On 9 January 2005 the Government of Sudan and the Sudan Peoples Liberation Movement (SPLM) signed a peace agreement after twenty-two years of violent conflict that killed over two million southern Sudanese and displaced another six.  Make no mistake this is an historic achievement of inscrutable and imponderable differences, the result of long and tortuous negotiations that could have failed at any moment without intense international pressure from the troika of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the stalwart Norwegians. 

It was the vindication of Dr. John Garang, leader of the SPLM, who envisaged a New Sudan of unity in diversity in 1983, a conviction from which he has never deviated during two decades of military victories and defeats, revolts against his authority, and interminable negotiations with disingenuous Islamist members of the National Islamic Front (NIF).  His consistency, determination, and patience have been rewarded.  He is now on paper the most powerful man in the Sudan as First Vice-President, President of the Southern Autonomous Government, and Commander-in-Chief of his own army.  The New Sudan will no longer be an Islamist state but a democratic "one Sudan regardless of race, religion, or tribe" in which the New South will have autonomy, retains its own army, receive fifty percent of Sudan oil revenues, and the right to vote for secession after six years. Those who have worked so hard for so long to achieve this triumph deserve our heart-felt praise, but they have had neither the time nor the energy to realize what they have accomplished or how to achieve it.  After the celebrations in the sober light of day the participants awoke to the fact they had little or no understanding of reality in the southern Sudan in their focused determination to complete the Naivasha Agreement

What are the realities?  No amount of rhetoric can overcome the fact that today the overwhelming numbers of southern Sudanese are open or "closet" separatists, including some within Garang's SPLM National Leadership Council.  This should come as no surprise after a hundred and fifty years of slavery, discrimination, and racism by northern Sudanese and, since independence, too many promises broken and millions dead or driven from their homes.  Moreover, there is a large body of silent northerners who are quite prepared to let the South go its own way, for indeed southerners are different, often despised, and not about to become Arabs and Muslims so its time the two million unwanted southern refugees milling around Khartoum went home.  Among the European and the United States governments there is an accepted folklore that the southern Sudan does not have the necessary educated and experienced individuals to administer the New South.  This is undoubtedly true, but a situation the international community has pledged to rectify by massive infusions of cash and personnel to help, and if the past is any prophet of the future, after winning a measure of autonomy at Addis Ababa in 1972 the southern Sudanese enjoyed themselves immensely managing or mismanaging their affairs and see no reason not to try again on their own.  During the six years before the promised referendum this enthusiasm for independence will be hard to contain despite the anticipated attempts by any northern government to subvert it.

The key to the success of the unified New Sudan, however, is not the evolution of a separatist movement in the New South, but the reception and acceptance of a large number of hitherto despised southerners by the northern Sudanese.   Naivasha guaranteed that southerners would receive thirty percent of the executive and legislative seats in the Government of North Sudan, twelve percent more than in the elected central government of 1958.  In 1958 the southern representatives were ill-educated, inexperienced, and naïve.  Some were fooled, most were bought.  It is doubtful that the southern Sudanese veterans of war, political infighting within the SPLM, years of negotiations with Islamists, and support from the educated and successful southern elite in the Diaspora will be bought or betray their constituents the second time around.  The new southern politician, however, will soon perceive that his future lies as a member of the independent government of the South and not as "Minister of Cows" in Khartoum. 

Perhaps, the greatest enigma of Naivasha is the seeming willingness by the leadership of the National Congress Party (formerly NIF) to abandon the Islamist state and the ideology upon which it was founded to convert all Sudanese into Arabs and Muslim fundamentalists.  Many have long wondered at the incongruity of the professed policies of the Islamist government to transform the multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic, multi-religious Sudan into an Arab nation run by Salafist militant Muslims whose current manifestation is Disaster in Darfur.  Are the Sudanese Islamist ready to abandon their ideology, their mission, and above all their power in return for a united, democratic Sudan or is it to be just more of the same tactics of give-and-take, stonewall, and prevarication that has characterized their governance during the past sixteen years?  That is the Naivasha Enigma.