Sudan: The Intibaha Spring
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By Magdi El Gizouli
January 23, 2012 — Some ten days ago the Deputy Chairman of the
National Congress Party (NCP), Nafie Ali Nafie, received a memorandum
reportedly signed by one thousand members of the Islamic Movement, the
semi-clandestine ancestor organisation of the ruling party. The
document which became known as the ‘corrective memorandum’ summarized
what its author(s) perceived as the commendable successes of the
regime and its stark failures, and proposed a reform agenda to address
its deficiencies. The 1999 fracture of the Islamic Movement into two
fratricidal camps, the opposition Popular Congress Party (PCP) led by
the veteran chief of the Movement, Hassan al-Turabi, and the governing
NCP headed by President Bashir was identified as the most significant
setback of the Islamic experiment in Sudan. To this the document added
rampant corruption, political inconsistency as evidenced by the swing
from a “totalitarian one-party system” to the current tolerance of
opposition parties, “errors” committed by the government in Darfur,
and the regime’s security obsessions.
Had the Islamic Movement not seized power in its 1989 coup, said the
author(s), the country would have either fallen into the hands of
Baath Party elements or Egyptian agents in the army, who were all
jockeying to topple Sadiq al-Mahdi’s government. Guided by its
innovative reading of Islamic scriptures (ijtihad) the Movement took
the right decision at the right time, said the document, and thus
obstructed the Western plot to install the rule of a Christian
minority led by John Garang and his rebel Sudan People’s Liberation
Movement (SPLM) over the country’s Muslim majority. This scenario, it
went on, would have entailed the “ethnic cleansing” of Sudan’s Arabs,
a repeat, it said, of the 1964 tragedy in Zanzibar and long before
that the expulsion of the Arabs from Andalusia. The Movement faced up
to this challenge, said the authors, defeated the rebels on the
battlefront, and eventually managed to attain peace through a tortuous
and exhausting negotiation process that culminated in a
self-determination vote and the breakaway of South Sudan. This
conclusion, stated the document, might be criticized by some as
another of the Islamic Movement’s failures although it should count in
its favour politically and intellectually.
Publicly, the NCP’s leading figures welcomed the memorandum as an
instance of awareness in the ranks of their party remarking that all
the issues it discussed were already addressed in the party’s national
convention held in December last year. However, neither President
Bashir, the Chairman of the NCP, nor Ali Osman Mohamed Taha, his
deputy and the Emir of the Islamic Movement, to whom the memorandum
was directly addressed, made any public comments in its regard. The
critical nature of the document compounded by the conspicuous silence
of two men at the top prompted observers in the Khartoum press to
compare it to the famous ‘memorandum of the ten’ that signalled the
1999 conflict between President Bashir and Hassan al-Turabi. The NCP
bigwigs dismissed the comparison and rubbished projections of an
imminent split in the party as unjustified exaggerations. Qutbi
al-Mahdi, the chairman of the party’s political sector, argued that
the memorandum’s signatories had acted in good faith by preserving
their anonymity.
Qutbi, I presume, is right, but only in a false sense. The ‘corrective
memorandum’ does not compare to the ‘memorandum of the ten’, and is
unlikely to be the foreplay of a power struggle as fierce as the 1999
divorce between Turabi and Bashir. Its author(s) did not challenge the
authority of the party’s leadership and their demands were largely a
re-run of the NCP’s official line. The document detailed a set of
reforms that the NCP, being the ruling party, should implement with
the objective of rooting out corruption and achieving “comprehensive
social and political justice”. These included the establishment of a
judicial anti-corruption body, promotion of the regime’s political
transformation towards an elections-based order that respects the free
will of the citizenry, promulgation of a permanent constitution for
the country, and guarantee of the independence of the judiciary.
Regarding the NCP’s organisational well-being the document demanded
that the ruling party sever its organic links to the state structures
and develop binding rules to govern the office terms of its leaders.
Apart from the reform rhetoric above the document made a few
recommendations that deserve attention: continuation of the regime’s
project to “Islamize” the state and society, “fearless enforcement of
sharia without hesitation”, and coordination with the Islamic forces
in the country to combat secularism and moral subversion.
So what then is the correction of the ‘corrective memorandum’? I
suppose al-Tayeb Mustafa spelled it out in his address to the Shura
(Consultative) Council of his party, the Just Peace Forum (JPF), a few
days after his paper, al-Intibaha, published the text of the
memorandum. He told the meeting that the country’s troubles would only
be resolved if and when the JPF is invited into the government. This,
to my knowledge, is the first time that Mustafa loudly voices his
power ambitions. Recently, al-Intibaha chided the NCP for
accommodating the ‘sectarian’ forces of old Sudan at the expense of
the Islamist vanguard. In fact, the ‘reform memorandum’ that
al-Intibaha attributed to the mujahideen of the Islamic Movement, i.e.
the combatants of the Popular Defence Forces (PDF) who took part in
the war against the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), reads like
an editorial in the paper. Al-Intibaha actually dedicates a daily page
to the glory of the mujahideen and their accomplishments. If not
authored by al-Intibaha’s folks the document, it can be safely stated,
mirrors their fantasies. Mustafa, of course, denied any links to the
document but stressed that it did not go far enough. The Islamic
Movement, he said, is in need of a “genuine revolution” and not the
timid inking of demands. Lately, the JPF has been mobilising support
in Sudan’s central states as a separate entity from the NCP. The party
chairman, al-Tayeb Mustafa, tours the country to spread his message
and receive vows of allegiance. The JPF teamed up with several forces
from the Islamist fringe and drafted an ‘Islamic constitution’ for the
rump (North) Sudan which they eventually delivered to President
Bashir. The NCP notables, Ghazi Salah al-Din, Amin Hassan Omer and
Qutbi al-Mahdi all publish frequent musings in al-Intibaha and are
habitually celebrated on its pages. Ghazi in particular has lately
become a favourite of al-Tayeb Mustafa. The man stands out in the
crowd of the NCP nomenklatura by his 2008 attempt to displace Ali
Osman Mohamed Taha from the leadership of the Islamic Movement.
Although largely dormant and hollowed out the Movement remains a handy
tool in the contests of the ruling elite.
The memorandum in a certain sense defines the limits of the
permissible in today’s Sudan. Criticism of the NCP functionaries, even
the bitterest, is tolerated if not encouraged in the same fashion that
prohibitions cry out for their violation, provided that the ultimate
authority of the man at the top is acknowledged. He and his intimate
captains, Bakri Hassan Salih and Abd al-Rahim Mohamed Hussein,
identify with the domain of sovereignty, the establishing violence of
the political order that came into being with the 1989 coup. Even the
polished Ghazi would not dare transgress that line. In his recent
lecture at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London
he argued for the same set of reforms proposed in the ‘corrective
memorandum’, i.e. the necessity of a permanent constitution, a wider
concept of justice and ‘democratization’, however within the framework
defined by the formal requirements of state formation and
institutionalisation, bluntly stated submission to the hegemonic order
he shares in running. This unqualified distinction between state
formation and competition for political power is equally prominent in
the debates of Khartoum’s opposition. Shafie Khidir, for instance,
developed the theme of a neutral space guaranteed by a democratic
constitution and state structures equidistant from the political
parties and formations where contestation for power is to take place
once the NCP regime is dislodged. The state, however, is never the
neutral arbiter it is presumed to be, even less so when it relies on
gate-keeping i.e. the control of export-import outlets for its very
existence. In concrete terms, what Sudan is being promised is
deliverance from the NCP proper to the JPF and allies under the
benevolent watch of Bashir and his fellow officers.
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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