Eastern Sudan tempts Darfurian fate

By ISN Security Watch staff in Nairobi and Khartoum (07/03/06)
International Relations and Security Network - Zurich - Switzerland

With conflict rife in Sudan’s troubled Darfur, and peace still tenuous in the south, another of Sudan’s marginalized regions could be set to erupt. Eastern Sudan ostensibly exhibits many of the same traits that led to war in Darfur since 2003 and in southern Sudan from 1983-2005.
On 24 January 2005, three weeks after the Sudanese government and the southern-based Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) signed the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), the Sudanese army opened fire on a demonstration in the eastern city of Port Sudan, on the Red Sea coast. At least 20 people were killed.

This incident plus the ongoing government clampdown, tensions both generated and exacerbated by the signing of the CPA, and the potent example of government tactics in Darfur all contributed to the formation of the Eastern Front in February 2005. The newly formed and relatively unexamined movement promises to forcibly resist Khartoum’s likely attempt to retake the Hameshkoreb enclave in eastern Sudan, near the Eritrean border, once the former SPLM/A withdraws.

Eastern Sudan comprises three states: Kassala, Gedaref, and Red Sea State. It has a population of around four million people. The main ethnic groups are the Beja and the Rashaida. The Beja are the largest group in the region, comprising numerous subdivisions. Indigenous to the area, they adhere to a Sufi brand of Islam that fits uneasily with the Wahhabite-influenced National Islamic Front (NIF), which forms the backbone of the National Congress Party (NCP) elite that now dominates the Khartoum government.
The Beja Congress is an established political-military force in eastern Sudan, contesting elections in the post-independence era, but mostly losing out locally to the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), which is the political front for the local Sufi Khatmiyya sect to which most Beja adhere.

The Rashaida are nomadic descendants of Bedouin immigrants into the area from the Arabian Peninsula in the 19th Century. Retaining links to the Gulf and adhering to their traditional lifestyle, the relatively wealthy group remains simultaneously more marginalized, as government agricultural and pipeline policies cut into the land used for nomadic lifestyle. The Rashaida Free Lions, the other constituent part of the Eastern Front, is a relatively new entity.
Local grievances can be traced directly back to the aftermath of the 1989 NIF coup in Khartoum. Land expropriation in the name of larger agricultural schemes has seen many Beja move to the slums of Kassala and Port Sudan. Much of the land was given over to local and River Nile-based elites linked to the ruling regime.

In 1990, the extrajudicial execution of Mohammed Karrar, the Beja governor of the region, was seen as a direct attack on Beja consciousness and lay at the backdrop of a Beja Congress decision to join the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) armed struggle, linking northern opposition groups to the southern rebellion led by the SPLM/A. The Beja Congress joined the NDA in 1995 as it saw the need to push for greater self-rule for the Beja in particular and the east in general.