Guerilla Government: Political Changes in the Southern Sudan during the 1990s (review)

While working as an international newspaper correspondent, I once asked a Sudan People's Liberation Army or Movement official in Nairobi (I never learned which one) for the name of a key escaped prisoner of SPLA leader John Garang. Alone in the office, the official glanced cautiously toward the next room where other SPLM/A officials were working; then he quietly wrote the name on a piece of paper and slid it across the table to me. On another occasion, in the SPLA-occupied Sudanese town of Yambio, near the Uganda border, I interviewed the chief of the local ethnic group. When the SPLA Dinka commander in the town found out, he was very upset—and with good reason. Beneath the surface of outward political calm in SPLA-controlled areas was a strong resentment by many local ethnic groups of domination of the South by the Dinka-led SPLA. Secrecy and authoritarian rule have long been the hallmarks of the SPLA in southern Sudan as it fought for political and military control in the long-running civil war against the north. Øystein H. Rolandsen provides a rare glimpse into the apparent efforts by the SPLM/A to be more open and less authoritarian in order to build more support for an eventual free south. I say apparent because the record of actual reforms compared to promised reforms is pretty dismal, as Rolandsen documents.

Documenting even promised reforms is not easy. Rolandsen acknowledges the scarcity and sometimes dubious quality of what records he was able to dig up. There were several major conventions of the SPLM/A during the study period of roughly 1991 to 2004. But minutes were available for only 1994 (the convention on which the book concentrates), and those minutes at times resemble a "propaganda piece" more than an accurate account of debates—if there were debates (181). Rolandsen notes that delegates to the 1994 convention were told to keep their remarks focused on a discussion of the points raised by SPLA leader Garang, and that few delegates who were not SPLA leaders spoke out at all.

Even when reforms were adopted by the conventions, they were seldom implemented. The shallowness of reforms is captured in a comment from the appointed Secretary of Education in the rebel government, who said at a meeting, "I am now standing before you as the whole ministry" (157). Clearly lack of resources limited attempts to build a civilian administration. But lack of intent appears to be just as serious an issue. Rolandsen writes that the "SPLM/A leadership recognizes a need for legitimacy even as it appears unwilling to share power or subject itself to the will of the people or to the SPLM membership at large" (175). He also argues that civil groups and the major ethnic groups must be included in any transition but that mostly they have been left out.

Until the recent Sudan peace accords were signed (leaving the Darfur genocide unsettled), it was difficult for the SPLM/A to share power or gather the resources to do so when it was still at war with the north. The dilemma, of course, is that if it does not eventually share power, it will continue to follow the authoritarian examples of other rebel movements, such as those in Eritrea and, one can argue, Ethiopia. Meanwhile Rolandsen, who curiously seems surprised at the record of the "guerrilla government," deserves credit for digging up hard-to-find published and unpublished documents, interviewing a range of sources, and giving us a closer look at the gap between the SPLM/A's reform rhetoric and its performance.