Unworthy of liberation
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By Magdi El Gizouli
September 5, 2011 — In his 3 September declaration of war the
Secretary General of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement in North
Sudan (SPLM-N), Yasir Arman, declared that the only path left open to
the remnant Movement was the “establishment of a ‘national democratic
front’ committed to the comprehensive restructuring of the centre of
power in Khartoum”. To that end, Arman stated, the SPLM-N will work to
promote its recently sealed alliance with the forces of the Darfur
rebellion and thus consolidate a “political-military nucleus” that
forwards “serious opposition efforts” against the Khartoum regime.
Arman went on to call upon the United Nations Security Council (UNSC)
to enforce a no-fly zone over Darfur, South Kordofan, and the Blue
Nile, the new South in (North) Sudan in the political jargon of the
SPLM-N. Arman’s notion of restructuring the centre of power through an
alliance of the ‘marginalized’, as it were, copies the ‘New Sudan’
thesis of the late John Garang. In an interview with Africa Report in
1989 Garang detailed his notion of the ‘New Sudan’ in the following
terms:
“We are talking here of a socio-political mutation - a new entity
coming out of what we have now. As a socio-political mutation, you
cannot really delineate it by saying one, two three. But we are
talking about a new reality in which the localisms and the
parochialisms - Sudan is composed of more than 150 different
nationalities speaking different languages with various religions -
are transcended by a commonality to which we all pay our allegiance
and our patriotism. That commonality has never been achieved in our
situation”.
The SPLM-N, like the mother SPLM before it, proposes to takeover
Khartoum through an armed insurrection of the hinterlands. War between
Garang’s SPLM and the central government lasted for 22 years.
Khartoum, however, remained what it has been since its establishment
under the Turkiya (Turco-Egyptian colonial rule, 1821-1885), the
centre of an autocratic, overtly ambitious, chronically weak, and thus
demonstratively aggressive state. Instead of restructuring power at
the centre the SPLM eventually opted for deliverance by break-off, a
choice that the overwhelming majority of the South Sudanese favoured
over Garang’s ‘New Sudan’ agenda.
In Sudan’s modern history only al-Mahdi (the Messiah), Mohamed Ahmed
bin Abdalla, and his Ansar had succeeded in crafting together the
necessary revolutionary thrust to overrun Khartoum from without. The
Ansar besieged Khartoum for an approximate ten months before they
victoriously claimed the colonial citadel on 26 January 1885. The
lessons learnt from the Mahdist episode constitute by and large the
guiding principles of the Sudanese state in its relations with its
peripheries as it developed under British colonialism (1898-1956) and
further under successive national governments.
The Mahdi, who started his military campaign against the
Turco-Egyptian Khartoum from the insulation of the Nuba Mountains,
propagated an egalitarian ethic that transcended the parochialisms to
which Garang referred to under the banner of Islamic revival. In that
manner he was able, albeit temporarily, to overcome the schism between
the riverain heartland and the wider periphery of Kordofan and Darfur
to the advantage of the latter. The alliance between the bahar (river)
and the gharb (West) broke down with the Mahdi’s early death. His
Khalifa (successor) Abdullahi al-Taaishi, a Baggara from Darfur,
completed the transformation of the Mahdist revolution into a state
structure, an exercise that demanded the centralisation of power in
his own hands. In that context, the Khalifa faced considerable
resistance from the riverain elite of the time, the Ashraf, a term
denoting the superiority of the Mahdi’s kin over the rabble majority
of the Ansar. The confrontation between the Khalifa and the Ashraf
resulted in the latter’s defeat and eventual purge from the upper
echelons of Mahdist state power. When the riverain elite re-emerged
victorious it did so in alliance with the invading army of Herbert
Kitchener as the fifth column of the Anglo-Egyptian re-conquest.
To subdue Khartoum the SPLM-N needs to consider the place of the
riverain Sudan in the equation. By defining its constituency in terms
of a marginalized African majority versus a dominant Arab minority the
SPLM-N mirrors the divisive ideology of the centre it seeks to
reconstruct. In so doing the SPLM-N delivers the heartland of the
country it wishes to transform to the siege mentality long nourished
by Khartoum’s rulers. On both sides of the frontline, it is Sudan’s
dispossessed who are sacrificed at the altar of Khartoum.
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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