حروف كلمــة (خراب )...

Sudan's politics

A vital election
The candidates in Sudan's election declare themselves
Feb 10th 2010 | From The Economist online

IN APRIL Africa’s largest country goes to the polls for its first national election since 1986. The election was forced on President Omar al-Bashir’s regime in Khartoum in 2005, the price that it had to pay for signing a peace deal with its southern rebels in January of that year.

In those far-off, optimistic days many presumed that these elections would finally sweep away Mr Bashir’s regime, which came to power in a coup in 1989, and usher in a new era of democracy and federalism. After all, having waged two savage counter-insurgency wars in the western region of Darfur and in the south, Mr Bashir is undoubtedly loathed by many of his own countrymen. However, if the final selection of presidential candidates is anything to go by, it won’t be that simple.

For a start, the main opposition party throughout the country, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), the political arm of the southern rebels, is not even putting up its leader, Salva Kiir, against Mr Bashir in the presidential contest. Instead, the party has picked a secular Muslim, Yasir Arman, to represent it. Mr Kiir will contest only the presidency of south Sudan, which has a semi-autonomous government as agreed under the 2005 peace deal.

Mr Arman should appeal more, perhaps, to northern Muslim Sudanese voters than Mr Kiir, a Christian from the African Dinka tribe. But Mr Arman is relatively unknown and has yet to prove himself as a political campaigner. Furthermore, the SPLM’s choice shows that its real priority is to get through with the minimum amount of political fuss until a referendum is held on independence in the south next year. At that point southerners are expected to vote for self-government and break away from the north; the SPLM will thus get its own country to govern.

With the SPLM distracted by next year’s referendum, then, the onus will be on the other parties to take the fight to Mr Bashir. The Umma Party has been the most successful northern Muslim party in Sudan’s post-independence history and it won the greatest number of seats in parliament 1986. The Umma has chosen its long-term leader, the 74-year-old Sadiq al-Mahdi, to contest the presidency; he is a direct descendant of the Mahdi, the spiritual and political founder of Sudanese nationalism in the 19th century. Mr al-Mahdi has twice been prime minister, the second time in 1986-89.

However, the Umma Party is not the force that it was. It is split; Mr al-Mahdi’s cousin, Mubarak, has also announced his candidacy for the presidency as leader of the Umma Reform and Renewal Party. Furthermore, the Umma’s heartland was always in the west of the country, including Darfur, but this is precisely where voter registration for this election has been most patchy. Indeed, no one is sure whether any of the 2.7m internally displaced Darfuris will vote at all.

As to the other presidential contenders, the Sudanese Communist Party, which was strong in the 1960s and 1970s, has chosen its own very ageing long-time leader, Mohammed Ibrahim Nugud, to run against Mr Bashir. He, however, is unlikely to appeal to younger, more Islamic-minded generations of Sudanese. The other powerful northern Muslim party, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), has, like the SPLM, not chosen its long-standing leader, Mohammed al-Mirghani, to contest the presidency. He is even suspected of having tried to forge a coalition with Mr Bashir’s ruling National Congress Party (NCP). The other big political figure in Sudan, Hassan al-Turabi, the former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and the architect of the 1989 coup before falling out with Mr Bashir, is not standing against the president either.

For the moment, then, the opposition to Mr Bashir looks divided, weak and anachronistic. Furthermore, Mr Bashir’s party will have complete command of the security and intelligence apparatus of the country in the run-up to the election. The NCP is unlikely to provide any of the opposition parties with the freedom to campaign openly or to put their message over on the state-run media. As in Darfur, many anti-government Sudanese will have been disenfranchised by the voter-registration process

The only real chance for the opposition against Mr Bashir would be if the different parties could unite around one candidate. This was the vision of the former leader of the SPLM, John Garang, who was killed in a helicopter crash just after the signing of the peace agreement in 2005. Last year the various opposition factions did meet in the south Sudanese capital of Juba to form the so-called “Juba alliance” against Mr Bashir, but this has proved to be more of a concept than a working political coalition. But a broad front of the Umma Party, the DUP and the SPLM would probably defeat Mr Bashir, however much the current government tried to rig the process and the result.

Nonetheless, despite all the Western sanctions, UN pressure and international opprobrium over Darfur, Mr Bashir, wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes and crimes against humanity, probably remains the favourite to win the election. After which, among other things, his supporters will regard him as untouchable by the ICC, causing even more difficulties for the UN and the West over Sudan.