Splitting Sudan

There are irrefutable and tangible indications that, since 2003, Sudan has been the object of a partition process occurring beneath the guise of a peace process that began with the Machakos negotiations. These negotiations resulted in a framework agreement for a settlement between Khartoum and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), in accordance with which a referendum is to be held in the south six years from the date the peace agreement goes into effect, which is to say in 2011, over whether the south should remain part of Sudan or secede and form an independent state. Such were the pressures exerted on the government of Sudan that it had no alternative but to accept this agreement, especially when a body of opinion in the north voiced its approval of the secession of the south, which has long been heavily supported by the US, Israel and neighbouring countries hostile to Khartoum, if that meant saving what remains of Sudan.

President Bashir must certainly have realised that the southerners would be little swayed by his government's policies, however sympathetic they were to their demands in order to induce them to remain an integral part of the nation, and perhaps he had already mentally prepared himself for this type of political defeat. However, what he and other Sudanese officials had not anticipated was not only that the SPLM would refuse to change its name, but that it would also take this name as its literal objective: the liberation of Sudan, in its entirety, from the Arabs and Muslims, whom it would drive northwards into Egypt, thereby abolishing Sudan's Arab-Muslim identity and making it possible to bring the country into the fold of regional alliances hostile to Egypt and to the Arab world.

Curiously, Egypt had not discerned the full dimensions of this scheme, even when signs of its implementation began to stare it in the face. To date, the following signs should have been impossible to miss and misinterpret:

First, the SPLM's involvement in Darfur and the Eastern Sudan crisis betrays its determination to rebel against the notion of one government over a united and indivisible Sudan, even though the SPLM attained the office of vice-president and became a partner in national decision-making processes.

Second, the SPLM has been furnishing arms, rumoured to come from Israel, to the rebels in Darfur and encouraging other rebel movements to reject the Abuja Treaty despite the many concessions offered by Khartoum.

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http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2007/832/op5.htm