MuseumDESCRIPTION:
Sudan analyst Eddie Thomas discusses the vision behind Sudan’s 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement and why it remains central to the country’s future.
TRANSCRIPT:
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Welcome to Voices on Genocide Prevention, this is Bridget Conley-Zilkic. With me today is Eddie Thomas who is the author of a new report from Chatham House, it’s titled “Against the gathering storm - Securing Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement.” Eddie, thank you for joining me today.
EDDIE THOMAS: Oh thank you for inviting me, Bridget.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: I would like to ask you to start by giving us just a brief reminder of what the CPA is and when it came into being?
EDDIE THOMAS: Well the CPA, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, was signed in 2005. It came at the end of about 30 months of negotiations between the two big leading actors in Sudan: the National Congress Party, which is the lead actor in government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement and Army, which was a rebel movement that largely dominated the southern part of the country. But the agreement, although it took 30 months to negotiate it, it really goes back over many years of conflict and dialogue and reflection of some of the political leaderships in Sudan and in the rest of the Horn of Africa.
The reflection was really about what is Sudan and what’s the problem with Sudan? It’s a big country. It’s a rich country. It’s got great people. But it doesn’t seem to get itself together. One of the answers proposed for that problem or that questions is that-- the problem in Sudan is the center is to powerful and it attracts too much of the wealth of the country and it’s sucking things out of the vast impoverished peripheries of Sudan. Now the center, I mean Khartoum and a couple of other cities, probably a few other cities on the Northern Nile Valley and it’s quite a populous area, it’s an Arabic speaking area and the periphery is everywhere else in Sudan.
The CPA was important because first of all it tried to solve the longest standing problem between the center and the periphery which was the problem between Northern and Southern Sudan. It did that by creating a autonomous government in southern Sudan, which really was the first government structure in Southern Sudan since the beginning of the colonial period, back in the 19th Century. It also restructured the center of the state to include southerners and who had been likely excluded from real power at the center of the state, to give them real position there and a kind of veto on some of the big decisions of the country.
That’s why it was really one of the most farsighted and important documents in Sudan’s history. In some ways it looked at Sudan, it said, the problem with Sudan is unequal development, mismanaged diversity and there’s an answer for that and that is to rebalance the relationship between the center and the rest of the country.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: The CPA was also a Cease Fire Agreement, I mean it was an attempt to end the specific conflict and at the same time start building this new vision that you’re describing of a Sudan that was more equal between the center and periphery. How can a single agreement manage both of those challenges?
EDDIE THOMAS: Well, it was an amazing agreement and you’re absolutely right to point out about the cease fire at which I should have mentioned -- it’s the headline item of the CPA story. A war which had lasted for twenty years -- but you know, some people like myself included, would say that it lasted for 180 years, it went back to 1820 -- came to an end, the war that really destroyed so many lives and ripped families apart for years and years, got people used to living in this desperate, brave life on the margin kind of thing and CPA delivered that. That was a really important, the most important thing in the CPA, no doubt. I’m sorry, could you repeat the second part of your question, because I had to say that because I’d forgotten to mention how important the cease fire was.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: You know, that fine and I think I can probably ask it better too. The question then of ending the conflict which is something that you can sort of bracket and say that the CPA did, whether it starts up again is another question. But this other part though of a new vision for the country, is that something-- obviously it was negotiated between the SPLM, SPLA and the governing National Congress Party, but was it a shared vision for the country?
EDDIE THOMAS: Now you’re getting on to an interesting question which is about the problems from the agreement. Before I say anything about that, I want to say it’s a very, very important agreement and though it has flaws I’m not in any saying it should be changed or reopened for negotiation. But one of the problems of the agreement that it was a bilateral deal. In some ways, it was a concession on the part of the National Congress Party, the ruling party in the north, to accept the diagnosis of the problem that had really been generated more in Southern Sudan and in the southern neighbors, neighboring states of Sudan. It’s not the only view of Sudan to say that the fundamental problem is the unequal relationship with the periphery. There is sort of a developing consensus about that. This notion of the need to rebalance Sudan is now part of the Constitution and it’s really the touch stone of political legitimacy in Sudan, so it’s a very important idea. There are still people who disagree with it privately or publicly and many of them are in the dominate National Congress Party, but it’s now the working idea for Sudan I would say.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: I’m hoping you can help us understand how Darfur fits into that picture of-- against this potential of a new Sudan. You have Darfur considered part of the north, so part of the part where there wasn’t previously at least outright conflict, not like between the north and the south. What happened that made Darfur burst onto the scene with large scale violence in 2003 and how does that fit into this scene of a Sudan that might have been changing?
EDDIE THOMAS: As I said this was a deal between these two powerful groups and it was a bi-lateral deal and it was hoped that a bi-lateral deal would start the ball rolling. Instead what seemed to have happened is that other actors in Sudan, other people who had been left out, other people of the periphery started to believe that the only way that they could get concessions was by starting an armed rebellion and concluding a deal with Khartoum.
Instead of being the template for peace in Sudan, it became a kind of precedent for bilateral deals. That’s one of the problems with the CPA. During the negotiations for the CPA, the international for support which was very much lead by the United States -- many outsiders to Sudan pushed for an immediate deal because they wanted to stop the fighting in the South that was ruining so many people’s lives. They didn’t include Darfur as a special case. There were elements of the CPA that would allow for change in Darfur, very important elements like changes to the way that land works in Sudan, like national reconciliation in Sudan, like sharing the revenue of the center with the poorer areas of Sudan. It was hoped that would kind of work itself out and that would change things in Sudan. In many ways if it did work properly, it includes the component for a deal for Darfur and they were already in the CPA and they would already be signed up for. It didn’t work out that way historically.
Historically what happened was the problem in Darfur got worse and worse in the run-up to the signing. The big violence in Darfur happened in 2004 and the end 2005, right at the beginning of 2005 the thing was signed, but it didn’t lead to a resolution to the problems in Darfur. What seems to be happening is that southern Sudan under the CPA has this possibility of leaving Sudan, has a referendum on determination in 2011. It can chose move out of the country and it can chose to set up its own system. But northern Sudan is left with the same center periphery problem without a ready set of solutions and partly because of the way the NCP has governed the northern Sudan, which is a very, very divisive way of governing, a revolutionary, but divisive way of governing; it doesn’t seem to have the kind of political structure that will even help it to find solutions. There’s a word that I use a lot in the report which is fragmentation. The kinds of political groupings in Sudan that would have the maturity and the depth of vision and their resources to argue for a new Sudan, they’ve been chopped up, turned into little competing groups. They will find it very hard now to start to discuss problems with the powerful center. Rebalancing their relationship with the center is really important for things in Sudan.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And as we move forward now, I think probably most of our listeners know, we’re now in 2009. One of the major markers in the implementation of the CPA is elections that are supposed to happen in 2009. Can you address those and some of the other markers particularly moving forward, not as much as what’s been done, what should we be looking for in the next few years, before the referendum in 2011?
EDDIE THOMAS: The election was a very important process of the CPA or is a very important process for CPA, offers the promise of including all these actors who didn’t really take part in the peace negotiations, giving them a chance to have their say on what kind of Sudan they want. They’re very complicated elections, they’re elections with I think in some areas 20 or 24 different ballots. Now that would be hard to organize in America, and it’s much harder to organize in a place like southern Sudan which hasn’t really ever had any elections outside a few polling booths in major cities. It’s going to be, you know, it’s going to be quite difficult to organize these elections. A census is to be completed. Borders and constituency, internal borders and constituency, borders need to be developed. Voters need to be enrolled. But in all of these processes we’re supposed to have started rolling a couple of years ago, but because of delays and to some extent bad faith in implementation, many of these critical processes have been bunched together to the period running up to the referendum, the last 30 months of the interim pre-referendum period of the agreement.
This year is a very critical time where the Sudanese leaders, decision makers, have to come up with very complicated solutions for complicated problems just in order to keep on schedule of the agreement. Unless these processes go ahead, unless there’s this opportunity to include different voices in the way the agreement is implemented over the next few years; and unless people, like Darfur people, get their chance to really influence things at the center of the state there’s going to be a lot of problems for Sudan. There’s lots of reasons why Sudan could fragment and having inclusive politics, civil politics over the next few years would really help it to stay together. Not having that would maybe run the risk having us see a Sudan with lots and lots of local rebellions. Instead of people sitting and talking and coming up with difficult political compromises and thinking things through and arguing things through, people will start shooting and then come to an interim deal. The interim deal will be between the people with the guts to get guns. And they may start to forget the people they represented before. This is a process you’ve seen many times in Sudan and I really hope that we can move instead to a Sudan where people are included.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Is it likely that the elections will go forward this year. As you said the census took place but I don’t believe the results are in and there are some demarcations of boundaries that would be important and still have to move forward. How likely is it that it will happen?
EDDIE THOMAS: I think that the international community is aware of the importance of the election and there will be a lot of pressure for it to go ahead. I think there’ll be-- and it may be possible to-- it’s still possible to organize it. There will be questions about freeness and fairness. I mean, there’s a lot other political changes that need to happen before the election including making real the constitutional freedom to expression and association, which the CPA gave to Sudan, but which haven’t turned into law and practice. People can’t mount competitive elections when there’s lots of censorship; when there’s near impunity for the security forces and they have what amounts to a power of arbitrary detention. Those things need to change and if they don’t change people will question what kind of elections they were.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: But you think that an election that could-- because we’ve seen it in lots of other situations where elections are sort of the-- almost considered symbolic for a process of democratization from the international perspective. But for people inside a society they are not symbolic and when they’re not real they end up frustrating and can be quite damaging?
EDDIE THOMAS: Well that’s always a risk isn’t it, that you know, that election needs to meet a certain threshold of fairness in order to be credible and to be accepted by people and that is a risk in Sudan. You’ve also had a couple of elections in Kenya and Zimbabwe which have changed the situation, have challenged the power of the center, but not in the sense of sweeping people away. They’ve lead to a process of negotiation which may improve things for people but haven’t resolved the problem. They’ve reframed the problem. They’ve maybe lead to some political progress. Now that is not as satisfying for people who live in countries where administrations come and go. But it’s also history in the making, it’s a political process happening and it could be very important for Sudan. The better the elections are the better the hope for Sudan in the future.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And for, I think a lot of our audience has come to be engaged on the issues in Sudan and through the conflict and the genocide in Darfur. Moving forward, what do you think are the priorities that internationals and people who care about Sudan and care about doing whatever bit they can to help it forward on the path of justice and the more equitable political system. What are the issues they should be focusing on and the deadlines, sort of the markers on the way that can help measure that?
EDDIE THOMAS: Well, first of all I’d like to say that ending impunity before some of the awful things that have happened in Darfur is, of course, a very important component of a hopeful future for Sudan. But I think one of the things that we’ve seen in the past year is that there is a difference between a prosecution and a political process. All the actions needed to end impunity are very necessary components of moving forward. But if the political process is the way that it will move forward, and you cannot, you can’t stop the fighting in Darfur without a political process and there are some things which are probably impeding political progress.
One is the intransigence of the central government. It hasn’t moved to do the kind of peace deals, the brave peace deal that it made with the south. It’s instead produced an extremely parsimonious and nonfunctional peace deal a few years ago which is not really working anymore.
Another problem is the deep divisions within northern Sudanese society. And you can see that in Darfur where you have rebel movements that have resorted to the use of ethnicity as a kind of recruiting sergeant. Ethnic affiliations have become the only kind of political consciousness that can be mobilized anymore. You know, like, we all have different identities, I’m sure you know, you’ve probably got an identity as one of the states of the U.S. and probably being your town dweller and not a country person, and all sorts of things. But you can handle those different ones, you can actually enjoy being a sort of multiple person. But if you’re in a situation where being from Arkansas is being is the only thing that matters and you have to be against everybody else that isn’t from Arkansas, your life gets impoverished as a result. And that’s what’s happening in Sudan partly because of the very divisive politics of the NCP, that people are forced into this ethnic book that doesn’t really fit them. But they don’t have any other way of doing deals or arguing their case, if they’re not defining themselves by their ethnicity.
It’s very important that those different rebel groups and also the civil society, non-military groups and are therefore able to come together and articulate a hopeful vision for Darfur and for Sudan. And I think there is only one hopeful vision for Darfur and Sudan and that is a fairer place, a place where wealth and power are shared more equally, where people in the middle of nowhere, in Hicksville so to speak and you know, in the country side, they also get schools, they also get hospitals and clinics, they also get their services and opportunities to take part in Sudan’s development.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: In your opinion, the way to help make that possible is…?
EDDIE THOMAS: Well, I’d love to say that do X, Y, Z, and I think one of the other things that we’ve seen in Sudan is it’s not that simple. The report that I wrote is recommending first of all that there’s much more attention to the way that politics have been localized Sudan, that people work to try and arrest fragmentation. Everybody has to work to do, that the international community does, but the Sudanese government does, rebel leaders, civil society activists in Sudan have to work to build meaningful political coalitions that can come up with hopeful ideas for their country. When deals are being discussed it’s very important that those deals are oriented towards fairness, towards a fair division of wealth and power in Sudan. It’s not just any deal will do. We’ve had plenty of deals in Sudan that haven’t gone anywhere. But we do also have a deal in Sudan, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which did produce some results for the Sudanese people. It’s a very ambitious deal, but then peace in Sudan is a very ambitious hope but it’s all one that we hope for, I think.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Eddie thank you very much for taking the time to talk with me today.
EDDIE THOMAS: Okay, thanks very much for inviting me, it’s a really an interesting opportunity.
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