BY DAN CONNELL
Secretary of State Colin Powell's recent four-country tour of Africa produced a flurry of press coverage on renewed US interest in ending the 18-year Sudan civil war. Despite US President George W. Bush's nomination of a special envoy to spearhead a new peace initiative, the Bush administration's policy toward Sudan will probably not be much different from the high-profile but largely insubstantial policies of its predecessor.
The Bush administration is coming under growing pressure to support the rebels from an unlikely coalition of conservative evangelical Christian groups and African-American organisations. Both are disturbed over the Sudan government's persecution of the mostly black southerners, some of whom are Christians. The conservative-led US Commission on International Religious Freedom maintains a drumbeat of op-eds and public statements calling upon the administration to tighten US sanctions on Khartoum.
But powerful forces are more quietly urging Washington to go in exactly the opposite direction. US oil interests, worried they are being left out of a petroleum bonanza in the new and expanding oil fields in southern Sudan, favour increased dialogue with Khartoum and a loosening of economic sanctions that have blocked them from doing business in Sudan.
Egypt, the key US ally in the Nile basin, opposes a US tilt toward the rebels, fearing the breakup of Sudan that may threaten Cairo's historical control over the Nile headwaters.
Special US envoy nominee Chester Crocker, former US President Ronald Reagan's assistant secretary of state for African affairs, appears to hold the position that the best southerners can hope for is negotiated autonomy.
Meanwhile, a highly touted "summit" that brought rebel leaders and government officials together in Nairobi for the first time in early June failed to produce a cease-fire. In the end, the main protagonists — Sudan government leader General Omar al-Bashir and Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) head John Garang — didn't even meet face to face. The prospects now are for increased fighting as both sides seek to position themselves for future bargaining. Nothing in the menu of minor policy initiatives announced in Washington over the past month is likely to change this.
The Sudanese regime has sharply escalated fighting in an attempt to contain the SPLA in pockets of the south, where the liberation movement's main strength lies. The regime aims to expand its control of southern oil fields prior to any halt in the war.
For its part, the SPLA has been defending its positions in the south, while threatening operations to curtail the government's oil production and also attack strategic targets in the north and east of Sudan, where it has built strong positions for itself over the past decade. In the past few weeks, the SPLA has claimed major advances in fighting in the southern Bahr el-Ghazal region, near the oil fields.
The Bush administration recently decided to send US$3 million to a broader rebel group, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), a coalition of more than a dozen southern and northern forces that operates in the northeast. The SPLA is also a key member of the NDA and is its largest and most militarily important contingent.
The south is where most of the SPLA's forces are and where much of the fighting has been since 1983. An estimated 2 million people have died as a result of war and famine there. Another 4 million are reportedly displaced. The north-south border area is also where government-armed Arab militias have raided Dinka villages for booty and captives, leading US evangelicals to charge the regime with aiding and abetting the resumption of slavery — a hot-button issue that has helped galvanise support for a pro-rebel strategy in the US.
But the conflict in Sudan is considerably more complicated than the simple north-south, Muslim-Christian, Arab-African duality often presented by groups pushing the US to support the rebels. Most northern Sudanese are Arabised Africans, not ethnic Arabs. Most southerners practice traditional religions, not Christianity, though missionaries operating there hope to change this. Many Muslims are deeply engaged in armed opposition to the regime, as well. The second largest armed group in the country belongs to the Beja Congress, based among impoverished Muslims in north-eastern Sudan, and there are several other groups from the north in the NDA coalition.
Under these conditions, Crocker's apparent preferred approach of placating southerners with a truncated form of autonomy, similar to that they were given (and subsequently lost) to end the first round of civil war in 1972, is not attractive to many Sudanese.
For their part, most southerners continue to manifest a deep-rooted skepticism toward anything short of full self-determination. What is now on the table for halting the war is not a recipe for peace. The government has repeatedly offered a sham autonomy that no-one in the opposition takes seriously.
The opposition may be increasing its political coherence and gaining military strength by default, as the regime is weakened by a debilitating split in the ruling Islamist party, the National Islamic Front (NIF). The recent arrest of NIF party founder Hasan al-Turabi on charges of treason for independently negotiating with the SPLA in opposition to the Bashir regime, has spilled over into the armed forces, where hundreds of Turabi loyalists have been detained over the past six months.
Increasingly isolated from the NIF rank and file, Bashir has intensified his campaign in the oil-producing areas, to ensure that oil revenues — about $500 million yearly and growing — flow into his regime's coffers. But despite the increased availability of oil money to purchase sophisticated arms, the Bashir-Turabi split has curbed the army's fighting capacity. Rebel spokespeople say dissension in the army partly explains their ability to repel the current government offensive.
Fierce fighting has been underway since April in the southern province of Bahr el-Ghazal, as well as in the central Nuba Mountains and the contested eastern province of Southern Blue Nile. Fighting is likely soon in the Red Sea Hills of north-eastern Sudan, where rebel forces threaten the country's main road and rail access to the sea and where the government has been quietly building up an attack force in the small Red Sea port of Agig. But so far government forces have fared poorly on all fronts.
The rebels say they will counter-attack once the government's force is spent. Such attacks have already started in Bahr el-Ghazal, where the SPLA claims to have recently captured a major town, Raga. The coming months may see decisive engagements as both sides jockey for position, both for future negotiations and to win favour for potential aid.
[Dan Connell is a contributing editor of Middle East Report. Abridged from a the Middle East Research and Information Project press information note. Visit the MERIP web site at <http://www.merip.org>.]