Torn apart by civil war Sudan stands a good chance to be put back together again, writes Gamal Nkrumah If Khartoum has to hanker after the idealistic spirit of international cooperation, it has to get its house in order first. Unless Sudanese policymakers blunder unforgivably, they should be able to make amends with their foes both at home and abroad. But, how does Sudan get industrious teams of professional politicians and diplomats to bond? First and foremost, the southern Sudanese and indigenous Darfuris must be made to feel at home in their own country. Anything less inevitably corrodes the dividends of peace and political reforms. None of this will be easy to implement. Sudan has come a long way since the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) signed between the North and South on 9 January 1995. The best way to foster the CPA is to propel the pace of democratic reforms forward and overcome awkward ideological and cultural differences that hinder smooth communications between the belligerent Sudanese protagonists. Such differences remain at the heart of the crisis. The Sudanese government and opposition parties are entangled in legal battles no less ferocious than the most truculent of conflicts in the country's far-flung and outlying regions. The opposition parties are determined to see the Sudanese parliament promulgate new laws that guarantee freedoms. Furthermore, they accuse the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) of desperately attempting to thwart the opposition efforts to institute radical change. The opposition insists that the laws in force run contrary to the Sudanese constitution. They assert that these laws are bound to adulterate the process of parliamentary and presidential polls scheduled for 2009. Needless to say, the government vigorously denies the opposition claims. Disputation on such magnitude is nothing new to Sudan. The Sudanese political establishment is divided against itself, though. The country's main government coalition partner, the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), has sided with the parliamentary opposition parties and is demanding an end to the laws that curtail freedom of expression, including freedom of the press. The head of the SPLM parliamentary committee Yassir Arman pressed for the immediate promulgation of the new more liberal laws. Mohamed Othman Al-Mirghani, the leader of the largest opposition grouping, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), a coalition of opposition parties, urged the government to lift all restrictions on political activism. Al-Mirghani vaunted that if free and fair elections took place the NDA would garner a large segment of the Sudanese electoral vote -- no less than five million votes. The NDA boasts a huge following in both northern and southern Sudan. In a flurry of diplomatic activity Arab countries are redoubling efforts to resolve the Sudanese crisis. A special meeting is to be convened on 12 October at the headquarters of the Arab League in Cairo to discuss the Sudanese political crisis. The ministers of justice of the 22 Arab League member states would attend the meeting highlighting the legal aspects of the Sudanese crisis. The focus of the deliberations would be the filing by the Prosecutor-General of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Luis Moreno-Ocampo of 10 criminal charges against Sudanese President Omar Hassan Al-Bashir. Moreno-Ocampo disclosed that the Sudanese President "masterminded and implemented a plan to destroy in substantial part" three non- Arab ethnic groups indigenous to Darfur -- the Fur, after whom the province is named, the Zaghawa and the Masalit. Members of the three ethnic groups constitute the greater part of the armed opposition groups of Darfur. The outlines of a solution to the Sudanese political impasse have long been clear. And, Arab countries are aware that a dangerous uncertainty hovers over Sudan, however, few Arab countries are willing or capable of taking steps that would promote lasting peace and political stability in Sudan. Nothing good is likely to happen until some of these political uncertainties have been ironed out. This is the first time that such charges were charged against a sitting president anywhere in the world, and the Sudanese authorities did not take kindly to the affront, to put it mildly. The ICC prosecutor-general inferred that the Sudanese president was ultimately responsible for widespread rape and other human rights atrocities committed by the government-aligned militias of the nomadic Arabised tribes of western Sudan better known as the Janjaweed. "Seventy-six-year-old women and six-year-old girls are raped," Moreno- Ocampo declared. In an interview with the London-based pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat he stressed that the perpetrators, no matter how high-ranking, must be brought to book. He noted that millions of refugees and displaced people are under constant threat of maltreatment, torture and death by the Janjaweed. "Genocide is a crime of intention -- we do not need to wait until these 2.5 million [Darfur refugees] die," Moreno-Ocampo argued. His statements prompted a political cataclysm in Khartoum. Whether the intractable social problems of Sudan can be solved quite so dramatically is open to doubt. Sudan strongly objects to Western rhetoric, but it cannot evade the need to change. That is a worry for the future as far as Al-Bashir's regime is concerned. The ICC prosecutor-general declared the Sudanese president guilty of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Sudanese government reacted angrily, calling Ocampo's statements "neo-colonialist" and "politically motivated". Ocampo was dismissed as a "common criminal" by Sudanese officials. The Sudanese Ambassador to the UN Abdul- Halim described Ocampo's verdict as the "justice of the strong against the weak". The Sudanese government, furthermore, warned that it could no longer guarantee the safety and well-being of the UN staff in Darfur. The government of Al-Bashir is defiant, however, and is lobbying countries it considers friendly such as Russia and China to block the ICC's genocide charges against President Al-Bashir. There are growing fears of a violent backlash. Reprisals by the Arabised militias, especially the Janjaweed, are expected. "We will not lay down our arms and sit at the negotiating table until real democratic reforms are underway in Sudan," Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) Abdul-Wahid Mohamed Nour told Al-Ahram Weekly. The Paris-based leader of the SLA disclosed that he is working closely with other Sudanese opposition forces to initiate change. Nour supports UN Resolution 1593 of 2005 which stipulates that the Sudanese government and all the other protagonists in the Darfur conflict cooperate fully with the ICC and Moreno- Ocampo, providing them with assistance.
