The Sudan Handbook

thE P ast & futuRE of PEaCE 303

failure to the periphery, simultaneously making them responsible for

funding social services and cutting their budgets. Almost a decade after

the programme ended, Sudan’s health and education expenditures are

still the lowest in the region.

During the first outbreak of conflict in Darfur, the government used

tribal conflict to depopulate agrarian Darfur, arming landless pastoralist

tribes against farmers. When the depopulation was more or less complete,

the landless tribes then fought each other for the spoils, creating further

social divisions in the region. It suits the government to present these

rural political formations as primordial, while constantly reworking them

for the shifting aims of its military strategy. And in the DPA, the govern-

ment sees this system as a means to resolve the problems of the future

in Darfur, providing the troubled region with a system of transitional

justice and war compensations for the 2003–2005 war that led to the

ethnic cleansing of millions of its people. Few Darfurian political leaders

advocate an independent Darfur – and this makes the search for reconcili-

ation within Darfur, and between Darfur and the centre an urgent one.

The Native Administration often gets tasked to deliver reconciliation,

because its customary law is based on mediation rather than punish-

ment. It is not, however, a system that can deal easily with mass killings

and state violations of human rights.

Tribal authorities also appear to be a part of the future of South

Sudan. The Interim Constitution of Southern Sudan gives a key role to

traditional authorities (the term more commonly used in the south for

Native Administration) in the shaping of the Southern state system.

The customary laws of these authorities are one of the constitutionally-

recognized sources of law.

Southern traditional authorities did not serve as a link between local

constituencies and sects or political movements at the centre, as their

counterparts did in the north. They mediated between local people and

armed forces, trading taxes, supplies and manpower for protection.

The lineage system of southern tribes survived the many displace-

ments of the war, providing connections between rural areas, cities and

The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors a foreign diaspora. These human connections meant that traditional

(www.riftvalley.net).