Sudan: Persistent Constitutional Stalemate
The territories now constituting the Republic of Sudan were first unified under a somewhat centralized colonial administration by Ottoman-Egyptian armies through a gradual process starting in the 1820s.
That colonial period ended when Muhammad Ahmed, a Sudanese sufi who claimed to be al-Mahdi (divinely ordained savior), led a nationalist/religious revolt that took control of most of the country by 1884. It is pertinent to note here that the Mahdi movement along the Nile valley was in the tradition of the Islamic jihad reform movements along the Sahil region of West Africa, as outlined in the previous chapter. But that brief phase of independence was plagued by constant civil wars, military campaigns, and famine, until the Mahdist state was destroyed thirteen years later by a British-Egyptian consequent of the country that was rationalized as “recovering Egypt’s possessions in Sudan.” Since Britain was occupying Egypt itself at the time, as a “protectorate,” and had led the conquest of Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, in 1898, it also dominated the joint colonial administration (called Condominium in the 1898 Agreement of the two colonial powers). Sudan gained independence from Anglo-Egyptian colonial rule on January 1, 1956.Less than two years after independence, General Ibrahim Aboud lead a military coup on November 17, 1958, suspended the 1956 Transitional Constitution, dismantled the English-model parliamentary system, and ruled by decree for the next six years. That constitution was restored, however, as the Transitional Amended Constitution of 1964, when a determined civilian uprising, supported by some army officers, forced the military junta out of government, and reestablished civilian government under an elected parliament. But that second attempt at establishing constitutional government was once again abruptly terminated by the second military coup of May 25, 1969 led by Colonel Jaafar Numeiri, which forced out the elected government of Prime Minister Saddiq al-Mahdi, the grandson of the founder of the Mahdist state of 1884–98.
The second military junta transformed their military regime into a single party state under what they called “The Permanent Constitution” of 1973, but was overthrown on April 6, 1985, again by a popular civilian uprising that was supported by some military officers, in a similar process to the end of the first military regime of Aboud in October 1964.A second cycle of those events was repeated in the 1980s and 1990s, starting with the overthrow of the elected government of the same Prime Minister Saddiq al-Madhi by the country’s third military coup on June 30, 1989 led this time by General Omar El-Bashir, who made himself the president of the country in 1993. A significant difference between this third military regime and the previous two is that the 1989 coup was carried out by the military wing of the National Islamic Front (NIF), a political organization that emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood, which had used various names since Hassan al-Turabi assumed its leadership in 1964. After concealing the true ideological nature of the 1989 military coup for a few months to consolidate its hold on the country through the systematic purge of all military and civilian personnel who opposed the NIF, the regime revealed its true colors and al-Turabi assumed the political leadership of the whole country, though mainly indirectly. Thus, El-Bashir was elected president in 1996, when all opposition parties and groups boycotted the elections.
In 1999, the multi-party system was formally restored under the Constitution of 1998, which allowed some of the traditional political parties to operate lawfully inside the country. But the main political struggle, as it turned out, was within the NIF itself, when some of al-Turabi’s lieutenants, in alliance with the military wing that carried out the 1989 coup, challenged his leadership. In response, al-Turabi used his position as the speaker of parliament to reduce the power of El-Bashir as president, while increasing his own.
In December 1999, El-Bashir responded by dissolving parliament and appointing a new cabinet and improving his position within the National Congress Party (NCP), a new name for the old NIF. As the power struggle within the NIF intensified, al-Turabi’s position as secretary general of the NCP was suspended in May 2000, and he established his own opposition party, the Popular National Congress Party (PNC). In December 2000, El-Bashir was reelected president under the 1998 Constitution, and placed al-Turabi first in preventive detention, and then under house arrest until he was released in October 2003, only to be placed in preventive detention again in March 2004, as the power struggle between the two factions of the original NIF continued.But the post-independence constitutional and political history of Sudan cannot be understood without close consideration of the civil war and its underlying causes and developments. The first phase of the civil war started as a local rebellion in southern Sudan in August 1955, four months before the country achieved independence, but developed into a full scale civil war that has continued ever since, except for about ten years of peace (1972–1983). That decade of peace came about through what is known as the Addis Ababa Agreement of 1972, negotiated by the military regime of Numeiri in an attempt to achieve a delicate balance between competing claims to self-determination, as explained below. For the purposes of this overview, it is sufficient to note that the critical terms of the Peace Agreement were enacted in the 1973 Constitution, thereby granting the south regional autonomy within the framework of a unitary state. Numeiri began to repudiate the 1972 Agreement and 1973 Constitution through a series of unilateral acts in the early 1980s, culminating in the imposition of Islamic Shariʿa laws by presidential decrees in September 1983. When the judiciary apparently resisted such an abrupt and drastic legislative coup, Numeiri declared a state of emergency, suspended all constitutional rights and freedoms, and established parallel so-called “prompt justice” courts manned by lay magistrates who were willing to implement his decrees without questions (Mayer 1993: 136).
Thus, Sudan gained independence more than a year before Ghana, which is commonly regarded as the first sub-Saharan African country to become independent, in 1957. Sudan also has the dubious distinction of not only being the first in sub-Saharan Africa to suffer a military coup (in November 1958), but also of enduring the longest civil war on the continent. Moreover, Sudan has been ruled by military regimes and single party states since independence, except for four years in the 1960s and another four in the 1980s. In terms of constitutions, there was first the 1956 Transitional Constitution, which was suspended in 1958 and restored as Amended in 1964. Second was the Permanent Constitution of 1973 that established the first single party state until it was gradually repudiated by Numeiri himself in the early 1980s. The uprising of April 1984 re-introduced the Transitional Constitution, again as Amended, only to be suspended once more by the NIF military coup of 1989. This military regime also transformed itself into a single party state during the early 1990s, and then adopted the 1998 Constitution that has allowed for limited political liberalization. But the future of constitutionalism in Sudan is most critically tied to the prospects of sustainable peace and stability, which will remain elusive until the role of Islam in the government of the country is clarified and regulated.