Could Sudanese Deal Inspire Secession?

Monday February 14, 2005 7:31 AM

By DONNA BRYSON
Associated Press Writer
LONDON (AP) - This month's peace talks between the Sudanese government and Darfur rebels could be the first test of whether Africa's largest country can stay in one piece.
Now that a deal has been signed with Sudan's southern rebels stipulating that the south will get to vote on independence in six years, the Darfur insurgents in the west of the country have started to speak more forcefully about autonomy. There's unrest in the central areas of Sudan too.
And why stop there, in a country U.N. special envoy Jan Pronk has described as ``a failed nation ... many nations together in one huge territory, held together by force''? For that matter, why stop at Sudan? It is only one of many African nations whose borders, it could be argued, are artificial.
Britain, France and the other European powers that determined Africa's borders at an 1884 conference in Berlin were concerned not with questions of cultural or national identity, but with balancing their own rivalries and ambitions. The map they drew jumbled kingdoms together in some countries, split tribes and language groups between others. Thus Africa today has Portuguese-speaking Angola next to Namibia, which has a strong German streak, while The Gambia, a former British possession, is basically two riverbanks surrounded by the former French territory of Senegal.
Sudan was created by the British who co-ruled it with Egypt from 1899 to 1955. Four times bigger than Texas, it straddles the great African divide between the Arab Muslim north and the black, heavily Christian south, and that faultline has defined the country's 21-year southern civil war.
Yet today the proposal to allow southern Sudanese to even consider changing an African border is revolutionary.
In the more than a century since the Berlin conference, ``these borders have provided the boundaries of much of political, economic and even social life; in other words, they have become rooted - part of the reason why inhabitants would think twice, and even more, before seeking a change of borders,'' said Mahmood Mamdani, director of Columbia University's Institute of African Studies.
Africans are keenly aware of the implications, which is why the African Union includes in its core values ``respect of borders existing on achievement of independence.''
President Omar el-Bashir sounds determined to hold Sudan together.
``Our ultimate goal is a united Sudan, which will not be built by war but by peace and development,'' he told crowds during a tour of the south following the signing of the peace deal. ``You, the southerners, will be saying 'we want a strong and huge state, a united Sudan.'''
George Ayittey, an economist and Africa specialist at the American University in Washington, worries that if secession became a trend, Africa would be reduced to myriad tiny states never able to compete in a world of big economic blocs. That is not to say he has any fondness for the colonial borders. Ayittey, a Ghanaian, longs for a ``United States of Africa,'' in which the borders would be meaningless.
David Mozersky, an African specialist for the International Crisis Group, notes that sentiment for secession developed only over time in the south, and ``hasn't been picked up yet as sort of the next chapter in Sudanese politics.''
But Ibrahim Elnur, director of the Office of African Studies at the American University in Cairo, thinks Southern Sudan's secession six years from now is a real possibility.
He pins his hopes on other provisions in the peace treaty which present the possibility of creating a viable, democratic federation in which disputes can be peacefully resolved, and which would be loose enough for no member to feel threatened or marginalized. If that promise is fulfilled, he said, Sudan could be a model for the rest of the continent.
``Sudan is a small Africa. In terms of diversity - cultural and ethnic,'' Elnur said. ``It is north African, it is west African. It is south African, it is east African. Everyone is there.''
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Donna Bryson is an Associated Press correspondent who has been based in South Africa and Egypt.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers




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