Through the 1990s, the Islamist regime was driven by a jihadist dream of state-imposed religious unity and purification for all of Sudan. But its project foundered on the everyday corrupt practices of the military regime, its struggle to monopolize and reproduce political power, and the deep contradiction between its vision and the diversity of Sudanese society. Islamist doctrines became conflated with Arabism, offending the piously Muslim non-Arab periphery of the north—Darfur, Kordofan in the west, and the Beja northeast—in addition to the south. By the end of its first decade the Bashir regime had become little distinguishable from other military autocracies, whose main preoccupation was retaining power. Alex de Waal and A. H. Abdel Salam provide a persuasive summation of its limitations: “Islamism in Sudan is in an impasse. It cannot move forward: it is not equipped with the political imagination or state practice to make sense of the modern world, or to run a state. Islamism’s appeal ultimately relies on what cannot be explained: an ethical transformation among human beings or the direct intervention of the Almighty. . . . [I]t is a philosophy of deceptive promise and fatal weakness.”67
Beyond seeking to enforce Islamism, the Bashir regime was also determined to crush the SPLA. Its resolve was reinforced by the imminent prospect of oil revenues from the discoveries in the south, promising an exit from the recurrent Sudan brushes with bankruptcy. The army was greatly expanded by conscripts from the rural areas and the floating urban marginals in Khartoum who had fled insecurity elsewhere. Though control was maintained in the main southern towns, an effective reoccupation of the southern countryside, a vast region with almost no paved roads, was impossible. A strategy of outsourcing military repression to local, mostly ethnic, militias did pressure the SPLA while exploiting rivalries within the south, especially between the two largest groups, the Dinka and Nuer. But the effect was devastating; groups such as the Baqqara Arabs adjacent to Dinkaland were licensed to loot, ravage, and kill. Much of the mayhem in the south in the 1990s was attributable to the subcontracting of violence; indeed, the Sudan army was only a secondary actor in the bulk of the fatalities in military encounters during the southern revolts.
Particularly damaging to the south was the split in the SPLM/A in 1991; a separate, mainly Nuer, faction under Riek Machar and Lam Akol (a Shilluk) broke off, initially demanding that Garang abandon the goal of a united Sudan in favor of southern separation. The following year, Machar succumbed to solicitations from Khartoum and allied with the regime against the SPLA in return for military supplies, an alliance of circumstance that lasted a decade. Akol split with Machar in 1992, forming his own militia, the SPLA-United. At the same time, the 1991 overthrow of the Mengistu regime in Ethiopia closed a supply source to Garang, which the regime had provided in retaliation against the Sudanese for offering sanctuary to the rear bases of the Eritrean EPLF. This drove several hundred thousand Sudanese refugees back into Sudan; their camps became a major recruitment center for all parties. Several years of ghastly internecine warfare ensued in Dinka and Nuer territory; southern Sudanese scholar Francis Deng records that the Riek militia “rampaged through Dinkaland with unprecedented brutality, massacring people and looting for cattle. The SPLM/A retaliated with commensurate ruthlessness.”68
Machar headed a mostly-Nuer militia under a succession of names that in 1997 became the Southern Sudan Defense Force (SSDF), loosely incorporating several small militias that had been armed by the Sudan army military intelligence to combat the SPLA. In an irony that continues to baffle, in a Khartoum agreement negotiated with the SSDF, the Sudan government agreed to an eventual referendum on self-determination for the south. Independence was the ultimate goal for Machar at the time rather than the reformed Sudan officially advocated by Garang and the SPLM. Elements of the SSDF occupied some key oil fields, permitting the concession holders to bring them into production on behalf of Khartoum and generating major new revenue streams not long thereafter. The deal with the SSDF also permitted Khartoum to construct new paved highways into the south; the primitive road network had long constrained national army deployments in the region.69
As the internal war dragged on, and its terrible toll on civil populations became more visible to the outside world, more external support became available to the SPLA. The Islamist character of the Khartoum regime was unappealing to Western powers, especially after its shelter of Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden became known (Bin Laden was invited to leave in 1996 under outside pressure). Bashir regime complicity in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a failed assassination attempt on Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in 1995 in Addis Ababa also gave rise to reprobation.70 The fate of southern Christian communities activated humanitarian support for SPLA, especially from American churches. Human rights activists mobilized protest against Western oil companies engaging in petroleum exploitation in the south (and expelling local populations from production zones with the help of Sudanese security forces and allied southern militias).71 Their action, combined with the insecurity, eventually compelled the Western companies to withdraw; they were quickly replaced by Chinese and other Asian enterprises.72 By the early 1990s, Uganda, frustrated by the sanctuary provided in Sudan to its rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), was providing military supply to the SPLA.
Among the many negative consequences of the prolonged southern insurgency was the militarization of ethnicity. Sharon Hutchinson documents the ways in which the culture of the gun impacted social values and hierarchies in Nuer country. Not only did young men with guns acquire abusive authority but the lived experience of ethnic difference was transformed by the new security dilemmas arising from violent communal combat.73 Women were major victims in the environment of chronic warfare.
By the end of the 1990s, it was apparent that neither side would triumph; external and other pressures mounted on southern groups to unite sufficiently for full negotiations and on the Sudan government to seek a settlement. The Khartoum tactics of outsourcing repression, soon to be repeated in Darfur, had run their course in the south. They could inflict great damage but not enforce the Khartoum writ. The SSDF was an uncertain and fragmented ally, who never abandonned its goal of self-determination even during its marriage of convenience with the Sudan regime. Worse, endemic insecurity was inhibiting the opening of a number of oil fields and threatened the security of existing pipelines. For the SPLA, though an aggressive strategy of extending its reach to Darfur and other disaffected parts of the periphery seemed at moments to hold promise and at times the capture of the southern capital of Juba appeared within reach, external supply was always episodic and uncertain, and achieving its aims militarily an elusive hope.
By 2003 more active international diplomatic mediation began to make headway, resulting in a peace settlement in 2005. The accord mirrored some of the 1972 provisions, constituting an autonomous southern regional government and giving the SPLM/A a place in the Khartoum regime while permitting the SPLA to provide the security force for the south. There were also novel new provisions: a 50–50 formula for southern share in the oil revenues, a 28% share for the SPLM in the Khartoum government (along with 52% for the NIF, now renamed as the NCP), Garang as national vice president, joint administration of disputed areas along the north/south dividing line, UN peace monitors, a pledge of national elections in 2009, and a referendum in the south on possible independence in 2011. Garang and his lieutenants were able to secure the agreement of the large number of lower-level SPLM cadres and followers, who strongly preferred secession, through the referendum promise. His own ambitions for Sudan might find realization if the SPLM could win national power in Sudan-wide voting by forming a coalition with the disaffected populations of western and northeastern areas. The agreement was saluted as a triumph for international mediation, though many were skeptical as to whether Khartoum would respect its provisions over time, especially with relation to open elections and the independence referendum.
Significantly, the SSDF was not a party to the accord, which provided for incorporation of al
l southern militias into the SPLA. A subsequent 2006 Juba accord between the SPLM and SSDF produced an agreement in principle to accept integration. However, this has been only partially accomplished; some SSDF elements have refused incorporation, invoking a need to retain a military capacity until southern independence is assured. Some militias continued to be armed as allies of the Khartoum army.74
One of the most remarkable aspects of the southern war was not only the educational credentials of the top southern leadership (Garang, Machar, and Akol all had overseas doctorates) but also their chameleon-like behavior. Garang had served the Khartoum regime as minister during the first southern uprising and never backed Anya-nya 1; he was a ranking officer in the national army until his 1983 defection to launch the SPLM/A. Machar and Akol were initially key lieutenants of Garang but defected and formed their own insurgency in 1991. Akol subsequently created his own separate militia in 1992. Not long after, Machar’s faction became a subcontracted auxiliary force for Khartoum against the SPLM/A before returning to the insurgent fold in 2002 as peace negotiations were about to begin. After the 2005 accord, Garang became initial head of the Southern Regional Government but was killed later in 2005 in an aircraft crash. Machar and Akol took up Khartoum posts representing the SPLM as vice president and foreign minister, respectively; at times they seemed to be enthusiastic regime spokesmen. However, Machar claimed to represent southern interests above all by insisting on reasonable terms for the 2011 referendum; in the end, Khartoum did back down from demanding a high majority for independence. By 2010, few doubted that a referendum would yield a large majority for independence; Salva Kiir, Garang’s successor in the SPLM and southern regional president, firmly endorsed separation for the south. In the end, mostly peaceful elections voted nearly unanimously for separation; South Sudan became the fifty-fourth independent African state in July 2011.
The south has endured unending warfare that waxed and waned for all but eleven of the forty-three years between independence and conclusion of the 2005 peace accord. By 1995, casualties were commonly reported to have reached two million, and there have been perhaps another five hundred thousand since (in addition to a similar number in the earlier civil war).75 Isolation and insecurity blocked economic development; the region remains starved of infrastructure and social amenities.
No sooner was a resolution of the long and bitter southern war in sight than a new center of insurgent resistance broke out in 2003 in Darfur in western Sudan. I do not offer a detailed summary of this phase of internal warfare but instead suggest a few of its key aspects.76 The discontents that produced the rebellion reflect a sense of marginalization in the peripheral regions of northern Sudan, as well as the south. Darfur, long neglected in colonial times, was largely absent from decolonization politics and had little representation among the Khartoum elite. Indeed, in the 1990s a group of Darfur intellectuals assembled a widely circulated “black book” that examined the regional origins of top Sudan government officials over time, demonstrating the overwhelming predominance of Nile valley Arabs centering around greater Khartoum.77
The inadequacy of the perception that conflict in Sudan was essentially a north-south division was illuminated by the framing of identities when the warfare taking place in Darfur erupted into the global media in 2003, where it was represented as a humanitarian disaster of genocidal proportions. Fur and other western rebel groups became racialized as “Africans” or blacks, confronting “Arabs,” though a phenotypical difference was nonexistent, all shared in Islamic piety, and Arabic was a shared lingua franca. The “bandits on horseback” (janjawid) armed by Khartoum to attack the insurgents were drawn from mostly nomadic arabophone tribes, though some held local identities distinct from the broader “Arab” category.
Although AU and international mediation produced a peace accord in 2006, the splintering of the two main rebel movements and continuing attacks by the Khartoum-sponsored “Arab” militias prevented full application. AU and other peacekeepers helped diminish the intensity of conflict, but no real peace returned. The damage was immense: at least two hundred thousand fatalities, hundreds of thousands displaced, a zone of scorched earth, and a legacy of bitter animosities.
The folly of subcontracting security operations to local militias found further demonstration in both Darfur and the south. In arming irregular armed factions to assault insurgents, one provides these uncontrollable elements a license to loot, rape, and kill. The terror they may sow rarely works to effect the willing submission of disaffected regions harboring insurgent fighters to a national authority. The hatreds they create, the redoubled insecurity arising from the multiplication of weaponry in the countryside, and the risk that, thus empowered, they become in turn rogue forces finding a livelihood in continuing local violence are destructive outcomes far outweighing any short-term benefit.
Thus Sudan remains an imperiled polity, with many unresolved problems arising from the secession of the south. The NCP regime rests on a narrow ideological and political base. Its president faced indictment by the ICC for crimes against humanity and bears responsibility for the breakup. The oil revenues have showered the Khartoum area with highly visible prosperity, which does not extend to the periphery of the country. The solution to its current dilemmas is difficult to see, and the legacy of its two major internal wars weighs heavily.
OTHER MAJOR INTERNAL WARS
Congo-Kinshasa
The most complex of the internal wars took place in Congo-Kinshasa from 1996 to 2003, leaving in place an intricate web of disorder that has plagued the eastern border regions ever since. No less than eight African armies be came involved in some point in the hostilities, dubbed Africa’s world war. I leave the details to several masterful accounts and offer only a condensed summary.78
The Mobutu regime was in utter dereliction by the mid-1990s, expelled from the IMF, abandoned by its external patrons, afflicted with hyperinflation and administrative decay. Neighboring Rwanda and Uganda, angered by the sanctuary that the Congolese gave to fugitive soldiers of the ousted Rwandan Hutu regime and to armed Uganda rebel militias, sponsored the amalgamation of four small factions into the Alliance des forces democratiques pour la libération du Congo-Zaire (AFDL), with veteran Lumumbist insurgent Laurent Kabila, a holdover from the mid-1960s Congo rebellions, emerging as its leader in fall 1996. Although the AFDL enlisted a number of disaffected youths from the eastern region, its primary military force was the Rwandan army. The demoralized Mobutu forces offered only scattered resistance, and the AFDL swept across the country, marching into Kinshasa in 1997 and installing Kabila as president.
Kabila soon tired of Rwandan tutelage, which was resented by the Congolese public. In July 1997, he suddenly expelled all the Rwandan military advisors and troops. The Rwandan regime reacted immediately, again in partnership with Uganda, and promoted the launching of a new rebel force, the Rassemblement congolais pour la démocratie (RCD). An audacious Rwandan airborne operation in August 1998 aimed at seizing the capital nearly succeeded, but forceful intervention of the Angolan and Zimbabwean armies stymied the maneuver. However, RCD recruits won control of the eastern borderlands.
The RCD soon splintered, but the Rwandan and Ugandan military forces entered the fray, occupying large areas of the east and north. The SADC responded to an appeal from Kabila for armed support; Namibian units joined the Angolans and Zimbabweans. Chad and—furtively—Sudan were also briefly involved; Burundi units crossed the border to attack their own Congo-based Hutu rebels. Thus the Congo wars became exceptionally internationalized.
The mosaic of violence became yet more complex by 1999 when another Congolese insurgent group, the Mouvement pour la libération du Congo emerged, carving out a zone in the northern fringe, armed and supplied by Uganda. Remnants of the Rwandan Interahamwe and former army, deeply implicated in the 1994 genocide, re-formed as a lethal force estimated at twenty thousand and created a zone of control in north Kivu, the Forces démocratiques pour la libération du Rwanda (FD
LR). Managing artisanal mining provided survival revenues; the FDLR became enrooted in this part of Kivu. Throughout the east, local, usually ethnic, self-defense forces proliferated; this loosely connected assortment of militias became collectively known as Mai-Mai (meaning “water,” after the supernatural protective potions these militias employ).
Various parties to the conflict fastened on the abundant resource base in the east, especially gold, coltan, and coffee.79 Rwanda and Uganda both financed their military operations in good part through plundered precious materials; they backed different rebel factions and came into violent conflict with each other in Kisangani in mid-1999, partly over control of diamond smuggling. A UN panel of experts in 2002 reported that an elite network of Congolese and Zimbabwean political-military interests had “transferred ownership of at least $5 billion of assets from the State mining sector to private companies under its control with no compensation or benefit for the State treasury of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”80
The international community anxiously engaged by 1999, facing a costly and confused stalemate on the ground. The UN, OAU, SADC, South Africa, United States, and Libya all competed in mediation efforts. A UN mission appeared on the scene; initially, the members of the team functioned only as observers, but by 2003 the mission had become a substantial peacekeeping force reaching twenty thousand. A ceasefire negotiated at a mid-1999 Lusaka conference immediately collapsed. Serious steps toward ending the great African war came only after the January 2001 assassination of Laurent Kabila, who was replaced by his son Joseph.81 The younger Kabila was far more willing to cooperate with international mediation. After tortuous negotiations, the major factions came to an agreement in South Africa in 2003, providing for a framework for a power-sharing transitional regime and parliament. Rwandan and Ugandan troops withdrew, a new constitution was drafted, and a relatively successful election in 2006 confirmed the presidency of Joseph Kabila.
B009THJ1WI EBOK Page 38