Black
Monday: The Political and Economic Dimensions of Sudan's Urban
Riots
Khalid Mustafa
Medani
August 9,
2005
(Khalid
Mustafa Medani is an associate professor of political science and
Islamic studies at McGill University and an editor of
Middle
East Report. He contributed this article from
Khartoum.)
The sudden
death of John Garang de Mabior, the long-time leader of the Sudan
People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) recently named first vice
president of Sudan, unleashed a torrent of anger and protest in
Khartoum. Suspecting that the July 30 helicopter crash that killed
Garang and 13 others was not an accident, thousands of young men and
women took to the streets of the Sudanese capital, setting fire to
scores of businesses and numerous government offices and public
facilities. In the ensuing three days of rioting, which spread to
the southern city of Juba, as many as 130 people were killed and
thousands more were injured. The Khartoum government, SPLM
lieutenants and Garang's widow Rebecca insisted that the crash was
accidental and appealed, somewhat in vain, for calm before the
disturbances finally fizzled out. Garang's August 6 funeral in Juba
was quiet, but the rioting has laid bare structural tensions that
persist as the Khartoum government and the SPLM seek to consolidate
a permanent peace on the north-south front of Africa's
longest-running civil war.
Like the war
itself, the unrest on what Sudanese term "black Monday" has been
widely depicted as driven by ethnic or religious hostility between
the "Arab" Muslim north and the "African" Christian and animist
south. But while Garang's death was the immediate spark, the three
days of riots were not a spontaneous protest against "Arab"
northerners by southern Sudanese "Africans." Rather, the riots were
ultimately a reflection of economic and political grievances long
harbored by a wide range of poor and marginalized Sudanese --
southerners and others -- living in and around Khartoum's urban
fringe. The disturbances, like Sudan's civil war, are best
understood as the outcome of frustration resulting from years of
neglect and political repression of the periphery by the central
government.
ETHNIC AND
RACIAL ENMITIES
The riots began
in the commercial districts of al-Suq al-Arabi and al-Suq al-Markazi
in downtown Khartoum. They then quickly spread throughout the
metropolitan area to the neighborhoods on the city's perimeter that
are home to an estimated four million persons displaced during the
north-south war's latest (and, it is hoped, last) phase from
1983-2005. Few areas of Khartoum were spared. In the middle- and
upper-class neighborhoods of Khartoum North (Bahri) and Riyadh,
affluent residents could only watch as a number of homes were looted
and burned. Hardest hit, however, were working-class neighborhoods
like Hajj Yusuf, al-Kalakla, al-Maamura and Dar al-Salam, where the
vast majority of the deaths and injuries occurred.
On the surface,
the assaults and looting throughout greater Khartoum did take on an
ethnic and racial dimension. In areas near the displaced persons
camps, and in the generally ethnically heterogeneous working-class
neighborhoods in Omdurman, some southern youth clearly targeted
lighter-skinned "Arab" residents. These residents belong to branches
of the Jaaliyyin, the Arabized ethnic groups from the central and
northern regions of Sudan who are perceived by many to have
monopolized control of successive regimes in Khartoum. While the
rioters burned and looted the homes and commercial establishments of
these groups, many purposely spared the "darker"-skinned residents
and shopowners. (Many "Arab" Sudanese are in fact just as "dark" as
non-Arab southerners; the difference lies in claimed lineage, not in
skin color per se.)
In Hajj Yusuf,
as well as in the middle-class districts of Bahri, home of the
traditional "Arab" quarters, ethnic and racial enmities have indeed
emerged. Many local residents have closed up their stores, boarded
up their homes and asked neighbors to keep a look out for suspicious
"southern"-looking individuals in the neighborhood. Even more
disturbing, there are have been several counter-attacks on
southerners by residents of Hajj Yusuf and al-Maamura in the "spirit
of self-defense," and a number of Arab areas have set up
neighborhood watch committees.
The
government-held garrison towns of Juba and Renk in the Upper Nile
province witnessed ethnic violence against Arab merchants, referred
to by some southerners with the pejorative term "Jallaba." In Renk,
non-Muslim southern rioters entered and destroyed local mosques,
while in Juba over 250 Arab merchants saw their stores burned and
looted. The northern Arab merchants had to seek the refuge of
government security forces after fleeing their homes. The attacks
against "Jallaba" in the south were a result of a long history of
commercial competition and exploitation (including the involvement
of some Arab merchants in selling southerners as slaves).
CLOUDED VISION
OF PLURALISM
As many
Sudanese note, the irony is that just prior to Garang's demise there
was an emerging new acceptance among both northern and southern
Sudanese that a "New Sudan" based on ethnic and racial tolerance and
political pluralism was both possible and desirable. Garang himself
would be the inspiration for such a "New Sudan."
By the terms of
the Comprehensive Peace Agreement signed by the Khartoum regime and
the SPLM in Naivasha, Kenya on January 9, 2005, the veteran rebel
commander Garang was to be sworn in as first vice president to
Sudanese President Gen. Omar al-Bashir exactly six months later.
Garang was indeed included in the government on July 9, inaugurating
a six-year "interim period" that is supposed to culminate in
national elections in 2009 and a referendum on self-determination
for the south in 2011. The CPA also made Garang president of a new
South Sudan Government that is to have extensive autonomy and
mediate between Khartoum and the southern provinces. Khartoum and
the South Sudan Government are to split oil revenues 50-50 in the
interim period.
Initial anxiety
that the CPA will now collapse was ameliorated on August 4, when
Bashir named Salwa Kiir Mayardit, Garang's deputy in the SPLM, to
the first vice presidency and the presidency of the
south.
But Salwa Kiir
may be less committed to the vision of a "New Sudan" than was his
late predecessor. The greater danger after Garang's death is that,
if the CPA is not implemented speedily, the fallout from the August
1-3 riots could easily derail hopes of spreading that vision at the
popular level. Following the riots, many residents of Arab descent
talk openly of a "unified" and Arabized Sudan with closer ties to
Egypt, while southerners are more than ever convinced that the "lack
of respect" paid to Garang indicates that there are two Sudans and
that the South must be "liberated" and fully independent of the
north. Southerners cite the initial bulletin of the Sudanese news
agency that Garang was not dead, as well as delays in declaring a
period of official mourning and organizing a formal investigation
into the crash, as evidence for the "lack of respect."
Regardless of
whether these complaints are justified, they express very real
sentiments of southerners vis-a-vis Khartoum. As Rebecca Garang
eloquently put it, the ethnic and racial violence in what had been
one of the region's most peaceful capital cities is a wakeup call to
Sudanese. The message is clear: without the implementation of the
CPA and the transition to genuine democracy, the riots could cement
the positions of hardliners on both sides of the Sudan
question.
SOCIO-ECONOMIC
ROOTS
Despite the
riots' undoubted ethnic dimension, they also reflected deep anger at
the very difficult social and economic conditions facing the most
marginal communities in the capital. Rising social inequality,
coupled with an inflation rate of over 40 percent and the paucity of
social and health services, has fed a groundswell of resentment
among millions of Sudanese living on the urban fringe. While there
are no official figures as of yet, property damage is estimated in
the millions of dollars. These estimates include the cost of the
destruction by arson of several car dealerships belonging to Sudan's
most prominent business families, as well as grocery stores,
supermarkets, pharmacies, gold stores, and vegetable and meat market
stalls. As the general secretary of the Khartoum Merchant
Association, Muhammad al-Atiyya, put it: "The trading sector
suffered the most and paid the highest price for Garang's death."
The protesters themselves did not loot the commercial
establishments; the robberies seem to have been committed by
criminal opportunists who followed in the protests' wake.
The
socio-economic roots of the riots are also evident in the evolution
of the protests in Khartoum, as well as in southern towns with mixed
northern-southern communities. While the protests and banditry began
in the center of Khartoum, they quickly spread to several displaced
persons camps outside of Khartoum proper. Residents of the largest
camps of Angola and Mandela entered the nearby working-class
districts and open markets of Omdurman, burning police stations,
hospitals and local government offices. Carrying matches and cans
filled with gasoline, southern youths (both men and women) then
broke into and burned down numerous homes. A multitude of others
followed in the wake of the first group looting homes and offices
and carrying off what they could. Despite reports to the contrary,
the residents of Angola and Mandela are not exclusively southern
Sudanese -- and the rioters were not exclusively southern either.
Their ranks included a large contingent from the war-torn western
province of Darfur as well as the Nuba Mountains region in the east.
Not coincidentally, in recent years these regions have endured the
greatest suffering and displacement as a result of the wars pursued
by the regime.
The riots are
therefore best understood as a spur-of-the-moment, albeit
short-lived uprising by southerners, Nuba and Darfurians living in
the capital against the regime. This is clearly evident in the fact
that the initial protesters did not loot property but only sought to
demonstrate their anger and opposition. The protesters' chants did
not attack northerners in general, but instead focused on the ruling
Islamist National Congress Party: "The National Congress is
traitorous!"
For their part,
in order to deflect criticism, the government has alternatively
described the riots as a spontaneous outpouring of "grief and
hysteria" or a result of an organized fifth column led by the
"enemies of peace." In reality, they were rooted in grievances
shared by communities in peripheral regions to the south, west and
east of the capital: decades of economic neglect, forcible
imposition of rigid interpretations of Islamic law and the stifling
of independent civil society institutions and political
freedoms.
"CONSOLIDATION"
In particular,
the groundswell of anger comes in reaction to the Islamist-backed
regime's economic polices of the last 16 years. These policies of
"consolidation," designed in the 1990s by Hassan Turabi, once the
primary Islamist ideologue behind the regime but now an opposition
figure, effectively brought the entire economic and political system
under an Islamist monopoly. For almost two decades, the Islamists
purged rivals from government, military and civil service posts,
monopolized a host of financial institutions, limited credit access
to members of the National Islamic Front, and controlled the
majority of export and import licenses and commercial enterprises.
These policies have long been a source of much public
dissatisfaction, not only in the south and Darfur, but also among
disenfranchised Sudanese in Khartoum.
Anger at the
government is rooted in a sense that the unjust "consolidation" has
proceeded apace, while educational and job opportunities, health,
housing and transportation for the majority of the population have
been left to stagnate. While many rioters exploited these grievances
to loot and destroy private property, the majority belonging to
Khartoum's working class were moved to attack commercial and
business enterprises out of anger, and the fact that they saw, in
John Garang, the hope of achieving some level of economic and social
justice after years of increasing pauperization. The fact that the
National Congress is to have, in accordance with the CPA, as much as
52 percent representation in the interim government, to the
exclusion of other parties and civil society organizations (with the
exception of the SPLM), will remain a bone of contention.
In the
aftermath of the riots, while state officials belatedly called for
all Sudanese to guard against communal discord and chaos (fitna), it
was left to long-repressed civil society and volunteer organizations
to fill the gap. Such groups, ranging from religious organizations
to professional syndicates and labor unions, not only immediately
called for harmony but also began to do the actual work of
delivering food and services to communities devastated by the riots.
They have also convened inter-faith and inter-ethnic working groups
to guard against the pending threats to the hard-won Naivasha peace
agreement. These organizations have demanded not only that owners of
destroyed and damaged property be compensated, as the government has
promised, but also that the livelihoods of Khartoum's poorer strata
be secured. In a conciliatory move, the Sudanese Red Crescent has
begun delivering relief supplies to the Angola and Mandela displaced
person camps.
ON THE
MARGINS
Many Sudanese,
rather than blame intractable north-south tensions for the riots,
have placed the blame squarely on the regime. As a resident of Hajj
Yusuf, one of the most ransacked neighborhoods, put it: "It is
really the fault of the government. The authorities should have
expected that there would be this kind of reaction to the death of
Garang, but there was an inexplicable security vacuum nevertheless."
Another commented: "The security forces were very late in preparing
a contingency plan to secure the capital despite the fact that they
had information about Garang's death [before the protesters did].
The government should have anticipated that this would happen,
especially since our 'Sudanese brothers' saw in Garang the beginning
of a new chapter in their history in this country."
Garang was
well-known for advancing the thesis that a new Sudan will have to
include the "marginalized." The riots in Khartoum have proven that
his diagnosis of Sudan's political problems was accurate. "Black
Monday" and the succeeding events have certainly highlighted the
fragility of the peace on the north-south front and underscored the
weakness of a deal that excludes rebels in Darfur and parts of the
east. But the disturbances also point to the perils of focusing too
much on the mechanisms of power-sharing and autonomy -- and too
little on the quotidian burdens of the marginalized men and women
whom those mechanisms are supposed to serve.
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