At a Glance
The Man Who Made and Unmade Sudan's Best Chance for Peace
The historical judgment on Gaafar Nimeiry is ultimately a judgment about an act of destruction — specifically, the destruction in September 1983 of the Addis Ababa Agreement, the one moment in Sudan's post-independence history when the country had found a formula for managing its fundamental political problem that had actually worked. To understand the magnitude of this destruction, it is necessary first to appreciate what the Addis Ababa Agreement represented and what it had achieved, because the decade between 1972 and 1983 is so comprehensively overshadowed by what came after that its significance as a period of genuine possibility is easy to lose.
The first civil war — the Anyanya insurgency that had begun in the south in the late 1950s and grown through the 1960s into a sustained armed conflict — had cost approximately half a million lives by the time the Addis Ababa Agreement was signed in February 1972. Nimeiry's decision to seek a negotiated settlement was not inevitable; previous Sudanese governments had consistently chosen military suppression over negotiation, and the dominant current of northern Sudanese political opinion held that the south's political aspirations were illegitimate, the product of colonial manipulation rather than genuine grievance, and that firm administration rather than political accommodation was the appropriate response. Nimeiry's willingness to break with this orthodoxy and offer the south the genuine regional autonomy that the agreement established was, whatever his motivations, a genuine political achievement — one that required him to override the resistance of significant elements of northern Sudanese political and military opinion.
The decade that followed the agreement was, by the standards of what came before and after, a period of relative normalcy for the south. The Southern Region, with its elected assembly and appointed executive based in Juba, provided a framework of regional governance that gave the south a degree of political agency it had never previously possessed within Sudan. The integration of Anyanya fighters into the national army — the most sensitive provision of the agreement and the one most subject to tension in its implementation — proceeded with sufficient success to maintain the peace, even if the specific terms of integration generated ongoing grievances. Development investment in the south, while never reaching the levels that southern politicians demanded, increased in ways that gave concrete meaning to the promise of equal citizenship within Sudan. For a decade, the agreement held, and people who had lived through the previous seventeen years of war were able to build something like ordinary lives.
Nimeiry's decision to destroy this arrangement was driven by a combination of factors that historians have debated since: the growing influence of Hassan al-Turabi and the Islamist movement, whose political support Nimeiry increasingly needed as other sources of legitimacy dried up; the discovery of oil in southern Sudan in the late 1970s, which created both economic stakes in controlling southern territory and the specific trigger for conflict in the form of disputed pipeline routes and revenue-sharing arrangements; the broader regional shifts that were moving Arab politics in an Islamist direction after Sadat's assassination and Iran's revolution; and Nimeiry's own psychological deterioration, noted by people who worked with him in the early 1980s, that produced increasingly erratic and grandiose decision-making. The September Laws that emerged from this combination were less a considered political strategy than a symptom of a government that had lost its coherence.
The specific decisions of 1983 — the abolition of the Southern Region, its replacement by three smaller regions in a classic divide-and-rule manoeuvre, and the imposition of the September Laws — were experienced in the south not as separate policy choices but as a connected package of northern aggression that demonstrated conclusively that the Addis Ababa settlement was dead. John Garang's formation of the Sudan People's Liberation Army in May 1983, drawing initially on the mutinying soldiers of the 105th Battalion at Bor who refused redeployment to the north, was the military response to this package. The SPLA's rapid growth from a mutiny into a fully-fledged guerrilla army was testimony to the depth of southern disillusionment — the extent to which even those southerners who had invested in the Addis Ababa settlement as a genuine framework for their future within Sudan had concluded that the northern political establishment could not be trusted to honour its commitments.
The popular uprising of April 1985 that removed Nimeiry from power was itself a consequence of the policy catastrophe of 1983: the renewed southern war was consuming resources that Sudan's already stressed economy could not provide, the September Laws had generated opposition even in the north among professional and educated classes who found the flogging courts and amputation sentences an affront to the legal culture they had been trained in, and the famine that was developing in the west of the country — partly a consequence of the drought but enormously compounded by government policy failures — was producing a humanitarian crisis whose scale the regime was trying and failing to conceal. The strike called by the professional associations in April 1985, and the military's subsequent decision to remove Nimeiry rather than fire on the demonstrators in the streets of Khartoum, replicated with significant variations the pattern of the October 1964 uprising that had removed Abboud — a demonstration that Sudanese civil society retained the capacity to remove rulers through organised popular action even after years of repression.
Nimeiry spent fourteen years in Egyptian exile, a deposed dictator living on the hospitality of a government that had its own reasons for maintaining relationships with former African leaders. His return to Sudan in 1999, invited by Omar al-Bashir's Islamist government, was the return of a man who had helped to create the conditions for the political forces that had superseded him — his destruction of the left in 1971 and his Islamist turn in 1983 together having cleared the ground for the Islamist movement's eventual seizure of power in the 1989 coup. He stood for president in the 2010 elections, receiving a negligible share of the vote, and died in May 2009 — before those elections, before the 2011 independence referendum, before the formal partition of Sudan that his 1983 decisions had done so much to make inevitable. The country he left behind was not the Sudan he had found in 1969, and the difference was overwhelmingly one of destruction rather than construction.