Fracture Lines

For the past four years, significant U.S. attention has been devoted to the crisis in Sudan's Darfur region, in which roughly two hundred thousand have died and more than two million have been displaced. A hybrid African Union/United Nations peacekeeping force remains only partially deployed, and peace negotiations have stalled. Meanwhile, clashes in South Sudan have raising fears that the fragile peace brought by the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement will collapse and the country's civil strife will expand to disastrous levels. The Bush administration treated Darfur and South Sudan as separate issues. But experts say both situations can be traced back to Khartoum's central government, which has historically maintained control of the country's periphery through divide-and-rule policies. There is wide disagreement about the best policy course for the United States to pursue in Sudan, but analysts agree that any effective policy will have to consider Sudan's internal politics and the center's relationship with its periphery.

Khartoum and its Periphery
Sudan is the largest country in Africa, approximately the size of Western Europe. Since its independence in 1956, it has been roiled by civil war almost continuously. This war was initially between northern Sudan and the south, which objected to its isolation and lack of development in comparison to the north. Following the military coup that brought President Omar al-Bashir to power in 1989, Bashir's National Congress Party (NCP) spurred an Islamist revolution that empowered the center's security and business interests at the expense of rural areas.  In response, groups from each peripheral area of Sudan entered conflict with the central government. According to a 2003 briefing paper from the International Crisis Group, these groups feel marginalized as a result of a government that has "exploited local resources, imposed its religious and cultural beliefs on historically diverse populations and consistently pitted local tribes and ethnic groups against each other for short term tactical gain." The government maintains that peripheral areas in the south were underdeveloped because of the long civil war. In a 2009 article for International Affairs, Sudan expert Alex de Waal says insight into these conflicts requires an understanding of Sudan's "political marketplace" (PDF), in which provincial leaders bargain with Khartoum for the price of their loyalty. Each time they start a new round of negotiations with the government, they launch "a targeted assault on the economic and human assets of the metropolitan elites," he writes. For example, a group might attack a merchant or army outpost as a way of drawing attention and demanding that the government bargain with it. The government usually retaliates with another act of violence, de Waal writes, and then the two sides will settle, or the violence escalates. The regions with ongoing conflicts are as follows:

Darfur. In February 2003, rebels from the western Darfur region of Sudan launched an uprising and demanded equal representation in the government and improved infrastructure in the region. The government retaliated by sending armed Arab militias, known as janjaweed, that targeted the villages of the rebel groups. The violence has displaced millions of people within Darfur and killed an estimated two hundred thousand. A 2006 peace agreement is moribund, and an AU/UN peacekeeping force in the region has been unable to prevent continued conflict.

Southern Sudan. Southern Sudan, which holds roughly 85 percent of Sudan's oil, fought to achieve independence from 1955 to 1972, and again from 1983 until 2005. In its second iteration, the war in the south was fought by the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), which gained political legitimacy under the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) and become known as the Sudan People's Liberation Movement. The CPA gave the oil-rich south autonomy for six years, at which time it will hold a referendum on secession. Failure to implement provisions of the CPA by both the SPLA and the Sudanese government led to armed conflict in 2008, and analysts fear renewed clashes.

Southern Kordofan. Created by the CPA, this new state straddles the border area between north and south. It has fertile land for agriculture and the only proven oil reserves in Northern Sudan. It is also one of the poorest states in the country. During the North-South war, Southern Kordofan was a critical battleground. The CPA has a special protocol related to the region, but its neglect has led to unrest. "The fate of peacebuilding in this front-line state will say much about the viability of Sudan's entire peace process," says an October 2008 International Crisis Group report.

Eastern Sudan. Fighting erupted in northeastern Sudan in 2005 between the Eastern Front, a group of rebels, and government troops. The Eastern Front was backed by South Sudan's SPLA and a rebel group from Darfur. In October 2006, it signed a power-sharing agreement with Khartoum, but reports indicate implementation has been slow.

The Comprehensive Peace Agreement Is Not Comprehensive
Experts agree that Sudan will not be a stable state until inequalities between the center and the periphery are addressed. Experts differ, however, on whether the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement facilitates or hinders that process. Some frame the agreement as a bilateral deal between the north's National Congress Party (NCP), the ruling party, and the south's SPLM that excludes other conflict-ridden parts of the country, such as Darfur. As a Kenyan negotiator told Sudan historian Edward Thomas: "Comprehensive in my understanding would be the whole of Sudan. That was never on the table: the government would not allow it. Every time I tried to raise it they said, 'Oh, you want to come and resolve all our conflicts? Come to Darfur, come to Eastern Sudan, we have enough problems.'" In fact, Sudanese in Darfur see the CPA as a bilateral deal that was achieved at their expense. But the negotiators from the south believe the CPA is "a panacea for other problems in Sudan," according to Omer Ismail, a Sudanese policy fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. The International Crisis Group asserts that "the CPA is the linchpin for peace throughout Sudan-[and] Darfur must be resolved within this context." By giving the south autonomy for six years before allowing a referendum on independence, the CPA offers a chance for Sudan to develop a democratic system, including elections and constitutional reform.

Though the CPA excludes actors in large peripheral areas such as Darfur and eastern Sudan, it does call for state restructuring that has the potential to address what is viewed by many provinces as the central government's excessive power. Thomas, writing in a January 2009 report for UK-based think tank Chatham House, calls it "the most important political framework in Sudan." Its provisions on power-sharing, wealth-sharing, land, and elections "still offer Sudan an alternative to permanent crisis, fragmentation, or breakdown," he adds. Ismail cautions, however, that clauses applying to the entire country are much vaguer than those that apply specifically to the south. The elements of the CPA that affect the whole of Sudan include: