The Addis Ababa Agreement

In 1971 the southern Sudanese rebels, who had theretofore consisted of several independent commands, were united under Gen. Joseph Lagu, who combined under his authority both the fighting units of the Anya Nya and its political wing, the Southern Sudan Liberation Movement (SSLM). Thereafter throughout 1971 the SSLM, representing General Lagu, maintained a dialogue with the Sudanese government over proposals for regional autonomy and the ending of hostilities. These talks culminated in the signing of the Addis Ababa Agreement on February 27, 1972. The agreement ended the 17-year conflict between the Anya Nya and the Sudanese army and ushered in autonomy for the southern region, which would no longer be divided into the three provinces of Al-Istiwāʾiyyah (Equatoria), Baḥr al-Ghazāl, and Aʿālī al-Nīl (Upper Nile). The region’s affairs would be controlled by a separate legislature and executive body, and the soldiers of the Anya Nya would be integrated into the Sudanese army and police. The Addis Ababa Agreement brought Nimeiri both prestige abroad and popularity at home.

Economic development

The signing of the Addis Ababa Agreement enabled economic development in Sudan to proceed using funds that had previously been allocated for the civil war. This redirection of government resources to peaceful projects coincided with the dramatic growth of petroleum revenues in the Persian Gulf, and the Arab states there began investing large sums in Sudan in order to transform it into the “breadbasket” of the Arab world. The resulting spate of development projects in the 1970s was followed by investments from private multinational corporations and generous loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The highest priority was placed on expanding Sudan’s production of sugar, wheat, and cotton in order to provide foreign exchange. The new projects were accompanied by efforts to expand the national infrastructure.

Though these projects were laudable in conception, their flawed implementation plunged Sudan into a severe economic crisis by 1980. Few projects were completed on time, and those that were never met their production targets. The steady decline of Sudan’s gross domestic output from 1977 left the country in a cycle of increasing debt, severe inflation, and ever-diminishing standard of living.

There were two fundamental causes for the failure of Sudan’s economic development. First, planning was deficient, and decisions were increasingly precipitous and mercurial. There was no overall control, so individual ministries negotiated external loans for projects without the approval of the central planning authority. The result was not only incompetent management but also innumerable opportunities for corruption. The second cause of economic failure lay in external events over which Sudan had no control. Rising oil prices dramatically increased Sudan’s bill for petroleum products, while the concomitant development projects in the Persian Gulf siphoned off from Sudan its best professional and skilled workers, who were lured by high wages abroad only to create a “brain drain” at home. The Nimeiri regime did not prove successful in breaking this cycle of persistent economic decline.

The rise of Muslim fundamentalism

In the elections of 1965, the Islamic Charter Front, a political party that espoused the principles of the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwān al-Muslimīn), received only an insignificant portion of the popular vote. But the election roughly coincided with the return from France of Ḥasan al-Turābī, who assumed the leadership of the party, renamed the Islamic National Front (NIF). Turābī methodically charted the Brotherhood and the NIF on a course of action designed to seize control of the Sudanese government despite the Muslim fundamentalists’ lack of popularity with the majority of the Sudanese people. Tightly disciplined, superbly organized, and inspired by the resurgence of Islam in the Middle East, the Muslim Brotherhood consciously sought to recruit disciples from the country’s youth. It was relentlessly successful, and by the 1980s the Muslim Brotherhood and the NIF had successfully infiltrated the country’s officer corps, the civil service, and the ranks of secondary-school teachers.

Despite its relatively small size, the Muslim Brotherhood began to exert its influence, which did not go unnoticed by President Nimeiri, whose SSU had failed to galvanize popular support. In the face of deteriorating relations with both the southern Sudanese and the traditionalists of the Ummah-Mahdī grouping, Nimeiri turned increasingly to the Muslim Brotherhood for support. He appointed Turābī attorney general and did not object to the latter’s designs for a new constitution based partly on Islamic law, the Sharīʿah. In September 1983 Nimeiri modified the nation’s legal codes to bring them into accord with Islamic law. This measure was bound to be resisted by the Christians and animists of southern Sudan. Moreover, Nimeiri was coming to accept the arguments of the Muslim Brotherhood and other northern political groups that the Addis Ababa Agreement had been a mistake. In June 1983 Nimeiri unilaterally divided the southern region again into three provinces, thereby effectively abrogating the Addis Ababa Agreement.

Resumption of civil war

Even before the official demise of the agreement, the civil war between the south and the north had resumed with even greater ferocity than before. There had been sporadic uprisings in the south since the signing of the Addis Ababa Agreement in 1972, but they had been quickly suppressed. In May 1983, however, an army battalion stationed at Bor mutinied and fled into the bush under the leadership of Colonel John Garang de Mabior. The rebels had become disenchanted with Nimeiri and his government, which was riddled with corruption and was contemptuous of southerners. Led by Garang, the ranks of the Bor garrison, which had taken up sanctuary in Ethiopia, were soon swollen by discontented southerners determined to redress their grievances by force of arms under the banner of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and its political wing, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM).

Nimeiri’s overthrow and its aftermath

Although Nimeiri at first sought to crush the rebels by military force, his deployment of the Sudanese army only succeeded in disrupting the distribution of food, which, when coupled with drought and diminished harvests, created widespread famine in the southern Sudan. Without popular support, Nimeiri found himself facing a successful armed rebellion in the south and growing criticism in the north over the rigour with which he sought to carry out the corporal punishments prescribed under Islamic law. In response, Nimeiri softened his hard-line policies: he annulled the state of emergency that he had invoked five months earlier, he rescinded the tripartite division of the south, and he suspended the more brutal aspects of the Islamic courts. But these futile gestures were too late. Nimeiri was overthrown in a bloodless coup in April 1985 by his chief of staff, Gen. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Siwar al-Dahab. Although the new military government held elections in 1986 that returned Ṣādiq al-Mahdī as prime minister, the next three years were characterized by political instability, indecisive leadership, party manipulations resulting in short-lived coalitions, and abortive attempts to reach a peaceful settlement with the SPLA. These years of indecision came to an end on June 30, 1989, when a Revolutionary Command Council for National Salvation led by Lieut. Gen. Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir seized power. The Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) was in fact the vehicle for the NIF.