Sudan is a tough nut to crack
Cameron Duodu
Letter from the North
The Sudanese civil war is one of the most puzzling in the world. It's been going on for so long that I cannot think of Sudan without thinking of that war.
Indeed, the war began even before 1962, the year when hundreds of Christian missionaries were deported from Southern Sudan on suspicion that they were fanning the flames of Southern secession. The dissidents were then known as the "Anya-Nya" and a crackdown on them led to hundreds of thousands of Southern Sudanese people fleeing to neighbouring Uganda, the Congo, Ethiopia and the Central African Republic.
In March 1972, however, the then ruler of Sudan, Colonel (as he was) Gaafar el- Nimeiri, signed an agreement in Addis Ababa with the leader of the Anya-Nya, General Joseph Lagu, "ending" the war. But, by 1976, signs had begun to emerge that the agreement might become unstuck, with the arrest of three members of the Southern Region Assembly. In 1981, a full-blown crisis occurred when the Southern Region Assembly was split in two. When Southern politicians protested that this was against the provisions of the 1972 agreement, 21 were arrested.
On June 5 1983, Nimeiri went so far as to suspend the Regional Self-government Act, which had given the Southern Sudanese people partial autonomy. He now created three regions in the south: Bahr el-Ghazal (capital Wau), Equatoria (capital Juba) and Upper Nile (capital Malakal).
As if in search of religious, as well as political, war against the South, Nimeiri then imposed Sharia law throughout Sudan in September 1983. By the end of that year, Sharia criminal courts had carried out 119 amputations for crimes like stealing.
The South saw the imposition of Sharia as an attempt to "Islamicise" the country and massive unrest ensued. In April 1984, Nimeiri declared a state of emergency. But two battalions of the army which was supposed to be enforcing the emergency mutinied in the South and broke away, under Colonel Joseph Garang. They formed the nucleus of the Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA) which has been fighting the authorities in Khartoum ever since.
There is a blind spot in Khartoum about the South. Even when Sudan gets a government that seems to be composed of rational people, like former prime minister Sadiq el- Mahdi, no permanent agreement can be reached.
I remember going to listen to a talk by El- Mahdi at the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House in London shortly after he had come to power in 1986. El-Mahdi had been touted as an Oxford- educated political master-mind who would succeed where the soldiers had failed. But he sent a cold shudder down my spine when he postulated, as his solution to the Southern problem, the idea of "social engineering". Nimeiri's fall from power had partly been caused by rumours that he wanted to flood Southern Sudan with Egyptian Arabs anxious to till new lands made fertile by a dam he had built. And El-Mahdi was talking about "social engineering"?
I wasn't surprised when his government fell within three years. Since then, I have never entertained any great hopes that the Sudanese problem can be solved in the foreseeable future.
With this sort of background, the Sudanese situation will prove to be a tough nut for President Thabo Mbeki to crack, if he takes up the suggestion of John Garang that he should help with the negotiations between the Khartoum government and the SPLA. The talks that have been going on in Nairobi this week between the two sides had, of course, made no discernible progress at the time of writing. But at least the talks have begun and we should hope that Sudan's journey of 1E000 miles to peace has commenced, with Nairobi as the first step.
I cannot end this piece without recalling what happened to me when I visited Khartoum in 1986. I was travelling from Addis Ababa, which then had one of the cheapest duty-free shops on the planet. Taking advantage of the cheap prices, I'd bought two large bottles of Chivas Regal whisky, which I was planning to take to London.
As soon as the Sudanese customs officers saw the bottles, they got excited. "Do you know that Sudan is an Islamic country?" they asked.
"Yes."
"Well, we don't allow the importation of alcohol into Sudan."
"Oh, I am coming here for only two days. I intend to take them along with me to London in two days' time. I don't intend to use them here."
"You can't import alcohol into the Sudan," they recited together.
"OK, can you keep the drinks at the airport and give me a receipt for them so that I can collect them and take them away with me when I come back in two days time?"
"No. In importing alcohol into the Sudan, you have broken the law. And the punishment is either we pour the drinks away, or we flog you."
"Flog me?"
"Yes, you have the choice. Either we pour the drinks away, or we flog you."
"You call that a choice? Pour the damn drinks away."
They took the drinks away to an inner room behind the counter. They did not allow me to enter, but I could see a sink and I could see them ostentatiously pouring the drinks down it. Later, they came and gave me the two bottles. Empty. Yes, the drink had been poured away all right.
But what had been at the bottom of the sink? A hidden receptacle, no doubt. I reckoned that in a "dry" Khartoum, two two-litre bottles of Chivas could each fetch the equivalent of 100 bucks. Not a bad day's work, enforcing Sharia, was it?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L
Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
