Les crises du mouvement armé sud-soudanais

Abstract

Crisis within the armed southern sudanese movement. The remorseless fighting between factions of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLM/SPLA) are widely seen as evidence that the Southern Sudanese movement is fatally damaged, mainly on tribal grounds. This attempt to discern the factors at work concludes that they are primarily political : they are the Southern expression of Africa’s current wave of aspiration for democracy, group identity and human rights. The great flaw in the Southern organisation is that it is an army, not a political movement — SPLA not SPLM. Yet the driving force of the South’s search for identity and justice means that resolution of the conflict can only be political, not military, and that the SPLM/SPLA ’s internal dissensions cannot ultimately be fatal. The political nature of the wider war means that the questions facing the South remain essentially the same, whatever can be its eventual formal relationship with the North.