Sudan stared down the barrels of two major crises this week as a split in the country’s coalition government coincided with fears that growing violence in war-torn Darfur could derail peace efforts in the troubled region.
As the Mail & Guardian went to press, leaders of the two main partners in Sudan’s coalition government were due to hold emergency meetings to try and find a way out of an impasse that threatens a key peace deal in the country.
But whatever the outcome of the talks, observers said that the current turbulence was just one symptom of much deeper fault lines running through Africa’s largest country.
The main political party in south Sudan, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), pulled its ministers out of Khartoum last week, accusing the National Congress Party (NCP), its dominant partner in the national coalition government, of failing to follow through on a peace agreement signed in 2005.
The dramatic move caught diplomats by surprise and sparked warnings of a return to civil war if the partnership collapsed completely. Late this week, there were signs of progress. Salva Kiir, the head of the SPLM and Sudan’s vice-president, was due to fly to Khartoum to hold emergency talks with Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir.
Bashir signalled he was ready to make concessions to his southern partners by reshuffling the joint cabinet on Wednesday, partly fulfilling one of the SPLM’s demands.
But even if an immediate resolution is found between the two parties, fundamental problems remain.
When the SPLM and Sudan’s government first signed the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005, they billed it as an all-encompassing solution to Sudan’s age-old political flashpoints.
It was supposed to end Africa’s longest civil war, reunite the country and form the foundations for peace agreements for festering conflicts in Darfur and other remote corners of the vast republic.
The CPA ended the 21-year-old civil war between the predominantly Muslim north and the Christian and animist south, and the SPLM joined the NCP in a coalition Government of National Unity. But the outward signs of cooperation — ministerial titles, shared legislative bodies and conciliatory rhetoric — have provided only a thin cover for continued enmity between the two old foes.
The SPLM has repeatedly accused the NCP of stalling on delivering key protocols in the CPA, while the NCP last week issued a list of 50 alleged breaches by the SPLM.
Most of the arguments focus on the withdrawal of troops, the line of the north-south border, the funding of a promised census and, above all, who gets to control the millions upon millions of barrels of oil that lie beneath the surface of Sudan’s sun-baked earth.
One potential flashpoint is the oil-rich area of Abyei. The 2005 peace deal gave independent international experts the job of marking Abyei’s borders, but Bashir’s NCP rejected its findings.
The International Crisis Group this week warned that both the government and the SPLM were building up troops around the area.
”The international community has to re-engage across the board on CPA implementation, but nowhere more urgently than Abyei, where the risk of a return to war is rising dramatically,” says David Mozersky, the Crisis Group’s Horn of Africa project director. And the problems go even deeper than the north-south divide. Despite the ”comprehensiveness” of the CPA’s title, it has had little to offer the warring parties in the west in Darfur.
The build-up to the latest round of Darfur peace talks, due to take place in Libya next weekend, has been marred by reports of continued vicious fighting between government forces and rebels.
Even as rebels held a last-ditch meeting in the southern town of Juba this week, to try to find a common set of negotiation positions, fresh violence erupted. On Wednesday the United Nations reported that three drivers working for the World Food Programme had been shot dead in two attacks by armed raiders.
Many have used the violence to write off the coming peace talks, scorning any chance of success. ”Can pigs fly? No,” said one international commentator, when asked about the chances of the combatants reaching a peaceful resolution. ”The talks are now in real jeopardy as many people in Darfur are busy burying their dead,” read a regular column in the largely independent Khartoum Monitor.