The Sudan Handbook

thE P ast & futuRE of PEaCE 299

self-determination, it turned out, was the effective abandonment of the

SPLM’s earlier vision of a new, secular Sudan. Faced with this choice, the

SPLM began to move away from its allies in the north, secular parties that

rejected the use of Islam as an organizing principle of politics.

The CPA was an elite agreement between two parties who, at that

point, had no clear elected mandate. It was bilateral, rather than compre-

hensive. It forced northern opponents of the NCP to seek their own

agreements with the Khartoum government. Between 2005 and 2006 the

NCP-led government signed the Cairo Agreement with political parties

from the parliamentary regimes of the past and the Eastern Sudan Peace

Agreement (ESPA) with SPLM allies in the east of the country, drawn

mostly from pastoralist groups in the area. In Darfur, where the signing

of the CPA had been one of the factors in the rebellion, the Khartoum

government signed the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA), but with only

one of the rebel factions.

The mutinies in the northern peripheries – in the east and in Darfur

• had not existed before the Islamists took power. These regions had
  little investment and little representation in the central state. They were
  managed through patronage systems organized by Sudan’s traditional
  parties, the Umma party and the DUP, which were linked to Islamic
  sects established throughout the north. But the security apparatus of
  the new government undermined the role of the traditional parties and
  fragmented tribal leadership. This strategy allowed the NCP to assert
  control of the periphery, but it divided societies in many parts of rural
  Sudan.
  The peace agreements for eastern Sudan and Darfur use the language
  and structures of the CPA – central government posts, regional invest-
  ment, regional political structures. But there were two important
  differences: first, the CPA allowed the SPLA to keep its own army. And
  second, the CPA had a single short clause on the question of national
  reconciliation, and set up no institutional framework for reconciliation.
  The Darfur Peace Agreement, in contrast, required the incorporation
  of rebel armies into national commands, and refers to reconciliation

The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors throughout the text, setting up councils and programmes to achieve it.

(www.riftvalley.net).