The Secession of S. Sudan : Everyone is a Leader in his Small Things

Abdullah Ali Ibrahim

(August 29, 2011)
“Blaming is a plan of incompetence or a manifestation of ‘slumber of spirits’, in the words of the poet Salah Ahmed Ibrahim. It is unfortunate that our political thought could not do anything but return from the separation by blaming. It is a symptom of the elite’s exhaustion”
If our share in Sudan of awareness of the tragedy of the separation of the south is nothing but blaming, we will not increase it by making it tragicomic.
Each of our political groups in government and opposition thinks that it is the surviving group, and blames the secession of the south on the other.
We have reached an absurd level of blaming over the secession of the south.
You find even the ruling National Congress turning to each other to blame each other.
One group holds the crew that was behind the Naivasha Agreement (2005) – which led to the separation of the south – responsible for the secession, until the writer Khalid Al-Tijani advised them to be rational and stop this empty exercise.
As for the Prime Minister during the two periods of democratic rule in the sixties and eighties, Sadiq al-Mahdi, he knows that there must be someone to blame for the crisis in the south, and so he hastened modestly to say that he bears some responsibility for its separation.
He attributed this to his troublesome allies in the government in 1986. However, he did not lack an excuse to blame the Salvation Government for the secession, without caring. He said that the difference between him and the Salvation Government in terms of the secession is “the difference between someone who intended the right and missed it and someone who intended the wrong and hit it.”
The Islamic/Salvation Movement, on the other hand, cannot of course blame anyone for the secession that occurred during its long “ruthlessness” in power. However, it denounces its opponents’ accusation that its clumsy management of Sudanese diversity through its long and blatant insistence on the Islamic constitution is what divided the country.
The Islamists have a “distorted” argument in deflecting this blame, which is that Sharia law has nothing to do with Garang’s rebellion that began in July 1983, while Nimeiri implemented Sharia law in September of the same year.
I do not know how the Islamists were able to limit the call for the rule of Sharia or its application to the Nimeiri era alone. Their call for this preceded Nimeiri and did not stop with him.
The same applies to the rebellion of the southern nationalists. The Islamists are “fooling” people with such a gratuitous argument. They began their political career – after an educational movement in the fifties of the last century – by mobilizing people to adopt Islamic Sharia as a constitution, which Dr. Abdul Latif Al-Buni detailed in his books on Islam and politics in Sudan. In fact, in 1968, they succeeded in passing a draft of an Islamic constitution from within parliament. The American Muslim academic Abdo Malqam Simenon (1994) described this extremism (which everyone is good at) as “randomness.” He meant by this the group’s transformation of a political agenda whose situations were not ripe (such as the establishment of the Islamic state) into optimistic theories for managing social development.
The randomness, in his words, ended with the Islamists turning against history, because they thought that their strategy was something that could be inserted into the course of practical practice whenever they wanted.
Change happens -according to their belief- when they say “Be” and it happens. The 1989 coup that they committed in broad daylight is a clear witness to the randomness of the movement and its bitter fruits. Blame sometimes took theatrical forms. As soon as the southerners voted for secession, the Democratic Unionist Party declared its innocence of its guilt by adorning the house of the late leader Ismail al-Azhari – the first Prime Minister of independent Sudan (1954-1956) and the head of the party – in black. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of the origins of the southern issue in independent Sudan knows that al-Azhari laid its foundation stone. In fact, he was the one who agreed, during the government investigation into the circumstances of the first “rebellion” of the southern nationalists in August 1955, to hold him most responsible for that rebellion that claimed the lives of hundreds of northern civilians.
Among the many missteps of his government and party on the threshold of independence, the report criticized al-Azhari for his extravagance in promising the southerners during the 1954 elections a fair division of the power inherited from the British.
Not only did he promise them priority in filling the positions that would become vacant after the British left the south, but he also granted them a good share of leadership positions in the north. The report described this electoral artifice as “reckless and irresponsible”, because the southerners did not obtain more than six positions in the civil service with Sudanization in 1954, the highest of which was deputy inspector of the center.
This unfair division of the southerners confirmed what had always plagued them, that the northerners – when Sudan became independent from the British – would return them to the era of slavery.
Their injustice against Sudanization – which they called “Shamala” – was some of the firewood of the 1955 rebellion. Accordingly, the unionists were wrong when they disavowed secession with their theatrical movement at Dar al-Azhari. The political elite in government and opposition, alike, were ministers for the secession of the south. This elite of Arab and Islamic origins (except for the Communist Party in its early days) did not deal with the south – in the specificity of its issue – with a cultural ease that penetrated its depths as another.
When she saw nothing in the south but a bone to tossed about in her dispute over power, she did not keep the necessary distance from him – like the last one.
Thus, the entire northern opposition abandoned the agreement. It did not realize the peace agreement that had enveloped the south (1972-1982).
It was cut off from the political, cultural and social vitality that filled the south with that decade. It clung to its gloomy analyses, until some of them reconciled with Nimeiri in 1977, a reconciliation that sought to secure his rule in the face of the southern ally.
In the late seventies, Nimeiri was no longer able to confront the southern demands alone, such as the necessity of implementing the Abyei referendum included in the Addis Ababa Agreement, his protests against the digging of the Jonglei Canal, and the beginning of the dispute over the newly discovered southern oil. In the context of this alliance with the Islamists, Nimeiri got rid of the Addis Ababa Agreement – which no one mourns – with the stroke of a pen in June 1983.
Then the elite of the opposition returned in the end to blame him for his failure to implement the agreement.
No political conscience would have doubted them about their fierce abandonment of that agreement, an abandonment that made it easy for Nimeiri to break its promise.
Among those who played the game of the greatness of the South in the most critical times is the current Democratic Unionist Party led by Mohamed Osman Al-Mirghani. Al-Mirghani now frequently confirms his innocence of the South’s sin by waving the Al-Mirghani/John Garang peace agreement in November 1988.
The unionists and opponents of the Salvation regime believe that if it were not for the hesitation of the then Prime Minister Sadiq Al-Mahdi in implementing it, we would have cut off the path of the Salvation coup in June 1989 and its end.
Al-Mirghani currently repeats that he agreed with Garang on the unity of Sudan, and that anything other than that – such as secession – is invalid. However, when we look at the context of the fanaticism and psychology of the ruling coalition in the late eighties, it becomes clear to us that the Al-Mirghani/Garang agreement was another symptom of the northern elite’s dealing with the southern situation as a bone of contention in their struggles for power.
This analysis of the Al-Mirghani/Garang agreement was agreed upon by two well-versed historians of the South. Douglas Johnson (Sudan’s Civil Wars, 2003) and Robert Collins in his latest book (2008) believe that Al-Mirghani was sick of the policies of his ally Sadiq Al-Mahdi, whose favor had become with the third partner in the government coalition, the National Islamic Front led by Dr. Hassan Al-Turabi.
As Al-Mirghani looked forward to the upcoming elections, he decided to approach the Popular Movement, which had boycotted the 1986 elections and continued the war.
He signed the aforementioned agreement with it. The agreement was no more than a second edition of the Kokadam Agreement (a town in the south) signed by the southern and northern parties – except for the Mirghani and Turabi parties – with the People’s Movement in March 1986. That agreement stipulated holding a constitutional conference to build a different or new Sudan, on the condition that the existing government would be dissolved and the Islamic September laws imposed by Nimeiri in 1983 would be abolished.
As soon as Sadiq took power after the 1986 elections, he reneged on his commitment to the Kokadam Agreement because his partners in power hated him, while Mirghani leaned towards him. The new version of Kokadam in the Mirghani/Garang Agreement included the People’s Movement’s concession to dissolving the government, and was satisfied with suspending Nimeiri’s Islamic laws until the convening of the hoped-for constitutional conference.
The agreement caused severe political polarization, the facts of which cannot be covered in this article. It is sufficient that the Salvation coup was a result of the intensity of those polarizations. The custom of concluding an agreement with Garang by a stubborn or irritable northern politician became widespread.
As soon as Turabi left his regime, he signed the February 2001 agreement with the SPLM. And so on.
Blaming is a plan of incompetence or a manifestation of “sleepy spirits”, in the words of the poet Salah Ahmed Ibrahim. It is unfortunate that our political thought had no choice but to return from separation through blame. It is a symptom of the elite’s fatigue, as diagnosed by the Darfur activist Alex de Waal, who said that the thought of its old age and youth has become old, to the point that the legendary energy of Sadiq al-Mahdi has evaporated. And those who remained with some vitality – such as Khalil Ibrahim and Abdel Wahid Mohamed Nour, leaders of the Darfur movements – have wandered in the paths of irritating revolution, or revolutionary destruction that was devoid of alternatives.

Accordingly, the arena was devoid of any new inspiring idea after Sudan tried all the major ideas (right, left and marginal), so they collapsed and their ruins blocked the way towards new inspiring ideas. The elite had nothing left but the minor ideas to fuss over and blame. “Everyone is a leader in his own small matters,” said the great poet Mohammed Al Mahdi Al Majzoub.