Sudan: A Complex of Unintended Outcomes

by Chris Chatteris SJ · June 24, 2009

<!– @page { size: 21cm 29.7cm; margin: 2cm } P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm } –>When President Bashir of Sudan was indicted by the International Court for crimes against humanity, he expelled 14 Western NGOs, including the highly respected Doctors Without Borders. Another effect of the indictment has probably been to save Bashir�s waning political career, since he is now seen by many northern Sudanese as a victim of Western aggression and his popularity has grown dramatically. This is a double example of the law of unintended consequences.

However the law works both ways � to Bashir’s advantage but also against it. His government is implicated in the violent Islamisation of the South of the country. This traumatic process has created large numbers of refugees. These are Southerners, who because (as the northern government insists), they are citizens of the country, have fled the fighting and moved to the capital Khartoum, seeking security and work, even if this meant putting up with a second class status.

An observer in Khartoum painted an interesting picture for me about how this has affected the Catholic Church in the capital. Christian communities there have had a rapid addition to their numbers thanks to the refugee influx. Many refugees are already Christian but many others who were religious traditionalists, have converted to Christianity and in the 14 Catholic parishes around Khartoum the Easter season sees the admission of 3000-5000 adults every year. For a government with an Islamising agenda, this is another example of that perplexing and sometimes maddening law of unintended consequences.

There�s another twist in the working out of this law. The largely black Southern refugees in Khartoum are an ethnic mix of perhaps a million souls, (though the Government estimates them at just over 200,000). Because they are drawn from all the different ethnic groups, in order to lessen if not completely avoid tribal divisions in parish communities, the Archbishop of Khartoum has insisted that all services be conducted in Arabic. This even includes singing. The Archbishop, it seems, comes from a family of accomplished musicians that has produced a large repertoire of hymns and parts of the Mass in Arabic and my source (a fluent Arabic speaker and good singer) judges them to be very beautiful. The point here is that part of the North�s Islamising strategy was the imposition of Arabic on the southerners. But right in the capital this has backfired in our now familiar law. What was supposed to carry the message of Islam has ended up being used to carry the message of the Christian Gospel!

In the broad political tableau, the same thing has happened. The attempt to unify the country through the imposition of a uniform religious culture now seems ultimately doomed, though Bashir and his government, buoyed up by the President�s popularity windfall courtesy of the International Court, do not seem yet ready to admit this.

Things will come to a head in 2011 when, according to the agreement grudgingly entered into by the Government under intense pressure from the West, the South will have a referendum to decide its future status. All sources close to the situation in the South suggest that the vote will be overwhelmingly in favour of full independence. The Southerners, it seems, have had enough. This was not how the Northern government�s script was meant to run. The South, with its considerable oil wealth, was to continue being dominated and exploited and the people progressively culturally and religiously absorbed.

The endgame is already in motion and the shape of its dynamic is becoming clear. South Africans who were around in the transitions years leading up to 1994 will find it depressingly familiar. It’s the crude tactic of violent destabilisation. The Bashir government is already doing all it can to hobble the embryonic Southern state, setting one ethnic group against an other and paying militias to attack each other. What did not work in South Africa in 1994 will probably not work in 2011 in Southern Sudan.

The most amateur crystal-ball gazer can foresee more violence given the sky-high stakes of large swathes of oil-rich territory. The final outcome of this coming violent struggle will probably be decided more by the extremely delicate matter of international relations between the West and the Arab world and the raw economics of energy. However, a situation which has produced so many unintended outcomes is likely to produce even more.