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Sudan Tribune

Plural news and views on Sudan

Passing of referendum Bills: People’s victory

By Zechariah Manyok Biar

December 30, 2009 — The passing of South Sudan Referendum Bill and the Abyei Referendum Bill by Sudanese Parliament, in their original forms that the Presidency and the Council of Ministers agreed upon, is a victory for the people of South Sudan and the people of Abyei. Not only is this step in Sudanese politics a victory for the people of South Sudan and Abyei, it also shows that there is a change in the way that things are done in Khartoum.

The month of December, 2009 may be described as both bitter and sweet because it is a month that the political system in Khartoum was tested. The agreements that we are now celebrating came out of the humiliation of the opposition leading officials on December 7, 2009. Even though Yasir Arman was beaten by Sudanese police against his political immunity, he can now be a happy man together with the people of South Sudan because he stood with them for their rights. A system that has never experienced real democracy is hard to correct.

The National Congress Party’s (NCP) Members of Parliament seemed to have underestimated the reason why the marginalized people in Sudan took arms against the system in Khartoum for more than twenty years in the near past. The implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) would be smooth now if NCP had understood what many people died for during the civil war between the North and the South in Sudan.

Northern politicians also do not understand the differences between Northerners and Southerners. Even though the cultures of both Northerners and Southerners are cultures of honor, the honor in the North is based on passive respect of authority, while the honor in South is based on the questioning of issues. People in South Sudan question God in their prayers and question religious beliefs in public. No authority would force Southerners into what they do not want and expect no resistance.

Southerners only do what they agree with. They can be passive to authority in issues that they are not familiar with, which was the reason why they never minded about the system in Khartoum for long time. Now South Sudanese know what they want and it would be difficult for anybody to make it difficult for them to get it. Many people in the world agree with South Sudanese that a political system that deprives citizens of their political choices is a bad one.

Aristotle in his Politics argues that man in nature is a political animal because he possesses speech. Speech for Aristotle is not a mere sound; speech is logos or word. Logos is both a reason in the mind and a word on the tongue. Citizens get involved in political issues through both reasoning and speech. Because human beings are political animals, they examine other human beings’ speech to find out a reason behind the words. This is one of the reasons why cheating would not give Northerners what they want. We need to be honest to one another in Sudan at this time because we all know what we want for ourselves and our children.

It does not matter who tells Southerners what, the only important thing is to give them freedom to make their choice about their future in Sudan. Those who want to campaign for either unity or division of Sudan should take time to make their case and let Southerners choose, based on the case that is more convincing to them.

Although the regime gives citizens their identity, Aristotle argues that a regime cannot be understood as a commercial alliance or as a defense body. What holds citizens together is the bond of common affection. Civic affection, according to Aristotle, is citizens’ intentional choice of living together. It is affection, loyalty, and friendships which make up a regime, as Aristotle argues. People who feel affection for one another are unlikely going to fall into conflict.

If Aristotle’s arguments about political friendships make sense, and I agree with Aristotle, then it would be counterproductive to force citizens who have no common bond of affection to live together. The lack of common affection between Northerners and Southerners might be the reason why there is unending war in Sudan.

However, the lack of common affection between Northerners and Southerners is a manufactured one. The lack of trust that exists between the North and the South today was built over time by political system in the North.

Political system in the North was built on the idea that some citizens in Sudan were better than others. That is the reason why some parts, South Sudan being one of these parts, were marginalized in everything. An outsider cannot believe that Juba was technically the second political city after Khartoum in Sudan before the civil war. Juba even today is not different from villages in many parts of Northern Sudan, let alone towns that rank far below Juba in the North.

To make matters worst, Southerners were seen by Northern politicians as people who could be ruled but could never rule others. Aristotle believes that a regime is a system in which power is distributed in a community, even though there can be dominant class in such a community. The dominance that Aristotle sees as exception in political sharing of power is not a one-take-it-all kind of system that we had been seeing in Sudan since 1956 to 2005. Southerners experienced the real share of power under the CPA. This is the reason why Southerners want to experience this power for sometimes before they think about a common affection between the North and the South.

But this yearning for self-rule in South Sudan has nothing to do with racial hatred. Northerners would be very welcome in South Sudan as citizens and leaders if Southerners chose secession under real freedom in 2011. There can also be a possibility of the reunification of Sudan in the future, as Dr. Luka Biong Deng once put it, if South and North Sudan stay as peaceful neighbors after 2011. The fact that Northerners like Yasir Arman are top leaders in the South now shows that Southerners are yearning for freedom, not hatred.

NCP must understand that the choice of secession of South Sudan by South Sudanese through democratic means would be better than the Unilateral Declaration of South Sudan as a different nation in 2011. It would be a wise thing for NCP to engage SPLM in fair discussions to focus on how Northern and Southern Sudan will remain as good friends after 2011 if Southerners chose secession over unity of Sudan.

The victory of the people of South Sudan and the people of Abyei that we saw this week in the passing of the two controversial referendum bills will continue regardless of what the Parliament in Khartoum does. Better for the Parliament to be nice than hostile to the wish of Southerners.

Zechariah Manyok Biar is a graduate student at Abilene Christian University, Texas, USA. He just graduated with a Master of Arts in Christian Ministry and he is still pursuing a Master of Science in Social Work, specializing in Administration and Planning. For comments, contact him at email: [email protected]

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