Local Peace Processes in Sudan: A Baseline Study

"The present report is an analytical survey of the literature of local peace processes in Sudan — variously referred to in English-language literature as “people-to-people”, “local”, “non-official” or “grassroots” peace processes — from the 1980s to date. It attempts to bring together the available written records of peace meetings in all parts of the country and to provide the most comprehensive bibliography, to-date, of these sources of information. The bibliographical research has been guided and supplemented by interviews with researchers and participants in key peace meetings. The report examines the relationship between people-to-people meetings and other activities conducted under the aegis of peace building and it assesses the relationship between these local level processes and the national political dialogue. The core of the report is a series of case studies of particularly significant local peace processes: Wunlit and related meetings in the Nilotic areas of the South, Abyei and the Nuba Mountains in the North-South transitional zone, and Darfur in the North. The four studies present a historical account of peace meetings in each location, discussing their effectiveness and situating them in the political economy of the wider war. Together these essays provide a framework for understanding the wide variety of transactions that have taken place under the rubric of peace building in Sudan. As well as a comprehensive bibliography and an extensive glossary, the report has established a database of over a hundred known local peace meetings. Information in the database, which can be updated, is presented in two forms: an analytical list that summarises the key features and outcomes of all recorded meetings (where evidence of these is sufficiently clear), and a geographical and chronological table that plots the locations of peace meetings against the date when they took place. Finally the report also includes a map showing the locations of the meetings and the ethnic groups involved in them. Assembling the material on local peace meetings has not been a straightforward task. This situation is in contrast with the documentation of the national North-South peace process, for which key documents are widely available (see, for instance, Justice Africa 2002, USIP 2005). In the case of local peace processes, the written material, though clearly extensive, is widely scattered and hard to track down, archived as they are in offices of NGOs in Nairobi, Khartoum or elsewhere. Though some organizations involved in supporting peace programmes — such as Pact, the NSCC and the Larjour Consultancy — have endeavoured to make records of their work available online, there are many other reports commissioned by NGOs that have never been distributed, or that did not get beyond the draft stage, or that are buried in the mass of grey literature generated by the aid presence in Sudan. There are cases of peace meetings that are known from project proposals to have been supported by international organizations, the outcome of which remains undocumented. The exemplary documentation of the Wunlit peace meeting between the Dinka of former Lakes Province and the Nuer of Western Upper Nile, which produced translated transcripts of the entire proceedings online (see SSFI 1999), and which has consequently become a document of historical importance, has not been replicated. There are, no doubt, records of peace meetings made by officials of the Government or the SPLM that remain unavailable to the public. Finally, for many meetings, particularly those that have taken place without external sponsorship (for instance those between sections of the Dinka of Northern Bahr el Ghazal and Baggara groups from South Darfur known to have taken place in the 1990s) there is no written documentation. Such meetings form part of an oral record that has an important role in local peacemaking, but they are beyond the scope of the present report. Page 6 Local Peace Process"