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JUBA - By Daniel van Oudenaren - 13 Mar 2013

Analysis: Juba visit key for Bashir legacy

President Omar Hassan al-Bashir accepted yesterday an invitation to Juba, setting in motion plans for a ceremonial visit laden with meaning for the embattled leader and his party.

Bashir and his South Sudanese counterpart exchanged congratulations yesterday by telephone after their lead negotiators signed a new timetable for implementing the oil and security deal signed last September in Addis Ababa.

According to Bashir’s press secretary, Imad Saeed Ahmed, Salva Kiir Mayardit extended an invitation for Bashir to visit to Juba, which was accepted immediately. The Sudanese leader promised to fulfill his pledge to make the visit “as soon as possible.” 

The visit would be a major step toward ending the cold war period that has affected the region since the oil shutdown, committing the two governments to the same kind of economic cooperation enjoyed from 2005 to 2011. Under the terms of the agreement, cross-border trade would resume, bringing relief to border communities now struggling under wartime trade conditions. Most importantly, Sudan would see fresh influxes of hard currency in the form of pipeline fees and the $3 billion ‘transitional financial arrangement’ that South Sudan will pay over the next three and a half years.

In ending the blockade of South Sudan’s oil exports, Bashir calculates that further brinksmanship would destabilize the economy, endangering his legacy of booming growth since he took power in 1989. The Sudanese president faces, however, a serious risk of being outflanked by militant Salafist groups and critics within his own National Congress Party, who may blame him afresh for the loss of the south and for compromising too soon with their archfoe SPLM/A.

To justify Bashir's diplomacy, it will therefore be suggested in Khartoum, as it has been before, that good relations with the south allow for tactical emphasis elsewhere, and that peaceful ties draw Juba back into the orbit of Khartoum’s influence, as a kind of tribute-paying neighbor – no different now than it ever really was, and which one day may re-join the fold.

Resumption of the oil production in the southern fields was an economic necessity, it will also be said, and on that basis NCP’s old sectarian rivals, the Umma and Unionist parties, have already welcomed the new deal, giving Bashir some cover from the political ‘center.’

Cold War ending?

In their conversation yesterday the two presidents agreed to proceed with “sincerity, honesty and seriousness in the enforcement of the [implementation] matrix and settlement of outstanding issues that hinder the promotion of cooperation between the two governments,” al-Bashir’s spokesman said in a press statement.

Stumbling blocks certainly await the agreement, most notably over the Abyei referendum. But declarations by both countries’ armies in recent days confirm that significant political impetus is now behind the agreement, in contrast to last October when the deal stalled almost immediately in the weeks before the foiled coup plot in Khartoum.

The flurry of recent diplomacy would appear then to have opened the way toward another chapter of uneasy peace and cooperation between Juba and Khartoum, a sort of post-Cold War era. How long it will last remains to be seen.

For Bashir, though, the new era does not mean peace. He understands far better than the diplomats who brokered the recent agreement the nature of the SPLM/A, and he is committed to its destruction. The offshoots and erstwhile allies of SPLM/A continue to battle the northern government on three fronts. A truce with one of the factions provides opportunity for escalation against the others.

From the beginning SPLM/A was never a separatist government-in-waiting; it was a revolutionary force that posed an existential threat to the modern state in the Sudan. During the civil war the movement invaded Nuba Mountains, Blue Nile, and (unsuccessfully) Darfur. In the north-east of Sudan it stormed Kassala in 2000 while the regime was in the throes of internal crisis, occupying parts of that state until 2006. This new ‘Eastern Front’ drew Sudanese troops away from the south and brought the war dangerously close to Khartoum.

Today, the Eastern Front has gone largely quiet, but a new ‘eastern front’ has opened – Kordofan – drawing men and arms west from Darfur, where the raw crisis of the Sudanese state has been festering openly now for ten years.

The Kordofan Front

Kordofan’s Nuba Mountains are now famously controlled by the secular SPLA-N, whose territorial gains during the last year and a half have expanded on their holdings of the previous war. But it is not these fighters alone that constitute the severest threat to the government.

Rather, the higher danger stems from alliances of ideological (and cultural) opponents of the regime to ideological kin of the regime. Front lines now are sometimes less clear than in the previous war; tribes that once could be counted as loyal no longer can be with certainty. Last year, for example, Misseriya leaders played a not insignificant role in the capture and looting of the Heglig oil field, at the southeastern edge of their territory.

And early this month a force of the Justice and Equality Movement entered Dar Hamar in North Kordofan, where they were within striking distance of an-Nahud or el-Obeid, threatening to cut the roads to Darfur. They clashed with soldiers who were traveling from El Obeid to eastern Darfur in order to secure Taweesha town for a presidential visit, forcing Bashir to cancel the trip.

It was in this territory, in the Wad Banda area, that the Islamist rebel leader Khalil Ibrahim was killed in an aerial attack in December 2011. JEM’s re-emergence there this year in spite of losses suggests a continuing effort to court the Hamar. The rebels seek to win recruits, safe passage, financing, supplies, information or – at the very least – ambivalence.

In targeting tribes on which the government had previously relied, the revolutionaries seek to expand the definition of ‘marginalized’ and thereby move the battle out of the periphery and eventually into the cities. The government, to counter such efforts, finds itself promising infrastructure services and political rewards which it cannot deliver owing to the deepening economic crisis.

This dynamic was evident in the tribal war between the Abbala and Beni Hussein over the Jebel ‘Amer gold mine in North Darfur, which broke out in January, causing massive displacement. The tribes involved have long been associated (pejoratively) with the ‘janjaweed’ militia allied to the government. But in recent interviews with Radio Dabanga, tribal leaders trying to calm the raging conflict called on militia to face the ‘common enemy’, NCP, and reminded them of past betrayals by the government. 

Bashir the peacemaker

The wars in the north demand the president’s attention and the army’s full readiness. His agreement with Kiir will provide much-needed cash to prosecute that effort, while also further driving a wedge between SPLA and SPLA-North.  

So how to celebrate the peace? At the culmination of the Naivasha talks in 2005 it was Vice President Ali Osman Taha, not Bashir, who appeared alongside SPLM/A founder John Garang de Mabior, and whose signature appeared on the peace agreement.

Bashir seems now to have taken that mantle himself, joining Salva Kiir at a presidential summit last August, then again in September, then again in January.

This is not likely merely a matter of protocol, merely a concession to Salva Kiir’s elevation to the level of head of state. It was clear with the arrest of Salah Gosh and a number of former generals and security officials last November that Bashir’s circle of trust had narrowed. Perhaps he can no longer afford to delegate the task to another; it is now, more than ever, a crucial part of his legacy.

Bashir the peacemaker last appeared in Juba on Independence Day, 9 July 2011, boldly celebrating a strategic defeat – the loss of the south – as merely a temporary tactical loss. His forces had just invaded Abyei and moved on Talodi, Heiban and Kadugli. Few in the crowd that historic day seemed to be aware. Should he indeed make another appearance in Juba, his stageplay as peacemaker likely will be only a bit part compared to the act that will follow.

By Daniel van Oudenaren