The Sudan Handbook

thE P ast & futuRE of PEaCE 297

to acknowledge the claims of minority populations within colonially-

defined states to enjoy this right. During the Cold War, African states

collectively rejected any change to colonial borders. This posed an

obstacle to southern Sudanese calls for independence from the north.

But in 1994, a regional group of countries, now known as the Inter-

Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) acknowledged the

right of self-determination of the peoples of Sudan. IGAD’s Declaration

of Principles was a remarkable and concise statement of the Sudanese

political problem from an African standpoint. Sudan’s diversity must

be affirmed, it said, through a restructuring of the state around the

principles of secularism, democracy and fair sharing of national wealth.

If that were not possible, Sudan’s constituent peoples would have the

‘the option to determine their future including independence through

a referendum’.

IGAD’s diagnosis and prescription for Sudan’s problems echoed those

of the SPLM, the political wing of the SPLA, and isolated the Islamist

leadership in Khartoum. Islamists claimed that the secularism of the

Declaration of Principles was a stumbling block, and broke off the negoti-

ations with a statement that declared that their government’s mission

was to Islamize the whole of Africa. Yet within three years, Khartoum

had accepted the right of southern Sudanese to self-determination. This

was a slightly different formulation from IGAD’s. IGAD had presented

self-determination as a right conditional on the failure to create an inclu-

sive state. But the 1997 Khartoum Peace Agreement (KPA) between the

government and a number of dissident factions of the SPLM/A presented

the people of the south with self-determination as an unconditional

right.

The mainstream SPLM/A, like IGAD, called not for independence, but

for a new, inclusive Sudanese state, a new Sudan. This was an innovation

in Sudanese politics: a southern party with a national vision. But the

factions that signed the Khartoum Peace Agreement called explicitly for

Southern self-determination, for a potentially separate south. Although

the agreement was denounced by the mainstream SPLM/A it set impor-

The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors tant precedents for the southern movements. First, it recognized sharia

(www.riftvalley.net).