The Addis Ababa negotiations

The Addis Ababa Agreement, negotiated in February 1972 between the government and the Southern Sudan Liberation Movement (SSLM), not only brought peace to the Sudan, but, as a unique resolution to civil war never before achieved in post-colonial Africa, brought great international acclaim to the nation and its leaders. Within eleven years it was repudiated by two of its principal beneficiaries: Nimairi and Lagu. Before its demise it was seen as a failure by most southern Sudanese. Many outside observers (and many northern Sudanese as well) have misjudged the political climate of the South by thinking that the second civil war can be brought to an end by a return to the 1972 Agreement's provisions for regional autonomy. To understand why this is not possible we must look not only at the failures in the implementation of the Agreement, but the issues the Agreement itself failed to resolve.

Negotiations were proposed with a united Sudan as the one precondition. Many exiled Southerners were unhappy about abandoning the goal of independence, and there was a clear difference of understanding between the government and SSLM delegations about the ‘regional autonomy’ then proposed for negotiation. To the SSLM ‘autonomy’ meant federation, and they came armed with a proposal for a full federal structure. In the end they were offered, and finally accepted, something far less in what became the Southern Regional Government.

At the beginning of the negotiations it was proposed that the two delegations form into political, economic and security sub-committees to draft the relevant proposals under each heading for inclusion in the final agreement. The SSLM requested that no economic sub-committee be formed, since its delegation was too small to be sub-divided into three. The result was that the political sub-committee reached rapid agreement on the terms of the establishment of the regional government, and the security sub-committee was able eventually to provide a basis for ending the fighting and absorbing the guerrilla forces into the national army and other security branches. There was no separate discussion of the economic powers of the new regional government, nor of national development policy as it applied to the South.

The SSLM delegation initially proposed that the whole country be divided into a Northern and a Southern region, with a single federal government in which both regions participated.