Why the Abyei Battle is Raging

Fred Oluoch

26 May 2011

After violating the Sudanese peace agreement and occupying Abyei early in the week, Khartoum came out strongly maintaining that they were just responding to constant aggression from their partners in the south.

Sudanese ambassador to Kenya, Kamal Ismail Saeed, said at a press conference in Nairobi that the Sudanese Defence Forces (SAF) was responding to the latest of the 24 violations that have allegedly been committed by the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in Abyei in breach of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA).

He was, however, quick to point out that SAF is ready to withdraw once the two parties negotiate an agreeable solution. But this could be easier said than done. His statement was contrary to the position taken by parliament in Khartoum, which voted on Monday, to support the stay of the Armed Forces in Abyei town until further arrangements are carried out through political understanding.

The MPs were categorical that Abyei will remain a northern town until the population decides on their situation by themselves.

In the 2005 peace agreement, Abyei was granted a special status which requires both sides to keep their troops outside the area until residents vote on their destiny. In the meantime, peace and security was to be maintained by the Joint Integrated Unit (JIU) comprising soldiers from both SAF and SPLA.

The Abyei Protocol, which was signed nine months before the 2005 Sudanese peace deal, expected Abyei residents to hold their simultaneous referendum from January 9 to decide whether they want to belong to the South or the North.

Conflict

But polling there was indefinitely postponed after neither side was able to agree on who should be eligible to participate. Khartoum had wanted the nomadic Misseriya tribe, who are residents of the north but move to Abyei for water and pasture, to also take part. The Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) insists that it is only the Ngok Dinka that has the right to decide the future of Abyei.

With both sides accusing each other of aggression and violation of the CPA, the Abyei issue-which was to form part of the post referendum discussions- is likely to boil into a stalemate that could lead to war. There is no guarantee that the Abyei issue will be solved before the south becomes a republic on July 9.

Ambassador Saeed says the issue has to be decided in accordance with the CPA, yet the programme as laid down in the peace agreement has expired. It is either the two sides to sit down and renegotiate the terms of engagement as spelled in the CPA, or ignore it altogether and adopt new ways of solving the issue.

The most intriguing thing is that both north and south maintained that Abyei belonged to them as per the 1956 border lines. For one, Jervasio Okot, a member of a civil society pressure group, some southerners are now calling for the Abyei issue to be settled politically given that the British colonialists were the ones who decided that Abyei would be better off governed from El-Obeid, which is in South Kordofan

But Ambassador Saed argued that everybody agrees that Abyei was in the north as per 1956 when Sudan got independence.

“At the political level, we would like to reaffirm that we are exercising a lot of restrain to maintain peace. There is no going back to war and all issues should be solved amicably. We are committed to CPA in letter and spirit,” he said.

The question now is who is the aggressor? The SPLM maintains that the recent invasion is in line with the recent utterances by President Omar al-Bashir, who threatened that he will not recognise the independence of the South if Juba continues to lay claim to Abyei.

But Magdi Mofadal, a diplomat at the Sudanese Embassy in Nairobi, argued that President al-Bashir was only responding to a move by the SPLM to include Abyei in their constitution as the integral part of the south, before the issue is fully solved.

According to Aly Verjee, a senior researcher at the Rift Valley Institute, the issue of Abyei has dragged on for almost 40 years without any solution, and there is no guarantee it would be solved soon. It was discussed in the 1972 Addis Ababa Agreement, again after the signing of the CPA in 2005 and now after the referendum.

Dinka-Arab factor

Historically, Abyei — which contains the bulk of the oil deposits in the south — has been occupied by the Ngok Dinka and the Misseriya. For decades the two communities, who both keep cattle, had developed a traditional arrangement where during drought the Misseriya could water their cattle on River Kiir, the only one that survives the drought in the region.

Thus, The Arab Misseriya and the Ngok Dinka ethnic groups have long held competing claims for access to the cattle grazing pastures and resources of the oil-rich Abyei region.

But after the CPA, the region became increasingly militarised and the government of South Sudan has been accusing Khartoum of arming the Misseriya to terrorise other groups with the intention of intimidating them before the 2011 referendum.

In 1905, during the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium period, the British transferred the administration of the nine Ngok chiefdoms from Bahr el-Ghazal province to Kordofan. However, the arming of the Misseriya by the government of Sudan during the first civil war and the alignment of the Ngok Dinka with the SPLM sparked the modern day dispute over which group could rightfully claim the Abyei territory.

In the run-up to the 2005 peace deal, the two parties were unable to reach an amicable solution and agreed to establish the Abyei Boundary Commission that was to look at the conflicting historical claims.

The report was completed in July 2005; Khartoum rejected it, while the SPLM supported it. The report had indicated the issue should be solved on the basis of the 1956 borders which indicated that Abyei belonged to the nine Ngok chiefdoms.

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