Democracy by the gun
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By Magdi El Gizouli
August 18, 2011 - In a rushed attempt to revive the ‘New Sudan’
project propagated by the unionist faction of the Sudan People’s
Liberation Movement (SPLM) Yasir Arman, the Secretary General of the
movement’s (North) Sudanese organisation (SPLM-N), and Abdel Aziz
al-Hilu, its rebellious Deputy Chairman, signed recently a
military-political pact with the twin factions of the Sudan Liberation
Movement (SLM) led by Abdel Wahid al-Nur and Mini Minawi, with the
declared aim of waging war against the regime of the National Congress
Party (NCP) and establishing a secular democracy in Sudan. Notably, it
was the same Arman who missed the ‘democracy’ game in April 2010 when
he, a presidential candidate, pulled out of the race citing inevitable
fraud and the situation in Darfur, in line with the mainstream SPLM’s
preference for a safe trade off for South Sudanese independence.
A spokesman of the SPLM-N, who until recently was a reporter for its
associate Khartoum newspaper, Ajras al-Hurriya, claimed that the
declaration of the brand new Sudan Revolutionary Front (SRF) was
signed in Kauda, the SPLM’s capital so to speak in South Kordofan. The
NCP press reported that the agreement was sealed inside South Sudan.
Ajras al-Hurriya was recently closed down by order of the Press
Council on the grounds that its shareholders included South Sudanese
citizens. A cynical guess is that the pact was signed in Kampala or
over the phone. Both Mini and Abdel Wahid have recently moved to the
Ugandan capital, the first from Juba and the second from Paris, where
they reinvented the absentee leadership of the pre-Addis Ababa
Agreement (1972) South Sudanese political figureheads.
The cause of a secular Sudan did not sell well with the Justice and
Equality Movement (JEM) which refused to join the pact, and expectedly
irked the SPLM-N’s ambivalent allies in the Khartoum opposition,
namely the National Umma Party (NUP) and the Democratic Unionist Party
(DUP). Turabi’s Popular Congress Party (PCP) had before voiced its
rejection of the SPLM-N’s secular agenda. The first two are more
likely to seek a co-existence formula with the NCP in the really
existing new Sudan, or the Second Republic to use President Bashir’s
depiction of the rump North; while the third, carried away by the
vengeance of its chief, prefers to invest in the promise of an
‘intifada’, possibly with the assistance of collateral guns.
Before his exit from the electoral race in April 2010 Yasir Arman and
his crew had rather successfully generated a momentum for the
dividends of ‘democracy’ and ‘secularism’ on a mass scale. The
political space they managed to create then is today doomed to dwindle
with the gun as its declared protector. Rather than unite Sudan’s
dispossessed the more likely consequence of the SPLM-N’s current
military fantasies is the generation of divisions within its own
ranks. No wonder the organisation’s very Chairman, Malik Agar, has
largely kept a distance from his colleagues designs. The governor of
the Blue Nile, backed by a constituency he managed to organise
politically, is more a challenge to the NCP’s hegemony than the SRF
with its three armies, liberated areas, and busy satellite phones.
The author is a fellow of the Rift Valley Institute. He publishes
regular opinion articles and analyses at his blog Still Sudan. He can
be reached at [email protected]
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