A new chapter in Sudan's history may be being written but many pitfalls lie ahead, writes Gamal Nkrumah Sudan has wrong-footed everyone over the past decade: foes have become friends and allies enemies. Who would have thought that Sudan's Islamist ideologue and former speaker of parliament, Hassan Al-Turabi, would be languishing in jail while his one time political ally, Sudanese President Omar Hassan Al-Bashir, invites the leader of the most powerful secular force in the country to become his first deputy. The final and comprehensive peace agreement signed last Sunday between the Sudanese government and the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), the country's largest and most influential armed opposition group, could well mark the end of a conflict that for decades seemed insoluble. It is not the first such deal, though earlier agreements reached between the Sudanese government and southern Sudanese secessionist groups inevitably proved to be false dawns. In 1972, after complicated negotiations, the Sudanese government and the Anya-Nya guerrilla movement signed a peace deal in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa that turned the three regions of southern Sudan into an autonomous area administered as a single political unit within a united Sudan. Yet though the 1972 Addis Ababa agreement ended a 17-year old war that had claimed the lives of an estimated 500,000 people it failed to address the grievances of the southern Sudanese and less than a decade later the conflict flared up again. The SPLA was created in 1983, replacing the Anya-Nya as the main southern Sudanese force fighting the forces of the central government in Khartoum. But there was a major difference in political orientation between the Anya-Nya and the SPLA: while the former group was a secessionist organisation fighting for an independent southern Sudanese political entity, the SPLA, since its inception, has insisted that it is an armed opposition group that aims to redress the wrongs of the past. The SPLA was fighting for the civil and political rights of all Sudanese. Nor is southern Sudan remotely homogenous. The inhabitants of Equatoria have long resented the dominance of the more numerous Dinka, southern Sudan's largest ethnic group. Ethnic and political rivalries threatened to rip the very fabric of southern Sudan apart, and successive Sudanese governments vigorously pursued a policy of divide and rule. Yet since 1983 the people of southern Sudan have congregated around the region's most powerful fighting force, the SPLA. And the SPLA has tried hard to represent the interests of all the southern Sudanese and not just those of a particular ethnic group. John Garang, the SPLA leader, is an ethnic Dinka. An estimated 40 per cent of the southern Sudanese are Dinka, while 20 per cent belong to the culturally and linguistically related Nilotic Nuer and Shilluk ethnic groups. But the Dinka themselves do not constitute a single group -- there are at least six major sub- divisions. And it is these divides that will come to play an ever-increasing role should southern Sudan secede. The vast majority of southern Sudanese people, though, will band together as a united political force just as long as Sudan remains united, though there will always be fringe groups that hold tenaciously on to their minority identities. The peace agreement signed in Kenya accommodates such groups. Under Sunday's agreement the Sudanese government is obliged to allocate 28 per cent of government posts to the SPLA, six per cent to other southern Sudanese political groups and another 16 per cent to northern Sudanese opposition parties. The agreement also allows the southern Sudanese to hold a referendum on independence in six years. The agreement may well become a model that other disenchanted Sudanese ethnic groups in the west, east and far north of the country -- and especially in Darfur -- might seek to emulate. Ominously, neither of the country's two largest northern opposition parties are participating in the new political arrangements. Both the Umma Party and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) are officially boycotting the new government. Yet the mood in Sudan following the signing ceremony was decidedly upbeat. "Yesterday was a great day after which we will accept nothing less than a new Sudan built on the ruins of the totalitarianism that began in June 1989," columnist Murtadha Al-Ghali wrote in Al-Ayam, Sudan's oldest independent newspaper. "We now look forward to international solidarity with Sudan and the resettling of refugees and displaced people," noted the editorial of Al-Rai Al-Aam. The fact remains, though, that Sudan faces some formidable challenges. The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has appealed for $302 million to help 3.2 million Sudanese on the verge of starvation. The WFP appeal does not include the victims of the conflict in Darfur. The war in southern Sudan has claimed the lives of two million people. The diplacement of an estimated four million civilians further aggravates the situation. Hunger and malnutrition have taken a terrible toll on the southern Sudanese and many of those requiring food assistance inhabit the so- called transitional areas of Abyei, the Nuba Mountains and southern Blue Nile. Damaged infrastructure needs to be repaired across the country and social, health and educational services are in desperate need of upgrading. Health scares are common in Sudan. The WFP plans to vaccinate six million southern children under five against polio, once thought to have been eradicated in April 2001. Yet security concerns continue to hamper the polio aid effort though the Sudan Liberation Army, the most powerful armed opposition group in Darfur, has opened up areas it administers in northern Darfur to local and international health workers.
