President Omar al-Bashir had visited Southern Sudan about once a year since the signing of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) between the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) and the central government. Northern Sudanese supporters and opponents of the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) which he leads are seldom seen in the South, although many of them profess a strong belief in the unity of the country, which will be tested in a referendum on Southern self-determination which the CPA has scheduled for January 2011. But in March 2010, the president flew in and out of cities and small towns across the semi-autonomous South, as general elections neared. Everybody in Southern Sudan who wastes time thinking about politics realised that Bashir had realised that Sudan's elections were too close to call. That was back in March of course, when they were too close to call, but by the start of April everyone knew who the winner would be. SPLM presidential candidate Yasser Arman withdrew from the race at the end of March, which cleared the way for a Bashir presidential victory in the polls, which took place at the end of April.
Bashir's election was one of several executive and legislative contests, which were won, as assistant president and security supremo Nafi‘ Ali Nafi‘ explained before the results appeared, by the NCP and the Salva Kiir group in the SPLM.1 The CPA promised democratic transformation and fairer wealth distribution for the country, but it structured that promise around a political alliance that encouraged the two allies to perpetuate each other's hold on power in the other's respective constituencies, siphoning new oil profits into the boomtowns of Juba and Khartoum. For the NCP, that hold meant control over the bulk of the country's resources, and control over Northern society. For the South, that hold meant that the SPLM could lead the voters of Southern Sudan to a referendum on self-determination for the autonomous region, which under the CPA need to take place by January 2011. These elections, the first competitive ones in a quarter of a century, were supposed to be a popular judgement on this alliance and on the CPA itself. But in the event, boycotts by junior coalition parties and the opposition muffled that judgement.
Boycotts
There were several boycotts, rather than just one. The SPLM leadership's decision to withdraw from the presidential race was presented by its Northern sector as a boycott. Many SPLM members believed the party was boycotting in all states of Northern Sudan, apart from Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile, two states with a special status in the CPA, where the long civil war in the South spilled over into the North. The Umma Party led by former premier Sadig al-Mahdi also boycotted late in the day, while the Communist Party boycotted early. The Popular Congress Party (PCP), led by Hassan al-Turabi, the leader of Sudan's Islamist movement before a major split in the late 1990s, stayed in the race, along with the Democratic Unionist Party-Original (DUP) of Muhammad Osman al-Mirghani.
Boycotters believed that the NCP manipulated electoral process and state resources to win. From 2005, when CPA implementation began, it had been building its support in preparation. The CPA required investment in Sudan's 25 states, most of which had been starved of cash since the economic crises of the 1990s and before. Figures up to 2007 are available, and they show that significant resources went to Sudan's impoverished periphery after the signing of the CPA, and that about 70% of the money went on salaries.2 These provincial salaried classes and security men were one NCP constituency in the election.
The next part of the NCP campaign, in the view of the SPLM and the opposition, was the 2008 census. The SPLM and the opposition claim that the census enumerators ignored areas of opposition strength, like the highly diverse shanties of Khartoum and Darfur towns, full of war-displaced; or the Nuba mountains, many of whose people participated in the civil war. Instead, they counted groups that could be fashioned into local vote-banks such as nomadic groups; the nomad population went up by over 300%.3 Women were better represented than men: the NCP may have seen women as a more malleable constituency than men, and the party was widely alleged to have used a combination of sugar distribution and petty threats to mobilise votes of poorer women. Constituency demarcation, say the opposition, favoured the ruling party. The CPA required the NCP-led government to align laws governing the security forces with the civil and political liberties in the new 2005 constitution that the agreement inspired, but this did not happen. The NCP's security budget (estimated at 70% of state expenditure) and their ability to tailor local incentives and threats remained intact. Come the voter registration, the NCP was able to use its patronage systems, its security laws and institutions, its local knowledge of a mysteriously and rapidly changing country to limit participation of opposition supporters. Polling was orderly in many centres, although the major non-boycotting parties (the PCP and original DUP) complained of widespread fraud and rejected the results.
The elections in Northern Sudan
The SPLM and the opposition give two main reasons for their different boycotts: they were afraid to lose; and they were afraid to win. If the SPLM/opposition took part and lost, their participation would endorse an NCP system of manipulation and fear rather than challenging it, and entrench the opposition's subordination. But for the SPLM, winning was also a possibility, to judge from Bashir's performances in the South. SPLM candidate Arman could conceivably have won, but many in the opposition believed that would have brought a violent response from the NCP. (Arman gave ‘social peace’ as one of the reasons for his withdrawal.) He may not have been able to manage the responses of the security forces to any SPLM victory.
After five days of voting, the opposition alleged widespread irregularities in voter registration lists, multiple voting, impersonation, ballot stuffing and intimidation. Different forces provided security for the elections in North and South, and their repertoires differed slightly. At the end of polling, the two large non-boycotting opposition parties in the north (the DUP-Original and PCP) rejected the results before they were tabulated. Even the government joined in – NCP groups accused the SPLM of rigging in the South and in the Blue Nile, and the SPLM's Northern Sector rejected results in the North. In spite of this ferment, the process was endorsed by African Union observers, and partially endorsed by United Nations, United States and European Union observers.
These rejections and endorsements appeared before votes were tabulated – the process of aggregating results from polling stations into constituencies. Tabulation is an electoral process highly susceptible to fraud, and although it took place in only 26 centres across the country the opposition was largely unable to monitor it. Software broke down and safeguards were thrown away to meet deadlines. Bashir's winning tally of 68% came out first and felt plausible – in spite of his withdrawal, Arman had taken 21%, mostly from the South. But that was where plausibility ended: there were NCP landslides in unhappy Darfur, Eastern and Northern Sudan and in the capital, the peppery centre of opposition politics. In Shendi North, the NCP's unlovable Nafi‘ (who reportedly set up the ghost houses of the security forces in the 1990s, and helped to organise the war in Darfur) took 93%. In Merowe, once a hard-drinking DUP stronghold, the NCP's former security head Salah Abdallah ‘Gosh’ persuaded 84% of voters to back him. In Khartoum, a city with millions of war-displaced Southerners and Darfurians, the NCP took the governorship with 87% of the vote. The SPLM candidate came fourth, with only 16,000 votes – outpolled by the NCP by a million votes.
Kassala in Eastern Sudan is near the centre of one of Sudan's smaller mutinies, the former in Eastern Sudan that brought together the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA, the SPLM's armed wing), Beja groups and nomadic groups linked to the Arabian peninsula. It is also the base of the Khatmiya religious order, whose patrician leader Mohamed Osman al-Mirghani also leads the DUP-Original, one of the few major parties that participated in the elections and a major force in all previous parliamentary regimes. In its heartland, the DUP-Original took 6.5% of the vote in the governorship race, against 85% for the NCP. The DUP did not take a single parliamentary seat (even though 40% of parliamentary seats, including a 25% quota for women, are elected by proportional representation [PR]). The floods in the neighbouring River Gash may have swept his supporters away, commented al-Mirghani. In the Umma heartland of White Nile, the NCP won the governorship and all but one parliamentary seat. The once-great patricians can now choose between humiliation or boycott – in either case, the results are the same.
The patricians were once able to deploy their religious prestige and tribal connections that gave a political coherence to Northern Sudan, and that brought the interests of their heartlands and Sudan's periphery into a balance. They managed Northern Sudan without resort to violence (under their rule, violence was routine in the South). The NCP has replaced the patrician system with boomtown politics at the centre and a more ethnicised and more violent rural political order in the periphery, aggravating regional imbalances. This might have been expected to show in voting patterns – indeed, parliamentary elections in the 1950s, 1960s and 1980s showed increasing support for regional parties representing Beja people of Eastern Sudan, Nuba people of Kordofan and to a lesser extent Darfurians.
Regional parties did not do well this time. The regional question has been reframed by the civil war in the South. During the war and its aftermath, the SPLM managed to mobilise disaffected constituencies in the East, Kordofan, and in the shanties in the booming centre; it also managed to inspire the disaffected in Darfur. Under the leadership of the late John Garang, who died shortly after the CPA was signed, the SPLM might have used these new aspirations and forms of resistance to restructure wealth and power in Sudan away from the dominant centre – creating what Garang called the New Sudan. But after Garang's death, the SPLM leadership was preoccupied with the many needs and contradictions in the South, and its confidence in its political capabilities in areas of the North outside Khartoum waned. Groups in the far North, East, West and central rainlands often eagerly awaited cooptation by the SPLM, and their eagerness was disappointed as the SPLM retreated from its transformative visions into something which seemed more manageable – Southern separation. The elections would have been an important part of that transformation, if they had offered voters a choice between supporting or reworking the powerful centre. Instead, it appears that regional groups will have to fashion local destinies at the edge of the Khartoum centrifuge. New regional movements fared even worse than the patricians – indeed, in Darfur, the new armed movements which reshaped the region's politics were largely unable to compete in elections, even though some have been incorporated into the government through peace agreements.
Elections in South Darfur
South Darfur has had a large share of the violence in Sudan's westernmost region over the past two years. Several decades of ecological stress, low development and migration, alongside the NCP's successful campaign to replace powerful sectarian parties with weaker ethnic units contributed to the outbreak of major rebellion in 2003 – the rebels sought and failed to join the SPLM, which was at the time seeking its own deal with the government (the CPA). The conflict displaced many sedentary groups, speaking African languages as well as Arabic, from farming villages into towns. The government associated the farmers with the rebels, and used monolingual Arabic-speaking landless groups whose economies were dominated by pastoralism to terrorise the farmers off their lands. That war was then replaced by local conflicts over its remaining spoils (in particular the empty lands) between newly militarised landless and land-owning Arabic-speaking groups linked to pastoralism. Up to 300 people died in this kind of violence over a two-week period during the elections. Many displaced people refused to register to vote because the government's response to the rebellion had so damaged its legitimacy. The government concentrated its voter registration efforts on the divided but dependent monolingual Arabic-speakers.
To what extent did the elections allow Darfurians to address this dramatic social polarisation? On the road from Nyala to al-Fashir there are new signs for villages with Arabic names like Taybat al-Shakirin (‘the goodness of the grateful’) or Ramallah (the Palestinian mountain town). They are settled by formerly landless Arabic speakers, on lands emptied of settled populations now crowded into little towns or camps on the road. The polling centre for Taybat al-Shakirin was Duma, a town full of displaced persons, and it was run largely by displaced persons. Polling there was largely unsuccessful, because the National Elections Commission (NEC) kept delivering the wrong ballot papers. It might have been deliberate – or it might have been that electoral officials were distracted by a largely unreported war in the same constituency, between newly militarised Arabic-speaking groups, that may have led to two to three hundred deaths in one week (the government said 22 people had died).
In spite of this violence, South Darfur had a contest more gripping than those in most areas of Sudan: the NCP won only 24 of the 29 seats. The Umma and the DUP won one seat apiece in constituencies where the NCP did not field a candidate (probably an indication that they had done a deal with an individual opposition politician that allowed him to win), and independents (some linked to armed movements that have signed peace accords with the government) won three more. The PCP got 24% of the gubernatorial vote (against the NCP's 57%) and even managed to get three of the nine seats for women on a PR women's list – in other states, the NCP swept the board in proportional and first-past-the-post races. Even more surprising was the closeness of the race. The PCP came second in 11 races, very often by a whisker – in Al-Salam/Bilayl constituency, the NCP got 34.9% against 34.7% for the PCP.
Al-Salam-Bilayl is a constituency near Nyala with a large displaced population – displaced people may account for up to a quarter of Darfur's population; the census failed to enumerate them. Polling centres in some areas of displacement seemed to be going for the PCP, whose campaign focused on a diagnosis of the dominance of ethnic groups from Sudan's rich centre on the Northern Nile Valley. In one speech, for example, PCP leader al-Turabi claimed that al-Bashir had suggested that a member of al-Bashir's own Ja‘ali tribe might honour a Darfurian woman by raping her. In a speech in al-Fasher, the North Darfur capital, he said that Darfur war criminals should be tried in this world before they stand before God in the next one, to receive their painful torment – a reference to Bashir's indictment by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes and crimes against humanity.4 For Darfurians, the PCP's bitter and inflammatory reworking of the SPLM's New Sudan rhetoric was the main electoral alternative to the NCP. And the PCP did far better in South Darfur than it did anywhere else, partly because of a strong governor's candidate and a strong local party. In some respects, its decision to contest the elections in spite of the SPLM and Umma boycott may have been motivated by over-confidence in its own strength – the party may have wanted to negotiate its way into government after a strong electoral showing. Instead, it got almost no seats nationally. It may now seek to deepen its links with Darfurian armed movements that it tacitly supports, such as the Justice and Equality Movement, led by a former party member.
The SPLM and the South
Southern Sudan's President Salva Kiir reportedly told one of the many envoys currently providing unsolicited advice to Sudanese elites that he did not want the elections because they would destroy his party. His party trounced all opposition in Southern Sudan and won the governorship in Blue Nile State, one of two Northern states that have special arrangements under the CPA, because of their involvement in the civil war in the South. Kiir himself took 93% of the vote for the Southern presidency, although there was likely ballot stuffing in certain states that inflated the SPLM share of the vote. But in today's Sudan these victories are not the same as party survival.
The SPLM's problem is that it has too many objectives, and the election revealed the contradictions between some of those objectives. In the North, the SPLM could still have mobilised the disaffections that the PCP aimed for. Kiir's delivery is wooden and al-Turabi's lurid, but the SPLM presidential candidate Arman (in some respects a more junior politician) was able to make compelling rhetorical linkages between that disaffection and an almost possible project for New Sudan. The decision to withdraw Arman disappointed many groups who had not managed to develop their own mode of opposition to the Khartoum government during five years' coalition government when the SPLM was balancing with some clumsiness its roles as a military organisation turning itself into a political party; an oppositionist group; a party of transformation with a vision that its cruellest enemies are now forced to invoke; a guarantor of Southern rights; a harbinger of Southern independence; and a junior member of a national governing coalition.
The election showed that the SPLM cannot be all of these things, and Nafi‘ was correct to say that Kiir's group, which stresses Southern rights and independence, won an argument about strategy. For this group, Bashir was an attractive candidate for the presidency: he is experienced; he has been weakened internationally because of the ICC indictment. Kiir reportedly told the BBC that he had voted for Bashir and expected many Southerners to do the same.5
Kiir was right about the risks of an SPLM split. The SPLM's nomination process was probably less consultative than that of the NCP (both got local parties to nominate three or four candidates for the national leadership to choose from) and many failed SPLM nominees, alongside some failed NCP nominees, stood against their party. A few ‘SPLM independents’ won – including Bangassi Joseph Mario Bakasoro, the governor-elect of Western Equatoria State. Some observers viewed the SPLM's party indiscipline as a positive indication that people could challenge party decisions and thereby democratise a party still recovering from wartime. But in other places, like Jonglei, Unity and Northern Bahr al-Ghazal, defeated independents were involved in scuffles or attacks against the government – and many of these independents had recently been senior army officers.
In the South, the SPLM won all but four seats in the National Legislative Assembly: the NCP won one seat, SPLM-Democratic Change (the party of former foreign minister Lam Akol, a serial defector from the SPLM) won two. The SPLM's Southern victory was even more crushing than the NCP's northern one: it now holds 92 of the 96 Southern seats in the National Legislative Assembly, while the NCP holds 322 of 348 northern seats. Southern opposition parties, most of them relics of previous political orders revived by the CPA's parsimonious quotas for the participation of political forces other than its two signatories, were completely wiped out.
Southern Sudan has strong vernacular traditions of democracy (albeit traditions that routinely exclude women's participation). But in these elections, insecurity and the presence of the SPLA (which is effectively responsible for security outside the towns) silenced debate. The SPLA's presence, alongside the eclipse of other political forces, sets the scene for the future political development of the South. Electoral contests have not been a vehicle for articulating interests, or spelling out why the South still has so much local conflict. Those political tasks can now only be worked out within the movement. The SPLM is now the only political force in the region that can mediate the region's conflicts – not least those that have their origins in alleged electoral malpractice.
Future prospects
The SPLM now has to work its way to the referendum. It conceded all the legislative seats in Northern Sudan (outside the special areas of South Kordofan and Blue Nile), but negotiated an increase in Southern participation in the national legislature, in a pre-election agreement. After the election, the NCP and SPLM announced that they were getting down to work on a host of post-referendum difficulties, like borders, nationality, currency, oil and debts. The SPLM will also need to manage some of the Southern political and social contradictions that were on display during the elections, and make more efforts towards internal democracy. And it needs to work out what to do with its Northern sector, particularly its large constituencies in the Nuba Mountains in Southern Kordofan, where crucial state-level elections were postponed because of failures in the census. Elected state assemblies in Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile have a special responsibility in the CPA to consult the electorate in order assess and review the special arrangements for those areas. The delay in running local elections means that these popular consultations may take place after a secession, potentially weakening the case for improvement.
The NCP is still seeking alliances with other parties – it has always sought to broaden its base, recognising that it is a minority party (even if these elections say different). It continues to be the party that decides the future of Sudan – and if Sudan is divided peacefully, will shape the political future of the North. What choices does it have? Nafi‘ ruled out an alliance with al-Turabi, although a rallying of Sudan's divided Islamists might be an obvious route to creating a sense of nationhood in the deeply divided North. Or the party could use the confidence that it received from the elections to be conciliatory, rather than cocky, with adversaries and victims: opinion is divided on which path the NCP will choose. Another possibility is that the NCP could package itself as the only political possibility in Sudan, the There Is No Alternative Party, the invincible alliance of state and capital that will never ever go away. In order to do this, it needs to develop structures that allow it to resolve the many divisions of the North within the party. From that perspective, the elections were a disappointment. The NCP landslides mean that nobody knows what anyone is really thinking – the NCP could have won with the benefits of incumbency, but emerged with more legitimacy and a better and more public record of who wants what where.
After the elections, a senior opposition politician was told by a senior-looking security man that the security forces have got the real results of the elections as well as the public ones. That might mean that the NCP at least has got a reading of the strengths and weaknesses of different political actors in Northern Sudan. Let's hope the security man was not just being cocky.