Zachary Ochieng
23 October 2007
analysis
Nairobi — Located between the Bahr el-Ghazal and Southern Kordofan provinces, Abyei is geographically, ethnically and politically caught between northern and southern Sudan.
It is home to the Ngok Dinka tribe, cousins of the South's populous Dinka tribe, and bordered to the north and northeast by the Misseriya, Arab cattle herders (baggara) who pass through every year to graze their animals.
Relations between the Misseriya and the Ngok Dinka have historically been amicable, indeed are cited as a model for North-South co-operation. They lived within separate administrative boundaries in colonial days, until 1905, when the British transferred the nine chiefdoms of the Ngok Dinka in Abyei from Bahr el-Ghazal to Kordofan province.
Following Sudanese independence in 1956, the Dinka and Misseriya have been pulled towards opposite sides of the country's civil wars. The first, from 1956 to 1972, polarised the communities along North-South lines.
The turning point was 1965, when 72 unarmed Ngok Dinka in the Misseriya town of Babanusa were burned alive by a mob in a police station to which they had fled for protection.
The Dinka began to gravitate increasingly towards the southern rebels - Anya-Nya - and the South's cause, while the Misseriya received preferential treatment from the central government and identified firmly with the North.
The 1972 Addis Ababa Agreement, which ended the first war, included a clause for a referendum to allow "any other areas that were culturally and geographically a part of the Southern Complex," including Abyei, to choose between remaining in the North or joining the new autonomous southern region.
The referendum was never held, and attacks against the Dinka continued throughout the 1970s, leading to the formation of a Ngok Dinka unit of the Anya-Nya II, in the small southern rebellion that began in Upper Nile in 1975.
The second civil war began in June 1983 with the birth of the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA). Many Ngok Dinka joined it, and the Anya-Nya II unit from Abyei played a leading role in founding the new movement.
Displacement of the Ngok Dinka, which had begun during the first civil war and continued throughout the 1970s, escalated during the second war.
Today the bulk of Abyei's Dinka population has been displaced, partly because of their early support for it, many from Abyei came to hold senior military and political positions in the SPLA and had close links with its late chairman, Dr John Garang.
As the war dragged on, the call for independence grew stronger among southerners, including the Ngok Dinka. However, the discovery of oil complicated matters in Abyei as in other oil areas close to the North-South border.
After the oil discovery in 1979, then president Jaffar Nimeiri began the first of many efforts to alter the boundaries and relocate oil-rich areas from southern to northern Sudan.
The Misseriya joined the war on the government's side in the mid-1980s, providing frontline forces against the Dinka in Abyei and further south in the form of the Murahleen, horsebacked raiders who attacked southern villages to loot and take slaves as part of organised offensives against the SPLA and southern civilians.
The July 2002 Machakos Protocol provided the framework from which the CPA grew - in exchange for northern Sudan remaining under Sharia (Islamic law), the South would get an autonomous government and a self-determination referendum on secession or unity after a six-year interim period.
The agreement defined southern Sudan within the borders that existed at independence on January 1, 1956, thus excluding Abyei from participating in the self-determination referendum, along with northern strongholds of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) in the Nuba Mountains (Southern Kordofan) and Southern Blue Nile (now Blue Nile State).
After the signing of the Machakos Protocol, the SPLM fought an uphill political struggle to extend the same rights it had gained for the South, including self-determination, to the "Three Areas" of Abyei, the Nuba Mountains and Southern Blue Nile.
The peace negotiations were facilitated by the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (Igad), with the chief mediator being Gen Lazarus Sumbeiywo, a former Kenya Army commander. In March 2003, a special session on the Three Areas was held in the Karen suburb of Nairobi. Separate discussions were held on each area, with each delegation led by a "son of the area."
The Abyei session made little progress because of a disagreement over the make-up of the delegations. The SPLM refused to recognise the Misseriya head of the National Congress Party delegation, because he came from outside Abyei, and the talks stalled.
For the Ngok Dinka and the SPLM, accepting the Misseriya delegation as presented would have implied that these communities were residents of Abyei and thus entitled to vote in a potential referendum.
With the SPLM arguing for a self-determination referendum and the government refusing but trying to stretch the definition of Abyei to include the larger Misseriya population, the parties made the first moves in a chess match that is still playing out today.
They appeared to agree at the Karen negotiations on criteria for defining a resident of Abyei but these were not ratified by the session and were not cited in the eventual Abyei agreement.
The Three Areas, and Abyei in particular, were one of the most difficult issues throughout the CPA negotiations. The main disagreement was whether Abyei would be granted a referendum with an option to join southern Sudan, which implied the possibility of joining an independent South after the southern self-determination referendum in 2011. This was a core SPLM demand.
With senior representation from Abyei in the movement's leadership, Garang had little flexibility. The government consistently refused to consider a referendum for Abyei, arguing that the Machakos Protocol had already closed that door, and Abyei must remain in the North.
Khartoum's rejection of a referendum on Abyei was driven primarily by its fear of losing control over the oil resources in the area, which make up the bulk of the proven reserves in northern Sudan.
The deadlock was eventually broken by US intervention. In March 2004, the presidential envoy on Sudan, ex-Senator John Danforth, visited the negotiations at Naivasha and presented the parties with a draft agreement on Abyei.
Though the government initially resisted because it contained a referendum, it eventually agreed under pressure from Washington.
The Abyei Protocol provided for the entity to have a special administrative status, under the institution of the presidency, and the borders of the territory of the nine Ngok Dinka chiefdoms that was transferred to Kordofan in 1905.
A special Abyei Boundaries Commission was to demarcate this area, and a local executive council was to be established, initially appointed by the presidency before the 2009 local elections.
The protocol defined residents of Abyei as members of the Ngok Dinka community and other citizens residing in the area, and the Abyei Referendum Commission - also to be appointed by the presidency - was tasked to determine the residency criteria. Essentially, however, nothing has yet been implemented.
The National Congress Party has consistently attempted to include Misseriya as residents of Abyei, calculating that they are more likely to vote to remain in the North than the Ngok Dinka.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2007 The East African. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
