On Friday, July 8, 2005, over a million people gathered in Khartoum’s Green Square to welcome John Garang, the leader of the Sudan People\u2019s Liberation Army\/Movement (SPLM\/A), six months after the Naivasha Peace Agreement between the government and the movement, which had begun its rebellion in the South in 1983. The first Southern rebellion (1955-1972) demanded separation, while the SPLM\/A’s manifesto, issued in the 1980s, insisted on the unity of Sudan within a new, identity-less home\u2014neither Arab, nor Islamic, nor African. Here, “Sudanese-ness” was to be a geographic designation for a place where citizens would be equal in rights and duties, irrespective of their nationalities, ethnicities, races, tribes, regionalism, religions, or political orientations, within a secular, democratic state.<\/p>\n
When Garang died in a helicopter crash, just three weeks after that million-strong rally in the capital\u2014which was followed the next day by a decree appointing him as Vice-President of the Republic\u2014neither the Islamists in Omar al-Bashir\u2019s regime nor the secessionists within the Movement, including his deputy Salva Kiir (who had been in the Anya-Nya movement that led the first Southern rebellion), mourned him. Nor did the splinter group that broke away from Garang in 1991 (the SPLM\/A \u2013 Nasir faction) led by Riek Machar, which had proposed the principle of “self-determination for the South.” Machar\u2019s group later rejoined the SPLM\/A in 2003, after al-Bashir, in the Machakos Protocol of 2002 (the birthplace of Naivasha), had favoured the “right to self-determination” over the “secular, united Sudan”\u2014the second option being what Garang desired. At the time, the Islamists, Salva Kiir, and Machar were united in favouring separation, which, when realized in 2011, left al-Bashir to rule Sudan alone, while President Salva Kiir (a Dinka) and his Vice-President Machar (a Nuer) fought over the rule of the Republic of South Sudan in a civil war that led to the death of hundreds of thousands between 2013 and 2018.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, the majority of the Sudanese people mourned Garang that day. It appears that many of the Sudanese in Green Square, mostly Northern Arabs, wanted to express their desire for Garang to be an alternative to the rule of al-Bashir and the Islamic Movement. In the “Political Memory” program on Al Arabiya channel, Lam Akol, a leader who defected from the SPLM\/A with Machar, provided new information that “even until his death, Washington was betting on Garang to overthrow the Islamist rule through elections when he ran for the presidency against al-Bashir,” and that the Americans were not inclined toward the division of Sudan, unlike al-Bashir, Salva Kiir, and many regional states.<\/p>\n
Here, despite Naivasha including the right to self-determination\u2014which encompasses the options of maintaining the geographic status quo or secession\u2014Garang’s actions in the seven months of 2005 before his death indicated that he sought unity, not separation. The Green Square rally was a message to him, conveyed by hands, feet, and voices, that he commanded a supportive social majority across Sudan, a message that his Northern and Southern adversaries seemed to have read well.<\/p>\n
This was not clear before July 8, 2005, although it could be sensed over nearly a quarter-century of the SPLM\/A\u2019s life, when people from the Northern Arabs joined it (such as Mansour Khalid, the Sudanese Foreign Minister in the 1970s and architect of Nimeiri’s rapprochement with the West after the failed communist coup in 1971, or the former communist Yasser Arman), or from the Nuba Mountains in Southern Kordofan (Abdel Aziz al-Hilu), or from the African populations of the Blue Nile region near the Ethiopian border (Malik Agar). These were signals of Garang and his movement’s social extensions that transcended the Southern framework. Even the former communist Abdul Wahid Mohamed Nour, when he founded the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) in 2002, was inspired by Garang\u2019s principle of the “New Sudan,” but the movement was confined to the African populations of Darfur before his movement split in 2006 between a social base supporting him from the Furs tribe and the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) led by Minni Arko Minawi, whose social base was among the African Zaghawa tribe. Meanwhile, Khalil Ibrahim founded the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) in 2001, which had a predominantly social base among the African Zaghawa and Masalit tribes. Khalil Ibrahim came from Dr. Hassan al-Turabi\u2019s Islamic organization and supported him in his dispute with al-Bashir in 1999. However, neither his Islamism nor Abdul Wahid Nour\u2019s Marxism allowed their organizations to transcend the African tribal base in Darfur, unlike what we saw with Garang, who transcended and crossed the trenches of religion, nationalism, race, tribe, regionalism, and localism.<\/p>\n
The “New Sudan” formula likely arose from Garang’s realization that the “Components State” system\u2014attempted by the Umma Party (representing the Ansar sect led by Al-Mahdi) and the Democratic Unionist Party (representing the Khatmiyya sect led by Al-Mirghani), in alliance with tribal parties in the South and regional parties in the Nuba Mountains\u2014had failed during the period 1964\u20131969. Furthermore, the military rule of Jaafar Nimeiri, attempting to adopt Arabism in the 1970s and then Islam during the 1983\u20131985 period as a collective Sudanese adhesive, had also failed. This was confirmed to Garang after the Islamists seized power in 1989, as the formulas of (Component Consensus), (Arabism), and (Islam) acted as detonators for Sudan\u2019s structure. This is especially true since those ruling Sudan since independence in 1956\u2014in the political class, the army, the administration, and the judiciary\u2014are from the Northern Arabs between Khartoum and the Egyptian border. They are ethno-centric, viewing Africans with contempt, whether they are Muslim, Christian, or Animist, and regionalists who condescend to people from other areas, even other Arabs like the Arabs of Darfur, who are distributed among various tribes. Had it not been for the rebellion of the African Darfuris in 2003 against al-Bashir, he would not have been forced to use the nomadic Arab tribes of Darfur, the (Aballa: camel herders) and (Baggara: cattle herders), in the Janjaweed forces (later renamed the Rapid Support Forces – RSF since 2013), to suppress the Darfuri rebellion which was based on African farming tribes. This is despite the fact that in the British census before Sudan\u2019s independence, the proportion of Arabs did not exceed 39% of the total population of the planned state.<\/p>\n
After Garang\u2019s death (or murder), the devastating price of not adopting his formula was confirmed: The new state of South Sudan erupted, and continues to be, in a multi-chapter civil war that lasted between 2013 and 2018, and is now dormant after Machar\u2019s detention last March. While this civil war formally takes the shape of a political conflict between the SPLM\/A led by President Salva Kiir and the SPLM\/A \u2013 In Opposition led by Machar, this does not conceal that it is a conflict between the Dinka (who control the army and Presidential Guard) and the Nuer. This conflict escalated into killing based on identity in city streets, tribal-ethnic displacement operations from oil-rich areas, and attempts to seize fertile areas for the grazing (or acquisition) of cattle, which, along with oil, constitute South Sudan\u2019s main wealth.<\/p>\n
In Darfur, the bloodshed continued between 2003 and 2023. This did not take the form of a conflict between a government and rebel movements, but rather an Arab\u2013African conflict, in which the Khartoum authority, dominated by Northern Arabs, sought the help of Darfur Arabs from the (Aballa) and (Baggara), who have old historical conflicts over fertile areas with the African farmers in the Darfur region. This led to ethnic cleansing, rape, and killing based on skin colour and tribal identity. The Rapid Support Forces (RSF), whose role in Darfur inflated, translated their growing power into action in the capital, Khartoum, against al-Bashir in the coup of April 11, 2019, in cooperation with the army. This created a dual-headed authority before the two sides fought and clashed on April 15, 2023, in the bloodiest civil war in Sudan’s history, which continues to rage between the Northern Arabs and the Arabs of Darfur. African Darfuris (Arko Minawi and Gibril Ibrahim, who succeeded his brother Khalil as head of the Justice and Equality Movement since 2011) and African Blue Nile populations (Malik Agar) are allied with Army Commander Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, while the SPLM\/A \u2013 North organization led by Abdel Aziz al-Hilu and centred in the Nuba Mountains is allied with Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo\u2013Hemedti, the commander of the RSF. Meanwhile, Abdul Wahid Nour’s organization, the strongest among the African Darfuris from the Fur tribe, remains neutral.<\/p>\n
Sudan is now practically split by conflict between East and West, just as it was split by conflict between North and South before 2005. In the East, there is a latent conflict between the central government and the Beja tribes near the Red Sea, which was contained in an agreement in 2006, but sometimes surfaces, if only through local demands.<\/p>\n
This conflict-based division is an explosion of the post-2011 structure in the Sudan after the secession of the South, where the conflict took the form of ethnic confrontation between Arabs (the government and Darfur Arabs) and Africans until 2023, and then between Northern Arabs and Darfur Arabs from 2023 until now. South Sudan, in turn, has been divided by conflict since 2013 through an explosion of its tribal structure until 2018, with a subsequent containment but no solution.<\/p>\n
The question now is: Will Garang\u2019s “New Sudan” formula be revived in Sudan and South Sudan?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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