Sudan pulled back from the brink of a major political crisis this week as both the country’s president and the leader of its semi-autonomous south said they were determined to avoid war.
But diplomats and observers said serious divisions remained between both sides that could at any time erupt into further confrontations and threaten the peace deal that ended two decades of war — Africa’s longest civil conflict.
Southern ministers walked out of Sudan’s coalition government last month, accusing Khartoum of failing to follow through on the Comprehensive Peace Agreement they both signed in 2005.
The crisis reached new heights last Saturday when Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir called for the expansion of a notorious northern militia that fought the south during the civil war.
Bashir was in military uniform when he made his call in a provocative speech at an event held in honour of the Popular Defence Forces, a government-allied militia also accused by the United Nations of carrying out mass rapes and abductions in Sudan’s festering Darfur crisis.
The provocation hit home and Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) officials quickly denounced his remarks, calling them a ”call for war”.
Pagan Amum, the secretary general of the south’s main party, the SPLM, went as far as to say the south was ”mobilising” in response.
The stand-off left many pundits wondering whether the country could be heading for a repeat of the civil war that killed at least two million people and displaced another four million.
But on Tuesday, south Sudan’s leader Salva Kiir told crowds gathered to welcome him back from a trip to Washington, DC that he would never ”ever” take them back to war.
A day later, Bashir addressed the general conference of his own group, the National Congress Party (NCP). Wearing traditional beige robes and a turban, he told his chanting supporters: ”We will never go back to war as long as we have peace as an option.”
The rhetoric died down and so, on the surface, did the level of threat.
Many doubt whether the north or the south was really up for a full-on conflict this time round.
”Neither side is at the moment prepared for war. Neither side is ready for war,” seasoned Sudan commentator Alex de Waal told journalists.
”The SPLM, when it announced its suspension from the government of national unity, was playing a very, very big card and implicitly saying they had the war card up their sleeve. They weren’t really prepared to go to war at that stage.
”And the northern government has largely called their bluff and said we too can be ready for war if you are. The SPLM under current circumstances really has no option but to get back in with the government of national unity.”
The SPLM is now saying it won’t go back into government until Bashir starts following through on some of the promises he made when signing the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. The most contentious of those promises is about who gets to control Sudan’s central and oil-rich region of Abyei. At the time of the peace agreement, both sides promised to let an independent panel decide on the demarcation of the key bit of land.
When the Abyei Borders Commission made its recommendations later in 2005, Khartoum promptly rejected them. The SPLM is now demanding that Bashir changes his mind — which he has vowed never to do. At stake is millions upon millions of barrels of Sudan’s new lifeblood, crude oil.
And that is just one of the unresolved issues facing the former political partners and civil war foes. One other big concern is the withdrawal of soldiers — from the south to the north and the north to the south. Both promised redeployments have slipped behind schedule, with the south further behind in its manoeuvrings than the north, according to observers.
Serious concerns have been raised about the transparency of the wealth-sharing agreement between the north and south, under which large parts of Sudan’s oil revenue were divided over the border. The south often claims it is not getting its fair share. The north regularly raises questions about how wisely and openly the south is spending the billions of dollars that do make it down to Juba.
Then there are other stumbling blocks, like the funding of the long-delayed census, designed to pave the way to long-awaited national elections in 2009.
And beyond that still is something neither side can control — unexpected, random events. Several times in the past few months tiny confrontations between soldiers from north and south have threatened to get out of hand. Earlier this year a band of soldiers returning from the north to the south were surrounded by Sudanese soldiers and held in a kind of siege for three days. Each time, wiser heads have intervened and the potential flash points have dimmed. But wiser heads may not always be there to intervene.
Said De Waal: ”In the very short term the chances [of war] are small, though the structure of both parties — the fact that they both have decentralised command structures — means that there could be a security incident that could spiral out of control. And that is a very, very serious concern. Even though war is not in the interests of either side, it could still happen.”