The Sudan Handbook

218 thE sudan handbook

the rural areas. A strange collaboration began, whereby the Government

in Khartoum supported the supposedly separatist Anyanya II against the

anti-separatist SPLA.

The SPLA’s objective of a ‘New Sudan’ enabled it to reach beyond the

bounds of the south to make both political and military alliances with

other disaffected regions of the Sudan. By 1986 it had carried the war

outside of the south into the adjacent areas of the Blue Nile and Nuba

Mountains. It was no longer just a north-south civil war, nor a Muslim-

Christian war, nor even an Arab-African war.

In its initial stages the war was seasonal. The SPLA advanced in the

rainy season, and receded in the dry season as the Sudanese army fanned

out from its garrisons. The SPLA measured its progress by the high water

mark the army reached at the end of each dry season, and there was a

steady erosion of the scale of the army’s advances. A truce between the

SPLA and the Anyanya II in 1987 was followed by incorporation of most

of the Anyanya II into the SPLA in 1988. This left most of the rural areas

of the south under SPLA control in the dry season as well as the rains.

(Only a few Anyanya II commanders, like Paulino Matip in Western

Upper Nile, remained aloof because of personal hostility towards John

Garang). By early 1989 the SPLA had taken control of many of the major

towns of the region as well.

Peace was very nearly achieved in 1989 when the government of

Sadiq al-Mahdi finally agreed to negotiate with the SPLM very largely

on the SPLM’s terms of a secular state. There was no mention of self-

determination for the south at this stage. Negotiations were forestalled

by the NIF-backed coup of Omar al-Bashir on 30 June 1989, and fighting

was to continue for another fifteen years.

The Split in the SPLA, 1991–2000

In the early years of the ‘Salvation Revolution’ government of Bashir

the SPLA maintained its military momentum, seizing control of all the

government’s garrisons in Western Equatoria by early 1991. The SPLM’s

The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors commitment to a united Sudan (albeit a secular state) meant that it was

(www.riftvalley.net).