EL ZAIN, Mahmoud The Passing of Development Discourse and its Successors: Is the condition ripe for putting forward

alternative development packages? (A case from the Sudan) Abstract: Following independence, the state in the Sudan had engaged in an enthusiastic appeal to development and proved to be effective in mobilising diverse communities that were otherwise hard to mobilise through other discourses. As part of the nation-building ethos and with the appealing promises it propagated, development discourse in the Sudan has gained in strength and implacability until late 1970s. However, development policies have resulted in stark exclusion and severe impoverishment of diverse groups of population, deep grievances and disastrous environmental degradation and ultimately an acute political and social instability. The resumption of armed rebellion in southern Sudan in 1983, in which ethnic groups from different parts of the country participated, the escalation of armed banditry and tribal conflicts in western Sudan, culminating into the current crisis in Darfur region, and student demonstrations in major cities generated an unruly condition and compelled the ruling groups in early 1980s to borrow another discourse. This situation permitted only one type of discourse: the ethnic discourse and such discourse in northern Sudan require a religious cloak. The state adoption of a religiously-cloaked ethnic discourse in 1983 evidenced the failure of developmentalism; it has engaged the state in undermining all that was related to development; spiritual life is prioritised against material life and demands such as for basic needs are literally ridiculed. Life in this world is substituted for by life in the day after. This shift in state discourse is a response to pressures from the marginalised ethnic groups, which the African state, particularly in the Sudan, had historically undermined. How this shift came about and whether it will reinvent the state and redefine its role in development is an important question that this paper seeks to answer. 1. Introduction: This paper argues that both structural changes in the role of the state since the 1980s and qualities inherent to traditional tribal systems may allow for forging ahead with alternative development policies. The last three decades were characterized by an increasing assertion of ethnic politics, reflecting an increasing weakness of modern state institutions in the Sudan. The ethnic politics has been increasingly in the rise since late 1970s due to expropriation of communal lands and the consequent ecological marginalization due to uncontrolled expansion of agricultural capitalism. Thus, the state or the state-backed groups, which expropriated lands of the pastoralists and traditional farmers for large-scale agricultural expansion, can no longer claim that they are promoting national economic development, historically viewed as being good for the whole nation and help keep its diverse ethnic components togetherunity in diversity. The ecologically marginalized ethnic groupsthose whose lands being expropriated, came to view the state and state-backed groups as promoters of narrow ethnic interests. Thus, mobilization at the local level by communities to defend their resources has increasingly leant on the ethnic, where the latter has eventually spilled over to the national level and provided the necessary premise for the success of the religious the more overt state discourse since early 1980s. In this regard, the government development policies were viewed instrumental in transforming traditional tribal conflicts over access to pasture and water into a conflict driven ethnic agenda, involving broader ethnic congregations. Policies of the de-railed state in Sudan, particularly in association to granting some autonomy to regions, originally meant to lift the financial burden from the central government, had contributed to boosting ethnic politics in the form of tribal competition over the regional governments posts. This has, in fact, led to re-tribalization and ultimately resulted in advancing tribal values to the centre of the political system at the expense of the shrinking modern political institutions. The advancing tribal values may take the form of a socio-cultural displacement, precisely when groups move together, carrying with them their cultural emblems to the urban areas. We shall view this condition as the existence of a rather discrete ethnic in and/or around the urban setting, where governments are often sensitive about security problems and where ethnic groups could use the urban media to assert their demands and to influence urban politics. In this paper, we would like to expand the above argument further by claiming that the state in the 1980s-hitherto has submitted to the advancing tribal values; or, more strictly, it has bet on what has already become a dear source of mobilization for marginalized groups (i.e., ethnic discourse). The principal concern of this paper is, thus, to understand how the states policies have ultimately led to de-centring its power through giving an added momentum to the ethnic and how the latter has come to reshape and re-define national politics so dramatically. Rather than condemning the clustering of ethnic groups around cities as source of insecurity and as reactionarycausing the ruralisation of citieswe presume that ethnic groups, pursuing their own interests in urban areas, may counter-balance totalitarian minority-favouring regimes (primarily mobilising the public through development discourse) and push forward for a democratic milieu. The main questions that this paper seeks to address are how does the ethnic at the margin of the urban change and how does this change of the ethnic affect its urban environment? How government policies contributed to giving an added impetus to the ethnic, whether such added impetus attribute to mass displacement of ethnic groups to urban areas, to a general decay in modern political institutions, or to inherent qualities of indigenous systems for which time now has ripe and whether this transforms the nature of political systems.
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2. Development discourse: Promise of abundance and equal opportunity nationwide With the expansion of modern state institutions, the swelling of the modern sector, and rapid urbanisation in the Sudan, traditional forms of social organisation, presumably, should have undergone significant transformation. Such transformation was certainly in the making; however, paradoxically, when it should have reached a higher stage of evolution, in fact, it largely took a reverse course. Below, we shall see how the development discourse first drove transformation in the Sudan and how it then abruptly gave way to its reverse. In Sudan, a country that found itself in dire need to hold together its diverse components, provision of services and achieving economic development were at the core of the state's discourse for consolidating the political system and creating unity in diversity. The government provision of a rural water supply was considered crucial for maintaining the legitimacy of the incorporation of western Sudan in the Sudanese state. Agricultural development under these circumstances became a spearhead for consolidating the ruling alliance and achieving abundance in social resources. Despite biased development, different regions in the Sudan, though for relatively short periods and to different degrees, engaged in activities that enabled them to taste the fruits of development. In services, for example, such as provision of rural water supply, post-independence governments tried to reach out to remote regions. Especially as part of the decentralisation drive, water became a significant mobilisation issue. Promises to improve the situation are the currency of any political campaign. Any aspirant councillor must listen to villagers expressing problems over water supply (Shepherd and El Neima 1981:19). Provision of primary education and health services gained momentum for some time. The period between 1964 and 1972 witnessed emphasis on rural development (Ali 1988) and in the Six-Year Plan (1977/78-1982/83) special emphasis was given to traditional agriculture (Ahmed 1987:134, see also Mohamed Salih 1987). Barnett and Abdelkarim (1991:101) argue that, following the end of the first civil war, There were some very real achievements, in particular the development of the Sudans infrastructure and in food production, the country becoming self-sufficient in basic foods such as sorghum during the mid- and late-1970s (see also Barnett 1988:5). With effective state propaganda, these minor achievements engaged rural communities in great expectations. The glamour of the increasing number of pump schemes and the maintenance of huge irrigated agricultural development projects enticed hundreds of thousands of migrant labourers from all over the country and made the state appear to them powerful enough to make social and economic development possible everywhere. The Kenana Sugar Cane (KSC) project, is an interesting example here. Believed to be the largest scheme of its kind ever created (Hancock 1989:148), the KSC exposed itself, in the central RZ, to the large population of immigrant labourers. This mammoth project (Holt and Daly 1979) is but an ambitious endeavour, meant to put the Sudan at the top of sugar producers worldwide. Hancock (1989:148) paints the powerful presence of modernisation in the form of the KSC: The 40 megawatt power-station, the network of conduits and canals (the main one twenty miles long), the pumping station to lift the waters of the Nile 150 feet from the canals to the fields, and the factory capable of crushing 17,000 tonnes of sugar a day--all these ingredients and many more seem to belong in some futuristic vision of an advanced agro-industrial economy rather than in the heart of one of the very poorest countries in a destitute continent. Though dams in Sudan are comparatively smaller, they also played an important role in propagating developmentalism. The large agricultural schemes irrigated from these dams, however, stood as uncontested monuments. The state, engaging in enthusiastic water construction rhetoricputting the Nile centre stageand aided by projects it had already constructed, thus, proved effective in mobilising diverse communities that were hard to mobilise through other discourses. Permanent and seasonal workers from different communities met in the melting pot of the central RZ and eastern Sudan. For a short period, an economic boom accompanied a vast expansion of commercially financed investments (Ahmed 1992:134), involving large amounts of capital from the Gulf states invested in rainfed mechanised agriculture. According to OBrien (1987:103), [E]thnic segmentation of the labour force was beginning to break down by 1975 under the impact of spreading cash needs and rapid inflation in rural Sudan at a time when capitalist expansion had thoroughly penetrated the countryside and placed peasants and pastoralists in competition with capital for land and other resources. Rural producers increasingly approached labour markets as maximisers of returns to individual labour time rather than as members of ethnically defined patterns of social reproduction (italics added). Transforming the colonial legacy of scarcity to abundance became one dear mobilisation promise for the ruling elite, engaging increasingly in the construction of large projects. In some respects, this engagement appeared to be a late attempt to compensate for the chronic injustices resulting from earlier resource capture and ecological marginalisation. An important internal political pressure for increased geographical dispersion of these [large]
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projects was a quest for a solution to the political problem of the south, and ultimately over the legitimacy of the state itself and the nature of the Sudanese identity (Barnett and Abdelkarim 1991:101, Barnett 1988:5). Generating abundance, as opposed to scarcity, was perceived by the popular masses, on the one hand, to be the responsibility of the state and, therefore, to be what gave the latter legitimacy and, on the other hand, it was considered by the state as a necessary condition for political consolidation. As part of the nation-building ethos and with the appealing promises it propagated, the states development discourse in the Sudan gained in strength and implacability until the late 1970s. As a corollary, like elsewhere in Africa, where ethnic pluralism almost by definition suspect (Doornbos 1990:193) and religious sectarianism was by definition backward and divisive, in the Sudan two such traditional institutions were sidelined and perpetually condemned. Counter-ideologies appealed to their different versions of the development discourse and plans emerged to topple the existing regime or compel it to embark on reforms. Indeed, the progressive elite in the Sudan toppled democratically elected governments. Among the prominent accusations against the leadership of these governments was that that they were sectarian. Military regimes, which ruled the Sudan for 38 out of the 48 years following independence, all bet on condemning this traditional institution, particularly being the foundation for their rivals, namely the Umma Party and the DUP. At the local level, similar measures were taken against tribal leaders. Native administrationthe British name for tribal rulewas dissolved twice by a progressive elite, in 1964 following the Popular October Revolution and in the early 1970s as part of the May regimes package for local government. President Ja'far Nimeiri, who took power through a military coup in 1969 supported by the left considered the notion of an Islamic state detrimental for national unity and, therefore, proposed a secular state (Duany and Duany 2000:174, see Barnett 1988:6). The years of relative peace (1972-83) following the signing of the Addis Ababa Agreement witnessed the advocating of the development discoursenot Arabism or Islamismwith emphasis on equality and political participation. With the ending of the civil war in the South, in 1972, and the suppression of some other regional movements, the government in Khartoum made attempts to ensure that development investment was seen to be more evenly spread throughout the country (Barnett 1988:5, Barnett and Abdelkarim 1991:101, italics added). In relation to this, the May military regime, as Al-Karsani (2000:44) argues, started its era by fulfilling some of the demands and objectives of the Nuba Mountains Union such as the establishment of a separate province for the Nuba Mountains. Development discourse reached its peak with the declaration of the ambitious Programme of Building the Science-Based Modern State in the early 1980s (for details see NCR 1981, El Zain 1995, 1996a). Characteristic of the development discourse was its use as an incentive and pretext for resource capture. The state promised to provide cooperatives for traditional cultivators and pastoralists as compensation for expropriation of large tracts of cultivable lands and pasture (Mohamed Salih 1987:111). However, neither the promises made to pastoralists and traditional farmers nor those to the nation at large were fulfilled. Like many states in Africa, the national projects that began in the colonial period to a large extent have collapsed, reducing the remaining state apparatus to a little more than machines used by a succession of politicians, generals and warlords to hold on power (Kevane and Stiansen 1998:2). Development discourse started on a resounding slide. Agricultural policies were disastrous, best described by a Sudanese political scientist as cultivation of hunger (Ali 1989). Similarly, politics in general were described as addiction of failure (Khalid 1990). Collapse took its toll on all sectors, including the one through which governments thought they might incorporate the remote regions, especially the west. Shepherd and El Neima (1981:14) argue that the recent very low rate of water supply provision and the poor record of maintenance suggest that the terms on which the West is incorporated may be declining. Undoubtedly, frustrated expectations have contributed to the growth of regionalistic feelings and actions within the West, one of the factors which lies behind the 1981 Regionalisation of Government. Widespread conflicts at local and national levels are nothing but expressions of the unfulfilled promises that the state once ventured to propagate. In our understanding, development discourse did succeed in advancing what would eventually generate its failure; namely, making large groups of population believe in the states promises. The failure of the state to comply with its development promise gave birth to a discourse protesting the marginalisation that authoritarian development generateda discourse successfully used to mobilise the large groups of population that are now challenging the very legitimacy of advocates of development discourse. The core group of the ruling elite, therefore, had to look for another discourse. Thus the 16 years of the May military dictatorship was actually a time of the peaking of the development discourse. But paradoxically it also led to its effective reversal. The agriculturalist lobby which became so entrenched during this period deflated the states developmental momentum, particularly its redistribution claims, and it ultimately degenerated into a predatory, rent-seeking entity, which normalised expropriating the resources of communities on behalf of the few. Resistance to the corrupt state took the form of appeals to ethnic solidarity. The last years of the May dictatorship witnessed what had aggravated the ethnic, which later on was reinforced by the current military dictatorship as the state ideology. 3. The swelling of the ethnic: Overt ethnicisation of the national politics After the early 1970s, migration/displacement grew to enormous proportions and the government could do little to reverse it. This, presumably, led to significant political changes in the seat of power at the confluence of the two Niles. A premise followed in this section is that the change in the population-political contours of the Sudan led to a
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shift in the state's discourse and, to some degree, a change in the composition of the political coalition. Using current events in the Sudan, it is possible to argue that the resurgence of the religiously cloaked ethnic discourse cannot be taken in isolation from the risks that accompanied the process of ecological marginalisation, as manifest in the collapse of subsistence economies which consequentially led to mass displacement of population. The argument followed in this section is that the collapse of subsistence economies aggravated the ethnic at the local level and the consequent displacement and change in the population-political contours at the regional and national levels replicated conflict between urban old-timers and rural IDPs and between downstream RZ and the NRZ/upstream RZ groups. The latter made possible a shift in the states discourse in the Sudan from a homogenising development discourse, which guaranteed the hegemony of the downstream RZ groups to an ethnic/religious discourse that challenged this hegemony from within. Other scholars have observed this shift while focusing on a different outcome. The shift in defining the focus of the struggle from political and economic to cultural and religious terms has legitimized unprecedented brutalities and dimmed hopes for any mutually-satisfactory compromise resolution to Africas longest civil war (Beswick and Spaulding 2000:xxiii, italics added, see also El Zain 1996a, 1996b). It is this shift in defining the focus and the regime of definition-making associated with it that defines for us the fundamental contradiction or the major aspect of conflicts. Conflict here is between ruling groups, dominated by the northern Sudanese urban middle class with its bulk consisting of riverain stock, who cling on a development discourse and lifestyles informed by this discourse and the ecologically marginalised rural poor who aspire for a share in the national pie. The rural poor contest for, or even aspire to displace the dominant groups' lifestyles and ethos, in as far as these dominant groups fail to address their needs. The ethnic, in this contest, has become an asset of the displaced in their bargaining with the crumbling developmentalist state. Yet this ethnic, itself, is legitimised through a rtour to a time of purity of religion; both cases asserting an identity politics. The incidence of population concentration has aided the effective replacement of the class politics by identity politicsit has turned the urban milieu from a presumed sphere for acculturation into one of ethnic cleavages. The former is a dear claim for modernist elite, as a condition for consolidating the goal of unity in diversity. 3.1 Ecological marginalisation and the encroachment of the ethnic onto the political centre Our argument is that the last three decades were a time of asserting identity politics, reflecting an increasing weakness of modern state institutions. Mobilisation at the local and national level increasingly leaned on the ethnic, where the latter, we presume, provided the necessary condition for the success of the religious. Due to ecological marginalisation, the ethnic rose after the late 1970sthe rampant, uncontrolled expansion of agricultural capitalism gave muscles and blood to ethnic politics (Al-Karsani 2000:44, see Mohamed Salih 1987, Harir 1993). The state or the state-backed groups that engaged in resource capture could no longer claim that they were promoting economic development; rather, marginalised communities saw in them promoters of narrow ethnic interests. The increasing ecological scarcity also pitted several marginalised groups against each other, putting those that had co-exited with each other for centuries at loggerheads (for details see Al-Karsani 2000:45, Mohamed Salih 1999, 2001, Ibrahim 2002). This contest over resources reached its peak in the divide into two camps, one Arab and one African, with the state often backing the former. Asserting the ethnic is inherent in what the state pursued as its economic development policies. In this regard, the government policies were viewed as instrumental in transforming traditional tribal conflict over access to receding grazing land and water into a new type of conflict driven by a broader ethnic agenda (ICG 2003a:11). Policies of the de-railed state, particularly those granting regional autonomy, were originally meant to lift the financial burden of the central government. Yet they contributed to boost ethnic politics in the form of tribal competition over regional government posts. Mohamed Salih (1989:73-4) refers to the competition between ethnic groups over executive government posts, among other aspects, as a retribalization process or the shrinking...of the modern political institutions in the face of the advancing tribal values (see also Al-Karsani 2000, Ahmed 1986:31). The government in the 1980s also bet on what had already become a dear source of mobilisation for marginalised groups (i.e. ethnic discourse), and thus promoted it once more. Three interrelated changes in the 1980s seem to have given added importance to the ethnic and accelerated the states appeal to it. These are, firstly, the inability of the state to deal with matters at the local level, where environmental scarcity had increased the incidence of tribal clashes and where [d]eterrent police forces are not found in the areas where the clashes occur (Al-Karsani 2000:45, see also Barnett and Abdelkarim 1991:103). The multiple effects of environmental scarcity, thus, jeopardised the states legitimacy in remote regions, where dissident groups such as armed bandits started to operate in the open. Secondly, the state found itself confronted with a new armed rebellion which had a political discourse that was eminently appealing to marginalised groups. Lastly, the change in the population-political map with its enduring pressures, actually, represented the knot and condensation of the two first changes. This last change is of significance for us because it takes its vibrant form in the downstream RZ. In the 1980s, due to processes described above, the ethnic came to have an important spatial dimension; instead of (population) spreading in the wider landscape at the macro level (national centre/periphery), it became part of the dense micro level of city centre/margins. The most pronounced example where the rural structure, embodying the ethnic, became part of the city, is the national capital of Khartoumthe place of responding to and formulating
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politics. It is only when this had taken place that ethnicity emerged as a serious discourse directly influencing the centres politics. Ethnicity became a discourse for consolidating the solidarity of the IDP groups in their confrontation with state authority as well as a discourse over which some urban political actors competed in order to appeal to, ally with, or totally appropriate. The ethnic now imposed itself as an important ingredient of state discourse, reflecting a significant transformation, namely the involvement of a large sector of the population who as yet were not involved in the formal political. As noted elsewhere, political marginalisation of pastoralists and exposing them to growing economic and social inequality induced movement out of their sector, which ultimately reinforced the gradual shift of the point of gravity from the pastoral non-state to the state sphere (Doornbos 1993:119). The ethnic gained this importance because its rural structures almost in their totality were abruptly brought to the margins of the city, clearly indicating how environmental scarcity increased the salience of group boundaries. It has been noted that the post-1984 migration is a compulsory movement where whole families, villages, clans, tribes or towns were compelled by the ferocity of the war to a life of destitution and poverty (Al-Karsani 2000:37, italics added). Most IDPs tended to flock together and settle in isolated slums, which held their cultural heritage intact. Samia El Nagar (1993:111) points out that despite long years of war, IDPs try to remain isolated within their own group. Such isolation, according to her, has been greatly exacerbated by government policies such as the latest policy of removing the displaced to remote areas away from the towns, where contact with town communities seems impossible (see Al-Karsani 2000:34-5). In this manner, they effected a siege1 of ethnic cultural zones around cities, especially after more of their kin came to bridge the physical distance isolating their slums from urban areas. The displaced groups carried with them, to the recipient areas, their heritage, and forms of social organisation, perception about reality and their political bias, which facilitated the invention of new forms of social organisation (see Mohamed Salih 1999). Al-Mahal and Omer (1992:27) point out that most of the IDPs live in tribal agglomerations where they continue their everyday practices, and that their sheikhs continue to exercise their former authority and enjoy the same former concessions among their kin. According to these authors, because the majority of the IDPs live in isolated slums away from the areas where services exist, they are alienated and internalise helplessness and lose direction in life (Al-Mahal and Omer 1992:53, see Duany and Duany 2000:180, Ahmed and Elbattahani 1995:196). As mentioned, the mass population displacement in the 1980s, particularly to the capital Khartoum, put cities under a veritable siege of tribal or ethnic cultural zones. In fact, localised as well as regional mass population displacement caused enormous cultural and political transformation that is often overlooked in scholarship about the Sudan. Previously, we pointed out that the change caused by the new population-map represents the knot and condensation of two other changes, i.e. the states withdrawal from dealing with matters in rural areas and its confrontation with a new armed rebellion with a discourse that appealed to the marginalised. To refer to the cultural zones around cities as tribal or ethnic underlines the fact that these were cultures of remote areas that had, largely, not been homogenised by the modernisation process and which were advancing, as noted above, for some time, to claim the vacuum left by the shrinking modern national institutions. In connection with education, for instance, members of cultural groups in remote regions remained largely illiterate. According to a survey among the IDPs in the national capital, 54.8 per cent could not read (Al-Mahal and Omer 1992:30). Illiteracy is considered even higher than the above figure, as most of those selected in the sample felt embarrassed about not knowing how to read and write, and therefore refrained from completing the questionnaires (Al-Mahal and Omer 1992:30). In this respect, remote regions preserved a degree of purity in their ethnic culture, which was now boosted by the process of re-tribalisation. Against the ought to be urbanisation of cultures, El-Kheir (1991:163) notes, the need to maintain rural traditions still holds strong among certain dominant [immigrant] groups such as the Nuba and people from Western Darfur. While this can serve to maintain traditions and kinship associations, it can retain tribalism and work against the establishment of urbanism and nationalism. In fact, this situation is being reinforced by discriminatory policies, adopted by Khartoum municipality, such as the kasha, eviction, and isolation in areas far from urban areas and deprivation of urban services and importantly by imposing a dominant culture on others. The discriminatory policies pushed most of the immigrant ethnics around Khartoum to resort to their indigenous forms of solidarity, initiating community-based organisations (CBOs), primarily self-help institutions. Extensive evidence of self-help in Khartoums squatter settlements is ascribed to indigenous culture as well as lack of local resources (Stern 1989:64). The institution of self-help, driven by indigenous values, generates an enormous political momentum impelling the IDPs to maintain apparent resistance to authorities. This reality of bringing the ethnic to the heart of urban Sudan, with their increased numbers of CBOs, has contributed to displace the states development discourse and given muscles and blood to the religiousor the religiously-cloaked ethnic discourseon which the state then started to lean. However, this should not be understood as being structural to the ethnic; in fact, it was the context of the 1980s with the dominant urban political party (the NIF) being of the same feather (i.e. ethnicist/religious) that caused the ethnic to express itself Words such as siege, assault (ijtiyaah), and invasion are commonly used in reference to the displaced groups advance into towns. Aggressive language, expressing such tones, is echoed by Bannaga (2001:36) in whose view the IDPs had ransacked Khartoum and besieged it all around.
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in a more traditional manner. The fanatic NIF party, having been partner or monopolised political power since the late 1970s, was able to benefit from the presence of the IDPs to reinforce its political programme by manipulating conservative group identities. The salience of group boundaries that was increased by environmental scarcity provided the NIF with the chance to incorporate large numbers of rural group members into the presumably larger religious group. Tribal values, taking the form of ethnic cultural zones around cities, gained momentum for some time. Some two decades back, Abdel Ghaffar M. Ahmed (1986:31) wrote that the revival of tribalism, is at present a major feature of national politics. The whole process of regionalisation and important ministerial and executive offices are based on a very sensitive balance of ethnic interests. This might be difficult to reconcile with the regime's early policy towards native administration. What we currently witness, in connection to this, is not only the failure of the state to be logical (Ahmed 1986:31) and live up to its development promises, but the passing away of the development discourse that was the ground for these very promises (El Zain 1996a). Referring to this condition, Abdel Gaffar Mohamed Ahmed (1994:58), states, Post-colonial aspirations for development and prosperity have degenerated into anguish and longing for the past, with the state increasingly retreating from development to crisis management and recently from crisis management to the bare maintenance of survival (italics added, see also Harir 1993:20). Scientific planning was substituted by fatalistic waiting, accompanied by areign of violence and the stubborn resistance to any form of settlement of the on-going bloody civil war in the south. That last claimed the lives of more than 2 million people (Ibrahim 2002:161, Suliman 2000:141, see Warburg 2000:85) and generated a reign of violence throughout the country with the recent unprecedented cruelties committed in Darfur as its most recent manifestation. This appeal to the ethnic, however, was only a normal subjective response to an objective condition of collapse of the pillars of physical existence as well as of the social and psychological integrity of the Sudanese society. This disintegration was caused by effective ecological marginalisation and the undermining of indigenous institutions and knowledge in dealing with resources (see Ahmed 1994:58). Crisis management in the ethos of the ruling elite is a reason for toughening the technologies of control and reproducing authoritarianism. Concerned as they were with mere survival, the regimes in the centre invariably explained away the problems of the periphery as discontent, and dealt with them through the repressive apparatus of the statethe military and the police. The situation in the south remains an apt illustration of this point (Harir 1993:20). The state could then select from existing frames and add to them the toughest of rules in order to manage the crisis. This is precisely what Nimeiri did in 1983 and what the NIF enacted after 1989. The shrinking of national institutions and the advance of tribal values largely reflects the degree of environmental scarcity and is strictly manifested in the absence of the states most effective functionsocial services and economic activity. This has meant a clear deterioration in rural water provision and subsidised food supplies, a decline of health and education services, and most importantly the shaking of the security situation. The dissatisfaction and collective reaction of population groups in remote regions took the form of dissident actions in the form of armed banditry, ethnic polarisation and conflicts, and armed rebellion as well as mass population movements. The most dangerous outcome of environmental scarcity was that it divided groups on the basis of political deliberations, stimulated elite tribal behaviour, and encouraged groups to contest for a bite of the political pie, so to speak. This gave the tribal elite the power to influence regional and national politics to achieve other goals, including the capturing of new resource niches for the herds of their tribesmen. This rent-seeking behaviour led to a transformation in the relationship national/local (or tribal) and had serious implications for national politics. Though armed banditry and ethnic polarisation and conflicts all contributed to the rise of the ethnic, the armed rebellion in southern Sudan (SPLA/M) was the most pronounced, and soon redefined the course of other minor conflicts. In particular, the unity of the marginalised groups expressed through the discourse of the SPLA/M became the most serious threat the ruling elite had ever witnessed. Such a degree of African unity had never existed before, and the rulers in Khartoum experienced fear as the revolt spread out of the south into disaffected regions of the west, the east and the upper Blue Nile (Majak 2000:48). Unlike the armed rebellion in the south from the mid-1950s to the early-1970s, the SPLA/M emerged after the state had undergone serious economic setbacks and shrinkage of its national institutions (Mohamed Salih 1989), and, as a corollary, had lost its appealing development discourse to economic deregulation and the consequent unprecedented corruption2 (El Zain 1996a). Moreover, rebellion in the south contributed to other significant transformations. Stephanie Beswick (2000:93) argues that war has revolutionized gender and generational relations. Most importantly, unlike the previous secessionist rebellion, the SPLA/M appeals to all Sudanese with a programme of a united, but New Sudan, that necessitates power restructuring and therefore threatens the guards of Old Sudan. According to Suliman (2000:164), the movement owes its high degree of support from large numbers of rural poor and destitute in the north to its adoption of the worries and aspirations of the marginalised. Suliman (2000:164) continues to say that this caused a transformation in the nature of the historical north-south polarisation in the country, where economic In the index of Transparency International (2004), Sudan came in rank 122 out of 146 countries in the world, indicating a serious corruption problem.
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needs surpassed ethnic assertions. In his view, it is now possible for the multi-ethnic dwellers of slums surrounding the cities to put their trust in John Garang and his movement. With this potential, the outbreak of the armed rebellion in the south strongly shook the ruling alliance and compelled the May regime, in its late years, to fetch new allies, namely, the religious right and to borrow another ideology (El Zain 1996a, 1996b). The circumstances which led to the outbreak of the armed rebellion necessitated, for a crumbling economy, the ethnic discourse as a new site of power from which the regime could confront the rising dissatisfaction, climaxing in the SPLA/M discourse. However, this ethnic discourse in northern Sudan was less universal, therefore, to make it more accommodative necessitated religious cloaks (El Zain 1996b:527). Hence, the Sudan was declared in 1983 a state ruled according to sharia. The adoption of religious extremism was thus a reemphasis of the states ethnic discourse in contrast to what was, ideologically, labelled as the ethnic discourse of the armed rebellion in the south (El Zain 1996a). It was an attempt, as Mudoola (1993:101) says referring to the Ugandan context, of using ethnicity to contain ethnicity. In our understanding, the emphasis on religion in itself shows the disruption that the institutions (national and local) had undergone; for, despite the prevalence of pre-modern forms of organisation, the state institutions in the Sudan had, for quite some time, aspired to adopt and use the development discourse. For the deprived groups, the ethnic was the most efficient mobilisation discourse, in most cases it also served as a shield against a looming and utterly unpredictable loss of ones life (we shall return to this later). Failing to control it, the government imagination went no further than to contain it through a counter-ethnic, or, a more hegemonic religious discourse. The ethnic and religious discourses are vital to each other in the sense that they are reactions to each other, building new discourses (commensurable to each other) and negating or undermining the previous discourse (incommensurable to their paradigm) and its terms of conflict. They replace the previous fundamental contradiction between labor and capital (Ali 1989:22, 1988, Barnett 1988:8) with one between one identity and another. It is the adoption of the latter which transformed the previous socio-political contradiction between the downstream RZ and the NRZ/upstream RZ. The assertion of identities questioned the two-century long dominance of the Nile Valley over the surrounding regions. Several incidences show that the implementation of sharia was largely in response to a looming environmental scarcity. Before sharia was implemented, the security situation in the country was deteriorating rapidly (Deng 2000:160). In the face of the mounting internal dissent present in the outbreak of the armed rebellion, according to Goldsmith et al. (2002:223), Numeiri may have been seeking through the proclamation of Sharia to consolidate his power by winning over the religious right, in particular the National Islamic Front. While in this statement Goldsmith et al. (2002:223) appear to claim that President Nimeiri made a deliberate move by implementing the sharia laws, which we argue against, their pointing to the religious right is important for our discussion. In our understanding, President Nimeiri did not deliberately implement the sharia. In fact, he offered to the religious right to implement sharia simply because he saw in the former the most dangerous player that at the time had the capacity to shake off or even overthrow his regime. In other words, Nimeiri knew that it was the religious right that was pushing in this direction in the first place. The most important thing was that now was the time to implement these lawsnot before that by any means! It was in September 1983, the year when the famine-hit IDPs reached Khartoum, that President Nimeiri, under pressure from the National Islamic Front, promulgated a series of new measures, including a new penal code, known henceforth as the sharia laws (Duany and Duany 2000:175). Sharia came to serve best those who were in power. Viewed in a context of depleting resources, sharia was at one level a technology of control, a weapon to force those who intruded into the central RZ to succumb, and an opportunity to efficiently mobilise both the second and third circle necessary for maintaining hegemony to win the war against the forth circle. Thus, for President Nimeiri, on the one hand, there was a need for an appealing ideology to consolidate his crumbling regimethe ideology espoused by the Islamists was the best option available to him for two main reasons. Firstly, this ideology was sufficiently powerful not only to divert the attention of the hungry masses, but also to mobilise them to sustain the bloody war in the south, which, otherwise, would be impossible to sustain. Especially because the states economic capabilities did not allow it to acquire advanced weapons, it was the amassing of the children of the IDPs as mujahideen, that appeared to be the most feasible option for fighting this war. With utterly high zeal, these mujahideen fought sometimes on the backs of horses, other times marching thousands of miles on foot to engage the infidels in the battlefield and Islamise the open frontier. Secondly, for a dictatorship, the Islamist ideology was the best option available to justify and inflict merciless punishment on those who criticised the states failurethose deviating from the right cause. The interpretation of Islam adopted by the regime was selected to justify the most authoritarian regulations needed for controlling a situation that was slipping rapidly into chaos. President Nimeiri, by taking refuge in political Islam, practically sidelined the tolerant sufi Islam, of which he had been courting its leadership for quite some time. In fact, the 1980s, as described by El-Mekki (1990:8), was truly a decade of political turmoil and deepening political conflicts where [i]ncreasing foreign dependence, food crisis and social disintegration during the first half of the decade sharpened conflicts (see Barnett 1988:5-6). For the dictatorial regime, the ethnic, inherent in the discourse of Sudanese Islamists, offered technologies of social engineering and political incorporation of the rural peripheries besides controlling the unruly urban centre. While discussing the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the
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Sudan and its feverish engagement in wealth accumulation, Suliman (2000:148) describes the political actors. He sees that the accumulation of wealth in the Sudan implied a state and a group of people that is decisively merciless. The frame of reference upon which this group leans should be simple, fanatic, absolute, and supported by a cluster of instantaneous ruthless (radiah) punishments upon whomever the group sees as sinful or deviant from its course (Suliman 2000:148). A structural condition of shrinking modern national institutions and the fading of the developmentalist state, largely due to environmental scarcity, gave the NIF, at least in the short-run, the largest winnings in the political arena. This is in fact because it was the de facto ruling party in the Sudan between the late 1970s and early 1980s and the de jour ruling party since 1989 hitherto. The gain of the NIF party was largely determined by environmental scarcity and the stark vulnerability this party generated by its economic policies, the stick of state terror and carrot of Islamic alms. For the NIF, this was the time when the regime of capital accumulation in the Islamic banking system became more opportune; yet it was also a time when forces of disturbance to this accumulation process, manifest in the IDPs, became more apparent. It seems that the ruling bloc realised, by the early 1980s, that the impact of the new population redistribution trends could not be controlled through promises of economic development, which had become too difficult to achieve. Nor could it consolidate power through advocating a narrow ideology such as Arabism. While the latter might havein the pastserved the cause of Arab/Muslim/urban middle class northern Sudanese it became problematic in more recent decades. For now, the population at the confluence of the Niles was largely of non-Arab origin though with a larger proportion of Muslims. Most of the displaced, who made up some 30 per cent of the population of the Sudan in the late 1980s came from rural areas of the NRZ/upstream RZ and largely clustered around urban areas in the downstream RZ. In the 1990s, about 90 per cent of the IDPs settled in slums around Khartoum. Their regional and ethnic background reflected the long process of ecological marginalisation, though these groups recently started to conceive of this background as the reason behind their own marginalisation. New today, however, is that those who underwent ecological marginalisation and those who subjected groups to a persistent condition of war and insecurity are now together at the place where real politics were being madeKhartoum and the regional and provincial capitals, especially the downstream RZ ones. While we bear in mind the dramatic population increases in all RZ towns let us briefly note the ethnic demographic change in Khartoumthe seat of the ruling elite and the laboratory of making national polity. According to Hassan Mekki Mohammed (2001a:20-1), Khartoum witnessed dramatic change in its ethnic diversity, with the city rapidly taking on an African identity rather than its previous Arab outlook. He states, Out of the 545,933 population of the 1955 census, about 372,596 were people of Arabic and Nubian origin, mainly coming from the Northern part of the country, forming approximately 70% of the population. Referring to the same census, he cites the number of people from western Sudan and probably West Africa at 14,935 and people from southern Sudan at 10,833. Western and southern Sudanese, according to these figures, respectively formed 3 per cent and 2 per cent of the total population of Khartoum in 1955. In 2001, the number of people from western and southern Sudan reached 4 million out of Khartoums 6.9 million (Mohammed 2001a:21, see also BAA 2004), making up 58 per cent of the citys total population. This indicates, according to Mohammed (2001a:21), that the city has within 46 years, witnessed a great diversion to an African [outlook] and entity. The numbers of the IDPs continued to increase and there was little prospect of their returning to their areas of origin. The IDP population size is significant, as their political weight is increasing, and eventually they will start negotiating a new formula for distribution of the national pie. For rebel movements, which largely express the concerns of these IDPs, the question of redistribution of national wealth has become an important agenda point. Thus, a package of laws to be called Islamic was a miraculous solution, and with its implementation in 1983 the regime succeeded in killing two birds with the same stoneconsolidating its grip on power through maintaining the accumulation regime of its principal ally, i.e. the NIF party, and appeasing the starved popular masses by effecting Gods commands on earth. Implementation of Islamic law was an attempt to refurbish the crumbling political alliance by replacing its development ideology with religion. The restive questions of the Afro-Arabism school, namely digging into the identity of the northern Sudanese and affecting radical amelioration in the Arab-Islamic component of the Sudanese identity (Ibrahim 1987:18), were totally replaced by borrowing an existing package. The Sudanese, viewed as part of a wider community of believers (NIF 1988), now became the renovators of the Islamic state in the Sudan. How did this come about and how the abuse of IDPs contribute to it? Lets first note that for the IDPs, the implementation of the religious laws meant different things. At one level it represented the states war against themat least against a large segment of them who were culturally different on the scale of high culture. At another level, it provided an opportunity for recognition for those who would be incorporated or used for consolidating the high culture. In this respect, the IDPs came as a great aid for the state. While it was facing organised urban groups it now found in the IDPs the scapegoat on which to attach all problems on the one hand and which could be used as subjects for punishment in order to terrify others on the other hand. The condition under which sharia was implemented was one of worsening scarcity, where the states relation to IDPs had become particularly tough and where it pulled away from development in order to consolidate its security grip. The recent kasha operations were in fact part of a cluster of new regulationsboosting the repressive state apparatus, largely informed by the condition of environmental scarcity. The state had for some time now allocated
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significant government expenditure away from economic services to the areas of defence, security, and general administration (Ahmed and El-Batthani 1995:203, OBrien 1985). Allocations to repressive state apparatuses were certainly a reaction to new realities, generated by that very states policies. According to Suliman (2000:147), the violence of state apparatuses increased in parallel with aggravation of poverty and resistance. He points out that in 1983, when Nimeiri implemented his set of sharia laws, the punishment of amputation tolled 200 persons in 18 months, the majority of them from the IDP shamasa (see also Mohamed Salih 1999:67). The sharia laws, according to Mohamed Salih (1999:67), were implemented not to curb the spread of the corruption within the state machinery, as declared by the proponents of the laws, but as a weapon against the residents of the squatter settlements, the beer brewers and the unemployed (italics added). Adherents to the riverain high culture, present in Khartoum municipal authorities, also engaged in an effective incrimination of the IDPs, where according to Duany and Duany (2000:180), laws against alcohol and prostitution are used against them in an aggressive and discriminatory way. The leaning of the Islamist religious discourse on pre-modern notions, in fact, gave credibility to ethnic solidarity, which had started to discredit in effective manner the religious discourse itself, given the ethnically driven atrocities caused by it. Specifically, the religious punishments were targeted largely to those originating from specific regions, as mentioned above, and therefore its victims were largely from specific ethnic groups. The apparent prejudice stemmed not necessarily from a culture of ethnic segregation, but rather from structural differences, namely the degree of cultural difference and economic, political, and ecological marginalisation. The high culture definition of right and wrong represented a major contradiction between lifestyles of ethnic groups in the so-called one Sudanese nation. A western Sudanese would say, We believe in God, but we still like to drink millet beer (The Economist 26 June 2003), while a fanatic Islamist who is being re-socialised through instructions from riverain high culture would not only ridicule the former but in the name of God would inflict punishment on these believers, destroy their property and confiscate their homes. In this respect, Islamic laws, interpreted through the lenses of high culture, provide yet another reason for evicting NRZ intruders from the downstream RZ. A passage on IDPs in the report of the Human Right Rapporteur on Sudan, as Suliman (2000:404) notes, points out that 96 per cent of the women imprisoned between December 1993 and November 1994 were from southern and western Sudanthe upstream RZ and the NRZ of Darfur and Kordofan. The implementation of the imputation punishments actually served as propaganda with the aim of proving that the state is truly Islamic, rather than serving the cause of justice even when seen through the Islamist interpretations of the text. For a crumbling state, the only remaining card was to project itself as an Islamic state, primarily concerned with spirituality, in order to rid itself of the duty of facilitating the delivery of material needs to society. Thus, given the overwhelming social resource scarcity, material needs were replaced by imaginary ones provided for by the religious discourse. Accordingly, Sudan became a worshipping state concerned, almost absolutely, with preaching and safeguarding God's commands on earth, singling out the success of orthodox Islam to feature again as the religion of the state. The IDPs condition of vulnerability provided a fertile ground for the operation of the strategies of the fundamentalist discourse, elaborated elsewhere (El Zain 1996a), including a rtour to the mythological and substitution of the material by the spiritual. In terms of real politics, the fundamentalist discourse in the cities in the 1980s became predominant, while the urban middle class modernist discourse started to slip to the margin and lost its historical leadership. A large segment of the IDPs had to identify with the state in order to earn some safety. The involvement of IDPs in urban politics became one important survival strategy in a context which offered limited alternatives or no alternative at all. As actors in the urban scene, the IDPs have resisted the aggressive campaigns to repatriate them, they fought against the government and lost martyrs, and they fought for the government and lost martyrs too. While the former loss aggravated their agony, the latter increased their bargaining mix. Exposing themselves in the urban setting, they came to know the bitterness of their deprivation, and, in their miserable slums, they displayed themselves in an undeniable protest. Important to re-emphasise here is that the new population contours generated by displacement maintained, and even intensified further concentrationmore of those alien to the Nile Valley came to camp along its banks. Nevertheless, most significantly, the religious gave legitimacy to the IDPs ethnic discourse; or, more strictly, it allowed them revive a compatible or commensurable discourse. In fact, the religious discourse was made to appear intrinsically ethnic (as analysed above). The IDPs very presence contributed to deconstructing the prevailing political conceptions about how the Sudan should be ruled and how its resources should be redistributed. As a discourse in the centre, the ethnic became capable of making itself heard through the media of the urban and by contesting for power positions, which had been largely the monopoly of the urbanised riverain elite. The ethnic therefore made itself a contestant in the political arena and, at the same time displayed itself as target over which urban political actors compete. It acquired tools to effect pressure on the government. The contradiction between the ruling groups needs and those of the ecologically marginalised rural poor who aspire for a share of the national pie could become true only if the discourse to which the displaced adheres could really influence national politics. To our mind, this has already occurred, when the state, particularly, its de facto and de jour political party at different intervals, by appealing to a certain segment of the displaced, engaged this segments discourse.
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Especially insofar as macro-politics sanctions the ethnic, the IDPs have a discourse to dwell in. Their presence and their treatment exposes the fallacies of the NIFs high culture universalistic discourse and the IDPs have increasingly resorted to mobilising themselves through their ethnic solidarity. As pointed out above, the ethnic for the deprived groups, is the most efficient mobilisation discourse; however, it has also been reinforced by the adoption of a compatible religious discourse. By implementing sharia, the May regime triggered the fragile coexistence among the Sudanese communities and shattered the remaining tolerance among Muslim communities, which sufism had established over the ages. While the implementation of sharia represented the peak of the expansion of the states political-ideological power, it operated simultaneously as a dissipative initiative, which brought the political unity of the state and social integrity of communities to the brink of collapse. Specifically, by essentialising the tense issue of identity (in this case Islamic/Arab versus others) and bringing it to the forefront as the principal commitment of the state, it deepened the divide between the north and the south on the one hand and reinvented the divide between high culture and native culture on the other. The former was asserted as synonymous to the culture of a Sudanese nation, which would surface more aggressively later. Now the regime found in the ecologically marginalised groups the forces that would fight the rebels on behalf of it, effectively dismantling symbiotic relationships which for centuries guaranteed sustainable livelihood and flows between communities. Militias from the poor and marginalised Baggara now led the states war campaigns and destroyed the economy and social integrity of the Nubatheir brothers-in-poverty and marginalisation (see Suliman 2000:227). In our view, this divide informs Nile hydropolitics, at the national level in the Sudan, as does the divide between the downstream and upstream RZ. The new condition of increased salience of group boundaries generated by environmental scarcity provided a great asset to the NIF. This party had the opportunity to trade off Arabism for Islamism; or with a little of a twist in the hegemonic ideology, to hold back the Arabist region of this ideology and push forward the Islamist region. The NIF bet on the ethnic being a traditional structure not yet completely regimented by the traditional parties. Following the last military coup of June 1989, tribal elites were highly honoured while the sectarian leaders were rendered conspirators. Honouring, enhancing, and accommodating the ethnic for the new leadership stems from the fact that it is the best discourse inherently compatible with and commensurate to what they advocate. Its stark manifestation, which surfaced clearly only later, is the government alliance with Arab groups against African groups. The ethnic is the victim because of the overwhelming condition of vulnerability of its adherents, i.e. the IDPs. In this respect, what could be seen as an opening up of the political and what would benefit the IDPs is the NIF competition with northern traditional parties over their supporters and in the power centres within the May regime. The NIF was effective in mobilising a large segment of the IDPs to pressure President Nimeiri in 1983 to adopt their fundamentalist political programme and to re-establish the third Islamic statethe first and second Islamic states being, in the view of the Islamists, the Funj Kingdom and the Mahdist state (for details see Ali 1991). That last in particular was recalled in several symbolsthe NIF made President Nimeiri in 1983 its new Mahdi3 and through this new Mahdi, the fortress of Khartoum4 was being conquered from within. Ironically, however, while the nineteenth-century Mahdi remoulded his revolution outside Khartoum and conquered it in the mid-1880s, now Khartoum in the early 1980s used an old weapon which did not belong to herdeclaring its own symbolic Mahdism. The descendants of yesteryear's foes were effectively incorporatedwesterners as zealous adherents to Mahdism were now lured to pay allegiance to the new MahdiField Marshall Nimeiri. As such, the NIF effectively secured the allegiance of the westerners. According to Sidahmed Khalifa, editor of Alwatan newspaper, the NIF had built its popular glory, in the past and after it seized power, on the educated descendants of the Ansar and supporters of the Umma Party in western Sudan (Alwatan 06 May 2001). This affiliation became more apparent later when the leadership of the NIF itself broke up, where the majority of westerners sided with the religious leader, Turabi,5 against the military leader,

This is no surprise. The Mahdi liberated El Obied and made it his capital in 1883 and, complying with the centennial notion of Mahdi/Messiah revelation, Nimeiri declared the Islamic laws in 1983. In 1985, Nimeiri and the fundamentalists behind him celebrated the centennial anniversary of the victory of the Mahdi. Not only that; Turabi, the mastermind of the last coup d'tat and the guru of the army officers who led the coup has actually maintained an enduring competition with the descendants of the 19th century Mahdi over the idea of Mahdism. Turabi believes he has a historical right to regaining what his great grandfather once claimed. The later is said to have equipped his fighters and wished to conquer Mecca. Hiding always behind an army general, Turabi, after victoriously imposed his brand of Islam on the Sudan, mirrors himself either as the Mahdi or the god of the Mahdi. 4 Khartoum has been fortified by legal regulations and measures of hardship against intruders from the landscape it rules. The city had repelled rural migrants in the 1930s as well as in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. 5 Hassan Mekki Mohammed, one of the leading NIF scholars, notes that regionalism and ethnicism inside the ranks of the NIF have become more apparent when conflict started over whether it is the historical or the military leadership, which should retain priority as reference. In the course of this conflict, the historical leadership had focused on western Sudanese because
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President Al-Bashir. These educated would be used to optimise the benefit of an existing objective condition of vulnerability and to maximise a mythological structure now surrounding towns. Seemingly, they were largely considered ascetics who were not seeking worldly material gains and who would therefore not only strengthen the religious state, but would also rid it of popular demands for the services of a modern state and operate as redeemers for the NIF leadership. However, herein lay the contradiction that would ultimately bring the NIF civilization project to collapse. The needs of the newly recruited cadres expanded, while their riverain leadership kept hoarding larger amounts of wealth. The NIF cadres from the marginalised groups then accused their fellow riverain leaders of being racist. This is the contradiction between the avariciousness of the Islamist jellaba and the ambitions of their redeemers. Parking on pre-modern interpretations, and as it justifies disability, repression and exploitation (Abu Zeid 1995:117, Ali 1991), the religious discourse became an appealing one to the vulnerable groups in the cities. Kurt Beck (1998:255), referring to the impact of what he calls the high culture of the Nile Valley, states that during times of disorientation that followed the droughts of the 1980s, the confident and unreserved adherence to local lifestyles [was] severely undermined. Fundamentalist Islam in the Sudan, essentially stemming from within the notions of high culture, replaced local lifestyles (see Doornbos 1988). It was introduced to the vulnerable IDPs as salvage and solace and these, in turn, adhered to it as the father who compensates for and binds together shattered family ties. Fundamentalism, in the words of Gita Sen (1997:12), breeds on marginalization and loss of control among young men. President Ja'far Nimeiri abandoned his socialist orientations and secular politics and sought support from the right by the mid-1970s. In 1983 President Nimeiri said that he had dreamt one night, that El Sheikh El Tayeb (eighteenth-century spiritual father of the Sammaniyya religious order) visited and ordered him to implement sharia in the Sudan. He did. Nimeiri's night dream was used as a prophetic pretext for the adoption of the Islamists' political programme and it justified sharia. Dreams as a site of truth in the religious discourse made of President Nimeiris dream a decisive moment in Sudans recent history. Significantly it targeted the traditional structure provided by the ethnic cultural zones surrounding the national capital. The existence of this structure, however, would serve a significant political interest of the NIF. Mobilising the rural displaced in what was known as the one million person demonstration, the NIF leadership was capable, first, to pressure President Nimeiri to adopt its political programme, namely the implementation of the Islamic laws and, later, to mobilise support to consolidate it (see Ali 1991: 80). The same segment of IDPs was mobilised to consolidate the fragile military coup backed by the NIF in June 1989. This development signalled the collapse of the middle class-dominated power bloc. It also signalled the collapse of the modernist riverain elite bloc, or replacement of realist riverain statesmen by fatalistic riverain clergy. The middle class, present in the alliance between the military officers and the intelligentsia (Ahmed 1993b), adopted in 1981 the Programme of Building the Modern Science-Based State, adhering to a secular culture and modern organisation of society. However, in 1983, when the state was religiously redefined, this discourse was reversed, indicating an extraordinary divergence that shook the status quo. In their second return, through their involvement in the June 1989 coup, the Islamist faction of the middle class seemed to recall and assimilate this traditional structure, existing around cities, though for a short time, and in the process propagated incredible miracles via national TV, radio, and newspapers. For an economically crumbling state, these miracles were an apt substitute that would make the mobilisation of the masses possible, or, even more effective. Under such circumstances, the Khartoum government transformed the military campaigns in the South into holy war (Kevane and Stiansen 1998:2). The divide among Sudanese along religious and necessarily ethnic lines became stark and deep, with the major contradiction in society increasingly conceived of as religious. In Sudan, no single issue is more divisive than the relationship between religion and the state. Differences between Muslims and Christians are so sharp that there is no communication or understanding between the two faiths (Danforth 2002). This, in our view, represents a deep crisis in the whole schema of nation-building in the Sudan. In fact, unity or, otherwise, disintegration of the Sudan resides in how this crisis is dealt with. 4. The ethnic/religious discourse and erosion of the riverain elites universalistic discourse This section examines how the ideology, which was borrowed and introduced for refurbishing the political alliance, is eroding from within, leaving a vacuum, so far, filled by ethnicist and regionalist ideologies. The NIF war policies, similar only to the Turkish rule in terms of the scale of destruction of Sudanese communities, gave rise to resolute resistance and consolidated the ethnicist and regionalist ideologies, which ultimately forced the core group to succumb. The most important characteristic of Islamist ideology is that, besides adopting violence as a strategy, it provided no worldly alternative. Its religious package not only generated a wide-scale divide in Sudanese society (familial, generational, ethnic, and regional), inviting armed rebellions in all parts of the country, but it also displaced development and its reconciling promises. It brought a new breed of leaders to replace both the modernist elite and they form an ideal group-feelings ('Asabiyya) with distinguished characteristics on which this leadership could lean in its confrontation with the military wing of the Islamic movement (Al-Ray Al-Aam 27.07.2004).
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traditional leaders. In rural areas, the role of such leadership was particularly important, as it contributed to reproducing the ethnic, namely by installing, for rural, local, and regional administration, NIF political cadres who were half-literate young men who could neither stand in the shoes of civil servants nor possessed the wisdom of the elders. They adopted a typical divide and rule policy towards tribal entities (Ibrahim 2002:76, see also El Zain 1996b) and neglected what would certainly lead to tribal feuding. These arrangements and institutional transformations were advocated from within the framework of a new implicitly verbal discourse, yet an explicitly religious and fanatic one, manifest in the ethnicist Arabism and Islamism (Ibrahim 2002:76, see El Zain 1996a). This marked the beginning of a stark polarisation founded on religious and ethnic hatred. The government, in the words of Ibrahim (2002:76-7), directly or indirectly, started to adapt to the religious and ethnic polarisation as a requirement for the civil war in the Nuba Mountains. The NIF government did not conceive the conflict in the Nuba Mountains in its historical, social, economic, and political context. Instead, it viewed the Nuba fighters as nothing but opponents of al-mashro al-hadaari (the civilisation project), which it had officially adopted. Government, therefore, did not view them as citizens demanding legitimate civil rights, who would have been better dealt with through negotiations before resorting to the use of coercion (Ibrahim 2002:77). To control the anger that it helped generate, the NIF committed a fatal mistake which would ultimately erode its universalistic discourse. The clearest sign of the erosion of the NIF ideology was its involvement in the creation of a coalition at the macro level involving the state and some tribal entities. Although this coalition-making could be traced back to the period 1983-86 (De Waal 2000:29), both under the May dictatorship and the elected democratic regime (for details see Mohamed Salih 1989, Goldsmith 2002), a clear-cut polarisation took place only later by the early the 1990s. Under the NIF, the polarisation took the form of a crowding of minor conflicts and tightening between the two major poles of the Sudanese government and Sudanese rebels. Though the previous government had unofficially armed the Arab Baggara tribes against the southerners, the NIF government by 1990 had officially recognised the tribal militias, following the issuing of the Popular Defence Law (Suliman 2000:143). Referring to the conflict in the Nuba Mountains, Ibrahim (2002:161) points out that this local conflict became part of the larger polarisation between the above two poles. Incited by the two parties, i.e. the SPLM/A and the government of the Sudan, and under their auspices, the tribal conflict in the Nuba Mountainsin South Kordofan Statebecame part of the military strategy and discursive undertakings of these two parties. The discursive undertakings or ideologies of the two parties, according to Ibrahim (2002:161), are Africanism/Christianity/Paganism for the SPLM/A versus (al-shuubeeyya al-uroobiyya) the ethnicist Arabism/Islamism for the government. It is worth noting that the leadership of the tribes targeted for militias were put under pressure by the government, in addition to the incentives they received or were promised. Incentives took the form of providing cars and houses and were simultaneously accompanied by threats of imprisonment and confiscation of property or even assassination if they refused to cooperate (Suliman 2000:143). Thus, capitalising on localised conflicts to mobilise local groups and involve them in a macro-coalition served tactical and strategic ends. According to Ibrahim (2002:164), the tribal racist ideology with its discriminatory exclusionist character has recently become one of the necessities of the civil war (for details see Ibrahim 2002:1645). Inter-ethnic conflicts were transformed from sporadic often-resoluble ones to more frequent ones. According to Ibrahim (2002:164), in the last ten years, the severity of inter-ethnic conflicts increased and these conflicts no longer break out due to competition over scarce natural resources. Indeed, tribal militias have become the agents of the conflicting parties (i.e. the government and the SPLA) and, therefore, act in accordance with their programmes or political slogans. At this stage, conflicts, primarily over resources, have been largely reconstructed with the aim of imposing and maintaining the sharia on the part of the looters of resources and resistance to sharia on the part of those who see it as an apparatus for justifying looting and disguising injustices. As pointed out above, this has in the final analysis boosted the ethnic identity and probably made northern Sudanese claim to be the only Muslims of the Sudan (combining Islam and Arabism), or otherwise, they used religion to mobilise themselves and in the process dropped the non-Arab Muslims (see Ibrahim 1987). In fact, these latter, under an Islamic state, have become targets of the jihad campaigns. According to Francis Deng (2000:165), The intervention of the government, with centralizing notions of Arabism and orthodox Islam as bases for building the Sudanese national identity and determinants of who should get what or occupy what status in the system, introduced stratification along racial, cultural and religious lines. This, first, segregated people along religious lines. But the crisis-driven discourse of the NIF has gone far beyond that, as Beswick and Spaulding (2000:xvii) point out that its declared jihad targets Muslims and non-Muslims and the militant Acholi guerrillas of the Lords Resistance Army are supported by the Sudanese government. The religious discourse in the north thus exposes itself as overtly ethnic. The new Holy Terror differed from anything the Sudan had seen before. Newly-created Popular Defense Forces, often called militia or murahilin, were enjoined to wage a total war against anyone who was not an Arab Muslim. They were given complete freedom to kill, rape, loot, and enslave such people, and above all to expel them from their territories so that these lands might be colonized by Arab Muslim settlers from the north (Majak 2000:49, see also Beswick and Spaulding (2000:xvii).
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Majak (2000:50) continues, The [Nuba] lands thus forcibly vacated were promptly occupied and taken over by neighbouring Baggara Arab pastoralists or northern Arab immigrants whose homes had been battered by drought and desert encroachment; the government justified its policy of ethnic cleansing as a form of famine relief for northern Arabs. Similarly, in his view, were the people of the Ingessena area. For some years they had endured the encroachment upon their lands by Arab Muslim speculators in mechanized agriculture backed by the government and financed through the Muslim fundamentalists Faisal Islamic Bank of Sudan (Majak 2000:50). Majak (2000:50) points to a significant change in the attitude of the Baggara herdsmen who did not participate in the first civil war (1955-72) and who, therefore, maintained their friendly interactions with southern tribes; yet they did become actively involved in the civil war after its second outbreak. Referring to the Abyei area, Deng (2000:165) notes that the stratification along racial, cultural, and religious lines combined with the partisan use of state power in favor of the Arabs against the Dinka, tilted the balance that had sustained coexistence and cooperation in the national interest of both sides. In Dengs view, suddenly, the Ngok Dinka, who developed brotherly relations with the Baggara, ceased to be relatives or good neighbours and became infidels against whom God had ordered jihad (holy war) and could therefore be killed with impunity (Deng 2000:165, see also Kevane and Stiansen 1998:43). The Ngok Dinka had to abandon their two-century long political practice of strategic relations with the Arabs of Kordofan and seek alliance with groups in southern Sudan including the SPLA (Kevane and Stiansen 1998:43, see Deng 2000:165). This change of heart, according to Majak (2000:46), derived largely from local causes associated with the intrusion of Arab pastoralists and Muslim Fellata. In the past, some groups espoused Islam to escape the cruelties of opportunist Muslims; now this no longer provided safety. Sudan is fighting a religious-ethnic war in its South as well as in the Nuba Mountains (Warburg 2000:85, see Beswick and Spaulding 2000:xvi). Many scholars (Suliman 2000:231, Mohamed Salih 1999, 2001, Majak 2000, Duany and Duany 2000, Winter 2000, Beswick and Spaulding 2000) have described Sudans government policies towards African communities in the 1990s as ethnic cleansing and genocide. The idea of creating a monolithic Arab and Islamic society governed by the historical sharia law implies ethnic cleansingthe extinction of the diverse cultures and different ways of life of the numerous non-Arab communities (Duany and Duany 2000:178). Within the rising ethnic discourse, cadres of the NIF who belong to NRZ stock saw on a daily basis the bulldozing of homes of their kin and their eviction from prime areas to marginalised and risky areas on the outskirts of towns. The NIF-advocated universalistic discourse, being crisis-driven, carries the germs of its total failure, as manifest in the assertion of the ethnicist riverain hegemonic culture and worldview (see Doornbos 1988). It therefore has discredited its espoused universalism and destroyed its ambitions to build in the country its aspired larger Muslim majority. From within its universalistic discourse, the groups that were incorporated saw in their leading imams the same old jellabagreedy peddlers, fake sufi followers and dishonest, yet, smart merchants. Increasingly losing credibility, the NIF started to crumble, necessarily as representative of consensually universalistic culture in north Sudan. To illustrate this, we shall give the example of groups from the Darfur Region, in order to see how they started to distance themselves from the mainstream hegemonic (high) culture. Darfur, especially in connection with armed rebellion, is taken as representative of the several armed movements. The early 1990s witnessed the slipping away of Daoud Yahya Bolad (from the Fur people) who would lead an armed faction into Darfur, as an SPLA guerrilla commander, against his erstwhile NIF party (for details see Minority Rights Group 1995). This indicated that the Muslims of Darfur had second thoughts about being classified in the camp of northern Sudanese. It is now clear to us that most of the Nuba Muslims and southern Sudanese Muslims, as well as the larger majority of the people of Darfur who were indiscriminately targeted by the war machine, would have second thoughts about their view of their fellow northern Sudanese Muslims. In this sense, the experience of the NIF cultural and structural violence served the strategic end of what it believed to stand against. Instead of paving the way for the spread of Islam and Arabism in the cultural open frontier, the NIF probably successfully sealed off or, at least, narrowed the passage through which Islam and Arabism used to pass. The Arab missionary in the Sudan, who had ultimate success in making sharia the rule of the day, simultaneously lost its historical mission to expand the Arab domain. Persistent cultural and structural violence associated with achieving this goal generated solid resistance, which ultimately blocked the Arabist missionary and successfully kept it at bay. The Machakos Protocol, a provisional grand bargain, according to ICG (2003b) effectively traded a southern self-determination referendum for Sharia in the North. Most of the armed movements are fighting to transform the hegemony of the core group, and like the SPLA/M, some of them have pressurised the NIF government to sit and negotiate with them. Should they enjoy a success similar to that of the SPLA/M, the Nile Valley will ultimately lose its two-century long hegemony over other regions. The hegemony of the core group was, therefore, eroded by its own deeds, heralding a new stage in the evolution of the political system in the Sudan, which may allow a greater chance for its components to interact with each other more properly. The hegemony of the core group was guaranteed by the existence of the open frontier; especially by the possibility to expand and compensate for the abuse of natural and cultural resources. More
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important in connection with the above is that even the Arab Sudanese now seem to be slipping away from alliances with the NIF, increasingly turning it from a national organisation to a regional one, and probably a narrow ethnic organisation. War has devastated communities that used to coexist with each other and Arab communities have increasingly realised that they were being pushed to do what would totally devastate them to the benefit of representatives of the high culture. This realisation is manifest in the number of reconciliation conferences they held and the peace deals they struck with their African cohabitants despite the active role of the government in sabotaging these efforts (see Suliman 2000, Ibrahim 2002). While this represents the de-centring of the truth held by the centralised state, as the mediator of all polity, it reinvented strategies of coexistence among different communities, which the state expansion had essentially eroded. According to Ibrahim (2002:79) the conflicting groups are driven by their economic needs and not political agendas and projects. Therefore, it is not in the capacity of the Khartoum government, under the orientations of its leadership (composed of the isolated urban elite), to comprehend the social/cultural intricacy of remote rural pockets, especially those on the front line in south-western Sudan. Even though nomadic Arab tribes engaged in alliances with the state in the past, it was certainly not their policy or capacity to be in permanent wars and for their tribal domains to turn into war zones. Arab tribes are increasingly seeking to amend their former symbiotic relations with their compatriots. On several occasions, the Rawawga Hawazma fought beside the Muru Nuba, when the latter were attacked by government troops. Objective interests of these competing groups (as farmers, pastoralists, or both) imply the nature of peace-making among them (Ibrahim 2002:80). Pitting the Baggara Arabs against the Dinka at one time and against the Fur at another may have been seen by tribal leaders as a riverain elite conspiracy not only to inherit the resources of these tribes, but also to cause large-scale devastation and disintegration among them so they could no longer evolve into contestants. Reconciliation conferences between these groups means that the conspiracy of the NIF leadership to pit the marginalised against each other has failed. Thus, the aggravation of the ethnic caused the breakdown of the NIF components, which were largely defined by the ethnic. Being subject to increasing alienation at the seat of power at the confluence of the Niles, the educated NIF cadres from western Sudan now followed suit with their tribesmen. The mid-to-late 1990s echoed the resentment of followers of Turbai, who were rumoured to be largely westerners, leading to the split of the NIF party into two competing wings, i.e. the Popular Congress Party (PCP) (led by Turbai) and the National Congress Party (NCP) (led by President Al-Bashir). Notably the government, as some critics argue, expelled most of the Darfurians from the state apparatus immediately after it sidelined Turabi. In 2002, some NIF leading figures from the NRZ walked away in protest and established the Justice Party. The NIFs leading cadres have increasingly slipped away, in fact, pulling out with them large numbers of kin supporters and generating a tribal polarisation over the cause of religious fundamentalism. Most recently, some cadres of the PCP quit and formed the Justice and Equity Movement (JEM). Noteworthy is that, in the late 1990s, some members of the JEM authored the Black Book (Justice Africa 31 January 2004), a widely read document that had remained anonymous for several years. The Black Book detailed political injustices in the Sudan and clearly pointed to the riverain elite as the ones who historically monopolised power and confined the largest part of the development pie to their own circle (Justice Africa 27 May 2003). Frustrated and further marginalised, the cadres from the NRZ, left the official NIF largely to representatives of the high culture and instead espoused a creed of rebellion that is now becoming entrenched in the upstream RZ. As one columnist, Abdel Latif Al-Booni (Al-Sahafa 2004) pointed out, the Islamist movement, had at first attracted to its ranks cadres from Darfur tribes that did not claim Arab linage. It gave them leading positions and the movement witnessed intermarriages that transcended the traditional tribal and racial frames. Yet following the recent split, in his view, the ruling wing of the Islamic Movement stood accused of siding with the advocates of Arab linage, while the opposing wing under the leadership of Turabi was accused of invoking ethnicist sentiments. He notes, in this context, that Turabi, in a book he wrote last year while in prison, likened the Sudan to South Africa with regard to racial discrimination. The recent coup attempt, as the government portrayed it, which Turabi was accused of orchestrating, resulted in the arrest of 36 officers the majority of them from Darfur (Al-Sahafa 2004). Now, after 21 years of continuous civil war, the harvest is yet more misery, stark injustice, bitter grieves, and incredible fanaticism. The truth for which the NIF fought is increasingly questionable. The founder of the NIF, Turabi, who mobilised thousands of young men and women to jihad, a significant number of whom perished in the battles of the south, now stands accused, his own credibility questioned by his disciples. President Omer Al-Bashir, referring to his former mentor states that This [Dr. Hassan al-Turabi] was our sheikh and our leader, but unfortunately we found him to be a liar and a hypocrite (DGSC 04 April 2004). The Islamists became the symbol of corruption and acquired another quality in that they became increasingly bankrupt; they deserved no credit for what they considered their epical heroism. Arab journalist Abdelrahman Al-Rashid, describing this, says, The so-called acts of bravery of the past were mere acts of stupidity, for which millions of Sudanese paid with their property and their blood (Sudan Tribune 27 December 2003). While the NIF factions are battling each other, real conflict seems to reside largely between proponents of the old political regime founded on injustice, corruption, and abuse of ethnic and religious sentiments and those proponents struggling to restructure and replace the Old Sudan with the
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New Sudan. 5. Conclusion This paper discussed how environmental scarcity resulted in the shrinking of national institutions, and the expansion of tribal values and how these tribal values, now at the centre of the political system, could influence state discourse. Environmental scarcity caused the state to withdraw from providing social and security services in remote regionsto withdraw from the promise of development, as the guarantor for some national consensus, and replace it with ethnicity and religion. The consequences of these processes ultimately led to the collapse of subsistence economies, disruption of symbiotic relations among communities and their mass displacement and settlement in the central RZ. The incredible number and concentration of IDPs in the central RZ resulted in significant changes in the states discourse. This was associated with their presence becoming beneficial to the fanatic NIF party; however, ultimately undermining their being and integrity. More precisely, this party used the presence of the IDPs to reinforce its political programme by manipulating conservative group identities. Its very success in this fuelled violence at local and national levels. The success of the NIF in manipulating groups identities resulted in stark upheaval, both localised among communities and nationally within the Sudan. Under its reign, unprecedented polarisation arose between Arabs and non-Arabs, taking the form of communal violence in different localities and on a regional scale. At the national level, this polarisation took the form of the states launching jihad against its own citizens, preaching ideologies of hatred and resulting in destruction of whole communities. Besides undermining the states legitimacy, the ideologies and policies driving the polarisation increasingly robbed the ruling elite of its hegemonic position. In reaction to the resource and cultural policies of the NIF, culminating in destructive wars against large numbers of communities, was the uncompromising call for resistance, for liberating communal lands from state control. The divisive fanatic discourse of the NIF not only failed to conquer the open frontier, but it also made it too difficult for the Sudanese to seek a compromise for coexistence in a united Sudan. Pushing the agendas of the hegemonic group to their ultimate end, the NIF discourse antagonised large numbers of communities, including those in the second and third circles, which were necessary for consolidating economic, political, and cultural hegemony in the Sudan. Groups making up these circles (the Beja, Funj, Fur, marginalised Arabs, Nuba, etc.), have now called to arms in resistance, critically distancing themselves from the hegemonic group. 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