The Sudan Handbook

thE P ast & futuRE of PEaCE 301

Articulating the Future

There are many reasons why the CPA’s interim period has failed to

convince southern Sudanese of the benefits of a unified Sudan. One

reason for this is that many – perhaps most – in the SPLM were aiming

all along at a different target. But for strategic reasons did not publicly

articulate the future that they really wanted. In his account of the war,

The Politics of Liberation in South Sudan, Peter Adwok Nyaba, a former SPLA

commander, described southern reserve thus:

There is a marked tendency on the part of the south Sudanese

political elite to shy away from clearly naming what they and

the people wanted. There is always a tendency to hide behind a

facade suggestive of some degree of lack [of] self-confidence in

the cause being undertaken. More attention was paid to what

others will say about us than what we want ourselves.

Many southern leaders, dismayed by Nimeiri’s abrogation of the
Addis peace deal, wanted independence for the Southern region, but
the movement was not well-placed to call for secession. At the time,
it was militarily dependent on Ethiopia, a Marxist state that could not
encourage secession in Sudan while rejecting similar aspirations at
home. During the first civil war, secessionist diplomacy failed to move
the Organization of African Unity (the regional inter-governmental body
of that era) from its stand against any change to colonial borders. These
lessons from the past were one of the factors that led the SPLM leader-
ship to reframe the problem of the south in a way that might be more
palatable to its allies. Instead of taking the south as the starting point
for analysis, John Garang presented south, west and east as a periphery
with a shared economic experience: reservoirs of labour and sites of
primitive accumulation, the process by which self-sufficient societies
are deprived of their resources. The elite of the centre, they argued,
used their control of the economy, their dominant culture, and the
coercive apparatus of the state to subordinate the majority. The SPLM
manifesto, and subsequent speeches and publications by John Garang,
The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors

(www.riftvalley.net).