dominance by the ruling party’s members from the urban north who were sent to replace unsympathetic Darfurians.
Sudanese anti-colonial nationalism was rooted among the educated elite and civil servants around Khartoum and to its north, conventionally referred to as the riverain Northern Sudan. Southerners were not part of it, but neither were the Fur, the Beja nor the Nubians.
Fractiousness has been a significant feature of Northern Sudanese politics. This was evident in the colonial period and was, of course, also fostered by the colonial rulers, as one colonial civil secretary, Sir James Robertson, put it in 1951: ”They divide, we rule.”
The Sudanese Communist Party and the Muslim Brothers, both established in the immediate post-World War II years, have been the predominant political forces struggling to break Northern Sudanese politics out of its sectarianism. For the Brothers, only a modernised Islamic ”ideology”, not the blind imitation of popular Sufi masters, could produce a modern and, of course Islamic, Sudan.
But when the Brothers entered the public realm they would face stiff competition from an established left that always respected popular religious sentiments and practices. However, both spurned democratic competition to support military rulers when they felt power within reach: the Communists in 1969 supported the coup of Ja’afar Nimeiri, and the Brothers (in the form of the National Islamic Front) supported, in fact manipulated, the 1989 coup of Al-Bashir, who still remains in power.
Suffering extraordinary colonial and post-colonial neglect the peoples of the south of the country were easily mobilised to call for rebellion. Historically, many of these champions for the periphery were, however, at one stage very close to and beneficiaries of the political centre. Even the leader of the SPLA, John Garang, was a colonel in the Sudanese army based in Khartoum before he walked away and started his own liberation organisation in the south. Southern politics has been as fissiparous as in its northern counterpart.
The work of small but powerful elites — minorities with capital, access to political power and connections to the outside world — from within the north, but also the south, have steered Sudanese politics for all of the post-colonial period. Democratic discourse that genuinely incorporates all regions, identities and classes has had a rather short and shallow existence in the Sudan. How long will the peace between men of arms currently being negotiated last? Will it be a peace without a repetition of Darfur and that ensures political participation by all Sudanese on the basis of equal citizenship?
Shamil Jeppie teaches African and Middle Eastern history at the University of Cape Town