This month has seen a panoply of peace initiatives and more globally, of proposals to end the "Sudanese Question".

A lot of this is due to the active and newly emerged Khadhafi, at long last freed from the cumbersome burden of world-wide terrorism - Lokerbie and elsewhere; our "bullient colonel" has amazingly changed into a "sage of Africa" seeking to earn the good graces of Europe and the U.S. who, be it said in passing, are only too ready to give him absolution.

The succession of events : the mediation of Libya and Qatar to reconcile Sudan with Eritrea; then Libyan mediation, equally successful, between Uganda and the Congo of Kabila. Finally it was from Tripoli that Sadiq el-Mahdi set out to meet Hassan el-Tourabi at Geneva.. The two enemy brothers-in-law supposedly envisaged a means to reconcile the opposition of the National Democratic Alliance and the Sudanese government.

All this is very fine and nothing can give more cause for rejoicing than to perceive a faint sign of hope for peace in Sudan and a return of democracy to Khartoum. 

The Western diplomacies are not the last to support such efforts, the more so that Sudanese petrol will  shortly start being exported through the Bachair terminal on the Red Sea ; once the largest country of Africa is solvent, it will offer profitable prospects for our companies ...

As a way of celebrating this new state of affairs, on 7 and 8 June France will host Mr Mustafa Osman Ismail, the Sudanese Foreign Minister, after several aborted efforts. The reason for this being the fact that since the assassination attempt on Egyptian President Moubarak at Addis Abeba in 1995, all journeys abroad by Sudanese personalities are under UN embargo.

Yet, as we say, one swallow does not make a Summer and our leaders when dealing with the Sudan dossier would do the right thing if they learned lessons from their recent Corsican misadventure.

Impossible not to call to mind a certain parallelism between these two dossiers. Indeed over several years we have been able to confirm to what degree information on the Sudanese reality is distorted on reaching Paris. It is not our intention here to discuss the causes for this. We want to alert public opinion and - why not - our leaders, to be vigilant as the title or our news sheet indicates. 

Before we get at the diplomatic manoeuvres, it seems appropriate to recall some facts.

-At a time when the regime of Khartoum prepares to celebrate its tenth anniversary, it is loathed by the vast majority of Sudanese, both from the North and the South. How could it be otherwise since everyone, except a handful of profiteers, has seen their material situation plummet, the most basic public freedoms and rights or the person denied them and constantly held in contempt. At the same time a civil war is raging and each year registers the number of its victims while not a single statistic is forthcoming to measure its daily horror….

-The liberalisation of the regime is only a decoy, even if a part of the leaders would like to obtain the removal of sanctions that cut them off from the international community, from the US and Europe and are therefore ready to compromise. By presenting their policy under a more favourable light they hope to put away out of sight the colossal fortunes they have amassed in ten years of traffic and plundering.

-Unfortunately, operations such as « internal peace », the adoption of a Constitution and the new Law dated  January 1999 on political associations are only an illusion or overtures destined to widen the base of the Islamic National Front of Hassan el-Tourabi, under the form of National Congress uniting all the prebendaries of the regime.

-"The internal peace" has never rallied other than the war lords avid for money, weapons and power. Today they are tearing one another apart for control of petrol at Bentiu, or the manna shed by UNO’S Operation Lifeline Sudan.

-The Constitution adopted in 1998, though duly stamped « Islamic » is constantly held in contempt in the absence of all separation of power. The Head of State, General Omer el-Beshir never misses an opportunity to remind everyone that the Sudan is and will remain an Islamic State against all odds and that since he came to power through guns, he will only quit it through guns. Not a week passes without there being arrests or disappearance of journalists or trade unionists ; but it is the totality of the population that lives under the permanent threat of omnipotent and omnipresent security forces. Through it may now possible for politicians or intellectuals in view to express freely critical opinions, for the mass of the population it would at best lead to losing their job, at worst to disappear after atrocious torture in the sinister ghost houses.

-The security forces, each service acting for a different clan within the state apparatus, seem to become ever more autonomous. Even psychopathic provincial governors have all liberty to torch dozens of villages protecting « pursuit of bandits ». This can be seen in the Kordofan, Darfur and along the Red Sea coast;

-It is in such a context that should be considered the half tolerant, half supportive attitude of the regime with regard to the reappearance of wide-scale slavery, as also the daily humiliations applied in a chancy way concerning the obligation for women to be veiled, the prohibition of festivals, dancing, music... These vexations, frustrations that punish all Sudanese whether Christians, animists or sincere Muslims, in what they hold as most precious, most respected, are only one of the means used to maintain an atmosphere of fear and terror. During this time, hidden behind the high walls of their luxury villas, the leaders practise all kinds of perversion and the unscrupulous business caste who are their usual entourage, live with impunity many light-years from the rest of the population.

-So, in order to understand the meaning of recent discussions on peace, one should recall that Khartoum refused to return to the negotiating table of the IGAD on 20 April this year.. Indeed one of the preliminaries to all agreement in this regional framework is Khartoum’s acceptance of a separation between religion and state (Declaration of the IGAD principles 1994 *). Recently General Beshir declared he saw no inconvenience in accepting the secession of the South. This can be explained by the feeling that it would be easy for Khartoum to pull the strings of an independent South torn apart by tribal or clan contention which Khartoum could easily stir up. On the other hand it is out of the question to return to a lay and democratic State that would deprive the Islamic regime of all vindication.

-However the passage by Tripoli or Cairo, even with the support of Paris or other European capitals less involved on the governmental side will doubtless be insufficient to bring a lasting solution to a conflict that has already been going on for more than forty years.

-As to the agreement between Sudan and Eritrea, it is of value only to the degree that it allows each side to spare its troops engaged elsewhere ; but neither camp lowers its guard and for Asmara the presence of the Islamic regime at its door remains a mortal danger for a precarious national unity

-The meeting between Sadiq el-Mahdid and Hassan el-Tourabi caused great surprise ; but it can be understood if taken as the attempt by two threatened or disgraced champions of Sudanese politics to make good a come back with their respective followers. Hassan el-Tourabi is strongly contested within the Sudanese State leadership that has globally chosen to fall in behind Omer el-Bechir’s standard. He is for recovering relations with the West in order to keep his assets by abandoning Tourabi’s dreams of an Islamic conquest of the planet. Hassan el-Tourabi, unanimously detested by the ordinary man of the street in Sudan as the person behind the fatal putsch of 30 June 1989, is also feared by the politicians he dispossessed and chased from power. Since he dreads being made the scapegoat sacrificed on the altar of national reconciliation he attempts to gain back the first move by controlling the process.

-Sadiq el-Mahdi is not much more in the esteem of public opinion for it was his disastrous government, a mixture of double language and immobility that opened the road to his brother-in-law. His sole preoccupation is to regain the power he thinks is his right ; to attain this end he would be ready to support Umma party and be accepted by the National Democratic Alliance. Since his escape from Sudan at the end of 1996, he has been unable to regain the leadership. Some observers believe that the Sudanese security forces themselves organised the departure of Sadiq el-Mahdi from Sudan, knowing that his ability to cause trouble would be perfect as a means to prevent the N.D.A. from becoming an effective opposition movement.

-As a recent article emphasises, what prevents the country from finding a solution to its problem is the incapacity of the Sudan, more especially their politicians, to go beyond the allegiances and traditional divisions. It is alas, this incapacity of the opposition that is the strongest asset of the present regime. The only reason why the regime is interested in all these negotiations is to gain time knowing that it now has little to fear from the exiled opposition or the West, and that despite the war raging over half the country its own business is prospering.