Sudan: The Rebel Alliance

Sudan: The Rebel Alliance

A new alliance of Darfur rebel groups with the declared goal of regime change threatens the Doha peace process. Fouad Hikmat, African Union Sudan Special Adviser, explains that if the peace process is to have any chance of success, it must be inclusive.

Transcript (edited for print):

The new alliance, which is called the Sudan Revolutionary Front, is three Darfur rebel groups who rejected--or let's say, they were not a part of the Doha peace process. They came together with the SPLM North, which is the SLM Minawi and SLM Abdul Wahed and Justice and Equality movement of Khalil Ibrahim, and they said that they formed an alliance with a very clear manifesto. And one of the key objectives of that manifesto is regime change by all means, political and military. This alliance is at its infancy, because they have yet to develop leadership structure and the executive part of it and the joint army, and so on. They face a very big challenge.

First of all, if these two parties are going to be able to foster this alliance, given that some of the elements have different doctrines, and perhaps also different thinking of what could be the future state of Sudan--and at the same time, they are ethnically and regionally based. One of the challenges is that this alliance needs to come out from regional and ethnic characteristics to become a national opposition to the NCP, to counter-balance as a political power to the NCP. And by definition, that means that they need to create a political platform to absorb or to attract the other opposition parties and marginalized areas to become a national body, recognized by the Sudanese before anybody else.

By themselves, with the characteristics I've explained, it is very difficult that they are going to achieve their objective. If their objective is to remove the NCP totally from government, that is going to be a very big problem, because you need the NCP to be part of a national consensus on the way forward, and is definitely going to fight back, and that will deepen the polarization in Sudan. If they couldn''t manage to create a national consensus--i.e., to attract the opposition, to get critical mass--even if tomorrow they succeed in reaching Khartoum, I doubt that that will be the final match. Most probably that will be the semi-final. So the question is, who is going to play in the final? And that might lead to the implosion of Sudan.

The alliance is going to impede the implementation of the Doha political process, because three members of this new alliance, once it become effective, are based in Darfur, and if their objective is regime change, it means that Darfur will remain the theater of operations, militarily and politically. And if the only signator of the Doha document for peace, the LJM, wants to move forward in the implementation, they are going to face a problem because the government, seen as the enemy by the members of the alliance, will fight. War will continue in Darfur, and in that sense the priority of the Darfur peace process is to create viable conditions for the return of the IDPs. That will be very difficult because the environment is not going to be viable at all.

At the same time, justice and reconciliation is not going to happen, and the people of Darfur won't see the peace dividend to give that legitimacy to the new Doha process. So even if those who reject Doha, they won't fight LJM as the Darfur rebel groups did after they signed the Darfur peace agreement in Abuja. Fighting between these two rebel groups under the new alliance in the Darfur theatre by definition will complicate the implementation of the Doha process. I think this is a very serious impediment.

So the challenge for the international community, the challenge for the two parties of the Doha peace process, is is how to make it inclusive. The alliance agenda is not about making the Doha process inclusive; its objective is to remove one of the parties of the Doha peace process.

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[ThePerfectBlack100]

Real Africans should Unite as one force I bet these watered down Africans would not try to bully people then.