Not on Our Watch by Don Cheadle, John Prendergast Page B

resolve the dispute failed, and in May 1983 Nimeiri ordered his army to attack the insubordinate southern troops. Outmanned and outgunned, the mutineers fled with their weapons, and similar uprisings and desertions continued across southern Sudan. The southerners sought refuge in neighbouring Ethiopia and united to form the opposition Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA).

    Return to War: The Sudan People’s Liberation Army and National Islamic Front
    On 5 June 1983, Nimeiri issued an order that annulled the Addis Ababa agreement. In what is now a familiar pattern of betrayal, the government of Sudan simply turned its back on a signed treaty, and regional autonomy was instantly wiped out. Khartoum re-established and consolidated control over the administration, finances, and armed forces of the south. Further, Nimeiri’s order declared Arabic, not English, the south’s official language. Later that year the Nimeiri government passed the infamous ‘September laws’ that transformed Sudan into an Islamic state, imposing Islamic law (Sharia) on the entire country and subjecting even non-Muslims to harsh penalties. The result—another civil war.
    Southerners rallied behind the SPLA and its charismatic leader John Garang, who was a member of the Dinka ethnic group, the largest group in southern Sudan. Orphaned at the age of ten, he joined southern rebels in the first civil war when he was only seventeen. Always an excellent student, he left Sudan to complete his secondary education in Tanzania and won a scholarship to study in the United States.
    He returned to Sudan to rejoin the rebels. After the Addis Ababa agreement, he joined the Sudanese military and rose quickly through the ranks. When southern troops mutinied in May 1983 and formed the SPLA, Garang emerged as the movement’s natural leader. His vision for Sudan was broader than simple demands for southern autonomy. Instead, he sought to transform Sudan into a democratic state that respected the diversity of its citizens.
    Civil war escalated between the government and the SPLA, and a new civilian government was installed in Khartoum. Under Garang’s leadership the southern rebels took control of much of southern Sudan. Yet by June 1989, as both sides recognised that total victory would be nearly impossible, a constitutional conference to address the south’s grievances and end the war seemed imminent. Meanwhile, as we will see below, simmering resentments and escalating violence in Darfur were largely ignored.
    Later that month, however, Sudanese dreams of a lasting peace were dealt a near fatal blow on 30 June. Brigadier General Omar Hassan Ahmed al-Bashir seized power in a military coup engineered by the National Islamic Front (NIF) and its front man, the former attorney general Hassan al-Turabi. The Bashir government moved swiftly to violently crack down on political dissent, abolishing parliament, banning opposition political parties, arresting opposition political leaders, and clamping down on the press. Anyone who was judged a threat to the Islamists faced arbitrary detention. Most gruesomely, the government tortured and killed its opponents in secret ‘ghost houses’ and prisons. [2]
    The National Islamic Front pursued with renewed vigour the radical agenda to make Sudan—north and south—an Islamic state. Non-Muslims in the south would be converted through the barrel of a gun if need be, as the government intensified the war with the SPLA and, ultimately, with the people of southern Sudan. The crimes committed by the National Islamic Front during the next 15 years of civil war put Bashir’s Islamo-fascist government alongside Nazi Germany, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, Milosevic’s Yugoslavia, and the genocidal government in Rwanda as one of the 20th century’s most murderous regimes.
    It was during this war with Garang and the SPLA rebels that the Sudanese government practised and perfected the genocidal violence that it later unleashed on