The Sudan Handbook

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called for a new, inclusive state, which Garang called the New Sudan.

This analysis did not necessarily represent the views of others in the

SPLM/A, as Garang sometimes implicitly acknowledged. Many south-

erners were fighting for an independent south, but they went along with

a movement that aimed publicly for liberation of all Sudan. The idea of

a new Sudan, and the analysis of the Sudanese political economy that

went with it, has been influential. Within a decade, a similar set of ideas

became a kind of orthodoxy for IGAD; and its influence is clear in the

Interim Constitution. But John Garang’s vision of a ‘New Sudan’ failed

to convince most southerners, including most of today’s leadership of

the SPLM. Still, they had to equivocate because they needed the CPA,

and its international sponsors, in order to reach their goal.

A Return to the Past

In 1989, when Sudan’s Islamists took control of the state, they planned

to change the country from the centre. Ironically, one of their techniques

was to reorganize rural Sudan around the political systems of the past, the

system of indirect rule through local leaders that the British called native

administration. Both the NCP and the SPLM appear to believe that this

is the way forward for administration of rural Sudan. The NCP adopted

a law in 1993 that helped to reinstitute Native Administration, whose

powers had been weakened since the 1960s. The state gave itself new

powers in the selection of tribal leaders, aiming to destroy links between

tribal leaders and sectarian parties, and used some tribes as recruiting

grounds for militias, to reduce the financial burden of running a war in

the south. The Islamists returned to the British system of managing the

periphery without investment and using ethnicity to isolate the periphery

from national political movements. Local militias were deployed as proxy

counter-insurgency forces, funded from the spoils of war. The regime’s

Salvation Programme (1992–2002) had envisaged a Sudan that was self-

reliant and financially stable. It was the local populations at the margins

that paid the cost. With the support of international financial institu-

The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors tions, the regime transferred the cost of the previous decade’s financial

(www.riftvalley.net).