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 SPLM-NCP Stand off: a Glance at the NCP History of Duplicity
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25/10/2007 SPLM-NCP Stand off: a Glance at the NCP History of Duplicity
By Atem Yaak Atem
Few observers of Sudan political scene were surprised at the decision last week by the SPLM leadership to call their colleagues who were in Khartoum as members of the Government of National Unity, GONU. These public figures representing the South on the ticket of the SPLM were there in accordance with the terms of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, CPA, of January 2005. The SPLM ministers and state ministers were to be partners with the National Congress Party, NCP, in running the affairs of the country during the interim period. While most of these public servants went to Khartoum with high hope of drawing up plans for their departments to provide services and development for the whole country they realised immediately that they were just ministers in name (apart from drawing salaries, some privileges such as cars and state houses) as juniors showed disrespect and out right insubordination.
The ordeal, and that is what it has always been the lot of any Southern Sudanese office holder in the successive governments based in Khartoum, including being despised even by semi literate members of the ruling class. If the problem was that SPM ministers in the GONU were not receiving the respect and dignity commensurate with their status, the issue would have been seen as a result of the perennial mutual distrust between the North and the South. However, serious things are at stake; a minister who cannot discharge his or her duties in full because someone or a clique does not want them to do the job, then the representation of the party they represent and the people to be served, is meaningless.
In the wider context, watering down the role of the SPLM members of the GONU is part of a pattern that has characterised the implementation of the CPA since day one. The litany of complaints which the SPLM Interim Political Bureau released on October 12 is a litany of “Too Many Items of the CPA Dishonoured” by the signatory to the peace accord, the NCP. The sabotage orchestrated by the ruling NCP includes non-implementation of the Abyei Border Commission, demarcation of the North-South border, delay in deadline for pulling out some of the members of Sudan Armed Forces, SAF, from the South, the Government of Sothern Sudan, GOSS, being kept in the dark about oil revenues or its management. Attempts by the SPLM to embark on a democratic path is also being blocked while publications allied to the NCP such as the Antibah which is affiliated to the ruling party is notorious for inciting hatred and intolerance against everything that is not Arab or Muslim, are spewing out poison ink against the South and the agreement. The list of grievances is not exhaustive.
Why are these things happening? There is nothing new in the history, behaviour and ideology of the leadership of the National Congress Party. It was just yesterday that what the whole world knows as a party of Muslim Brotherhood changed its name as a camouflage in the belief that the young generation will treat it as just another new and conventional organisation on the country’s political landscape. This Islamist outfit, like a secret service organisation, loves operating under aliases. The NCP is a forerunner of the National Islamic Front, the NIF, that staged the military coup of June 1989 and the rule under the guidance of Sheikh Hassan Abdalla el Turabi and hardline operatives among the civilian and military officers affiliated to the ideology of political Islam. Before that the party was the Islamic Charter Front which came into existence around the time following the overthrow in 1964 of the first military rule of General Ibrahim Abboud. The founding leader was none other Dr Turabi then a young dean of law faculty at the University of Khartoum. The Charter Front drew its inspiration from the teachings of the Egyptian Islamic thinker Hassan el Bana and Sayed Gutb whom the Government of President Gamal Abdel Nasser hanged for alleged anti State activities in the 1960s.
Revisiting the NCP’s past is an important reminder for those who are taken aback by the policies and practices of the NCP. Following the fall of the military regime in 1964 and the return of active political life based on dialogue and freedom of expression, the Sudanese political forces of the day agreed that the civil war then raging in the South had to get a political and constitutional solution, not a military one.
The holding of the Round Table Conference in March of 1965 between the Northern political parties and the leaders of the Southern insurgents under the leadership of Sudan African National Union, Sanu, was a milestone. Although little was achieved by the conference by way of immediate end of the armed conflict, the subsequent Recommendations of the Twelve Man Committee were later to become elements of the Addis Ababa Agreement, AAA, of 1972. (Most Southern Sudanese think the University of Juba came out the blue; it did not: it was one of the items in the said recommendations and the project was carried out jointly by the Government of Southern Region and the Central Government of Nimeiri in 1977.)
What was the stand of the Islamic Charter Front in these attempts to solve what was then known as the Southern Question? Speaking on behalf of his party Dr Hassan el Turabi went against what was a consensus among the diverse Sudanese political parties including the theocratic Ummah by rejecting anything remotely relating to the idea of local autonomy for the South. To Turabi all the items on the Twelve Man Committee document were an anathema to his party as he claimed endorsement and implementation of such proposals would lead to the disintegration of the country.
When Nimeiri in alliance with some progressive elements in the North took power in May 1969, his Government acknowledged the existence of cultural differences between the two parts of the country and that on the basis of that reality the people of the South had the right to exercise regional autonomy and to develop their own cultures.
At the time the Islamic Charter Front like several other parties had been proscribed so its leaders including Turabi went into exile to wage war on the May regime mainly because of the its recognition of those rights for the people of the South. The Brotherhood opposition to Nimeiri’s rule intensified after the signing of the AAA in 1972. Together with his brother in law Sadiq el Mahdi told Nimeiri that there would be no reconciliation between the opposition and his government unless the general promised to return the country to pre-AAA period. Nimeiri agreed and embarked on some protracted measures, some provocative such as the abortive plan to redraw the borders in 1980. In the end Turabi and his party (and Sadiq el Mahdi) carried the day. The NIF and Ummah, together with Nimeiri, can be credited to have ignited the second civil war that erupted in 1984.
After the fall in 1985 of Nimeiri whose rule had been infiltrated and finally hijacked by the NIF, the Sudanese forces of the uprising called for a negotiated settlement to the armed conflict. All political parties attended the conference with its famous Koka Dam Declaration of 1986 which among other things stipulated that the problem was a national one and had to be solved through dialogue for all the political parties including the SPLM and the government of the day to fashion out a lasting and working political and constitutional formula.
Conspicuous by their absence at the gathering at Ethiopian resort were the NIF and Democratic Unionist Party, DUP. While the Sudanese from all corners of the republic were working for a peaceful solution to the war between the Government and the SPLM/A, the NIF and its many irresponsible publications were daily publishing stories and fabrications aimed at inciting religious and ethnic hatred, intolerance and invectives against the SPLM/A and its leadership. At the same time these NIF mouthpieces were intimidating the progressives among the Northern intelligentsia who favoured dialogue with the rebels.
The NIF bellicose stand ultimately led to the military take over when the government of Prime Minister Sadiq el Mahdi was preparing to hold peace talks with the SPLM. The so-called the Salvation Revolution took its name from the fact that the coup had “saved” the country from the government of the day “capitulating to the rebels” by talking peace and possibly reaching a peace agreement with the insurgents.
SPLM’s complaint that the NCP impedes the nurturing of democracy seems to be oblivious to the fact that the former leader of the Brotherhood has never been to a legislature through free and fair elections. In the general elections of 1968 Turabi was thoroughly trounced in his home village of Masid, south of Khartoum. Again in 1986 he was humiliated by an alliance of nearly all Sudanese parties who decided to back one candidate against the NIF chieftain to block the schemer with a penchant for dictatorship from entering parliament. Turabi has passed on the fear of the electorate and open and fair contest to many of his students now running the NCP. The ideology of the Brotherhood is anti-democracy, hostile to freedom of speech and the press and the rights of others who hold contrary views.
Another major tenet of the Brotherhood is their time tested and ingrained policy epitomised by dishonesty as an instrument when dealing with their opponents. When they find themselves cornered and in order to save loss of face they would enter into an agreement with their enemies or rivals. Never in their wildest imagination do the leaders of NIF, now NCP, sign a deal with the intention of carrying it to its logical conclusion: Ask Riek Machar, Lam Akol, Kawac Makuei, those who were in the Kerubino Kuanyin Bol’s camp or some opposition leaders from the North, East and more recently, Darfur.
This leads to the other relevant question: what is that this time round that the NCP agreement with the SPLM would be faithfully implemented? It is true that the SPLM had and still has the second largest and most effective military component in the form of SPLA after the SAF. But the NCP which is a minority in itself has no respect for superior numbers. The scuttling of the CPA began before it was signed.
The plan to bring the agreement to nothing precisely began at Machakos the day the protocol was signed in the Kenyan town. On that day the NCP threw spanners at work. The Machakos Protocol affirmed the right of the people of Southern Sudan to self-determination through a referendum. The NCP and some alarmists among Northern Sudanese equate self-determination with separation. Before the ink had dried on the paper government delegation called a secret meeting of people of Arab stock regardless of their party affiliation, except for one SPLM member they did not know he was not ideologically one of their own. The message was that they would have to accept the inevitable by signing the agreement to avoid the pressure and possible censor from the international community. The next step, the divulged report goes to state, was that everyone among the brethren must make sure that the deal was not to be implemented, using all means, fair or not. The NCP faithful were sure to succeed in that they were going to use the differences and cut-throat power struggle among the Southern elite as tools in putting the South in disarray during the interim period. This is then the genesis of what is taking place today characterised by procrastination in the implementation of the clauses in the CPA.
When the leadership of the SPLM decided to call their colleagues in the GONU the reaction was predicable: anger and counter accusation. President Bashir condemned the “walk out”. For his part Nafie Ali Nafie one of the hardliners in the NCP sang the usual refrain from the Northern ruling class: this was a foreign plot. His message like those who have misruled the country since 1956 is that Southern Sudanese never think for themselves; they do the bidding of the West especially the Christian organisations. This is not only an insult to the people of the South and their leaders. Northern politicians thinking this way are actually incapable of learning. Why should the North arrogate to itself the monopoly of patriotism or competence when it comes to running modern societies?
The leadership of the SPLM and the GOSS has all along has been patient like the Biblical Job in handling provocation after provocation engineered in the South by the Khartoum through their agents within the various Southern militias or members of SAF. To the NCP this patience it is lack of resolve or cowardice on the side of the SPLM/A leadership. In fact, there is a lot to be gained by the SPLM/A in avoiding acts of violence that would lead to the resumption of fighting. Despite few voices of some reckless Southern Sudanese, including a journalist who once urged the Southern law making body to declare a UDI (unilateral declaration of independence) calling for the resumption of fighting, the SPLM has done well by sticking to the political struggle, although admittedly a complicated and frustrating process when one is dealing with a group of people that is impervious to logic and adverse to the rights of others. The South and the SPLM under the leadership of President Salva Kiir rightly deserve commendation for their wisdom and by resisting to answer folly with folly.
Having stated this there is a strong need for the SPLM/A to be more vigilant now than any other time before. The hardliners within the NCP who are angry that after all the SPLM can take tough decision will come up with further mischievous schemes, some subtle, others crude, to create chaos if the current crisis is resolved peacefully and to the satisfaction of the parties.
The SPLM/A must ensure that no-one puts the SPLA in such a situation where or when individual officers or a group of officers would be pushed to do what could plunge the region into a war for which the people are not adequately prepared. War like peace should be fought by the people and on behalf of the people. The SPLA should fight in self-defence and should not be the one to fire the first shot nor should it engage in wars of aggression.
Another area of fear is the apparent virtual blind trust and faith most people in the South put in the international community. Yes, we need the support of the world opinion to be with us. Apparently, too, for the time being at least, there is a huge amount of information which is available to important members of international community on who the bad guys and the good guys are in the CPA process. Being a good guy in a situation like this is good. But how many people have been butchered while the world body was on their side in terms of opinion? Rwanda, Darfur, Cambodia of Pol Pot, Armenia in 1915, Iraqi Kurds in the 1980s…you name it. These mass tragedies should serve as useful reminders that despite the presence of good will a people targeted by tyrannical and diabolical regime could find themselves alone in this world populated by billions of human beings. Sometimes people refer to UN as a synonym for international community. But that UN building at Lake Success in New York has seats for the likes of China and Russia whose main concern is not the rights of a certain Gatluak or Wani or Deng: they want trade. And they have the veto, too.
Although the people of Southern Sudan are part of the human family and in need of the support of peace loving people all over the globe, there is no substitute for their determination to fight for their rights and be able to defend themselves against the eternal oppressors and looters of their resources. In that role the future of the people of Southern Sudan lies squarely and securely with the SPLA, their army.
The writer is a member of the SPLM and founding director of the former Radio SPLA. He was a member of the SPLM delegation to Koka Dam conference, Abuja Two and other talks with several opposition groups and the Government of Sudan in Ethiopia and Kenya.
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Deng
فيس بوك
تويتر
انستقرام
يوتيوب
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