CAIRO: The crowded, narrow lanes of Souq El Tawfiqqeya are an unlikely spot for an embassy, located in one of the most dusty and noisy corners of the capital. But there, among shops selling spare auto parts and stands selling koshary for LE 1 a bowl, down a dim hallway in an unmarked apartment is the Cairo Office of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM). To those working inside, it is a diplomatic outpost of the New Sudan.
Part embassy and part recruitment center, the SPLM office employs 34 people and enjoys generous financial support from State Security. According to the Egypt Representative of the SPLM, the jovial Tongun Sebat Faraj Allah, the Ministry of the Interior and Egyptian Intelligence allows the organization rent free access to a government-owned office and pays their utility bills.
Before the 2005 peace agreement between the North and South, the intelligence service also paid the salary of the office’s former Director, says Faraj Allah, who has only held the job since 1999. In the early nineties, he says, the Egyptian government even bought the former director a car.
This support has been crucial to the SPLM’s recruitment and organizing efforts in Egypt. Faraj Allah says that during the days of guerilla warfare against the Khartoum regime and foreign oil companies, Egyptian state funds allowed the office to operate in times when the SPLA did not want to send money away from the front lines to support advocacy work abroad.
The Ministry of Interior was unavailable for comment by the time of publication.
In those days, before the peace deal, the office was the outpost of a scrappy rebel movement. But the deal, signed in January 2005, completely changed the terrain of the conflict. It created a power sharing government and established a schedule for general elections in 2008 and an eventual independence referendum in 2011. But it did not require the disarmament of the SPLA, the movement military wing. The militia has vowed not to give up its arms until Khartoum has fully implemented the agreement, and views its weapons as a kind of insurance policy.
These days, the office has become an embassy of sorts for the most powerful party in southern Sudanese politics and a major center for the Sudanese refugee community. The movement’s refugee members in Egypt hope that the party can turn their war-torn country around. Members are drawn to the movement by its promise to fight for “a multicultural new Sudan, where governance is based on the general will of the people and the rule of law.
The SPLM is also attractive to many for its willingness to divide Sudan between North and South if its lofty goals must come at the price of territorial unity. Faraj Allah describes the support his office receives from Egyptian Intelligence as part of the President Hosni Mubarak’s general approach to the conflict in Sudan. In the war between North and South, Egypt has tried to remain on good terms with both parties. Indeed, a framed photograph of President Mubarak meeting with late SPLA leader John Garang is prominently displayed in Faraj Allah’s office.
“They want to build a relationship with the movement, and now with the government of South Sudan, he says, adding, with a smile, “They want to catch the stick in the middle, so that they don’t get hit by either end.
If Egypt is concerned with not being struck by the sticks of Sudan’s conflict, the SPLM is concerned with making sure it always has enough sticks to fight with.
To that end, Faraj Allah says that one of the primary roles of his office is to recruit and organize members for the party. He says that the office has registered 10,000 members since its foundation in 1989, many of whom have returned to Sudan or moved to the West as refugees. Members are the life-blood of the SPLM, and the Cairo office has been very successful in its efforts to attract and mobilize them.
Members provide important financial and political support to the SPLM. Those in the West pay the movement a 5 percent tithe on their incomes, as well as sending remittances home to support their families. They are a potential source of much-needed funding and know-how for economic development.
“We ask the most educated ones to go home, says Faraj Allah. “Those with money, those with proper education and proper technological experience should come back home and help with development.
Politically, members living abroad are urged to organize in their new home countries and pressure the governments to be sympathetic toward SPLM positions. When asked by a visitor if the movement’s members in the West have been effective advocates, Faraj Allah grinned and his eyes grew wide.
“Oh yeah, he says.
As an example, he cites the high-profile case of Talisman Energy, a Canadian oil company that was widely accused of human rights abuses by Sudanese, American and Canadian groups in the 1990s. In 2001, the Presbyterian Church of Sudan and the American Anti-Slavery Group sued the company in a Manhattan court for its alleged abuses, although the case was eventually dismissed in 2006 because of a lack of evidence.
But it was not all American court room drama. According to Faraj Allah, the SPLA played a central role. The case illustrates how its members abroad provide diplomatic and political muscle that can hit harder than military might alone.
“When the company was working in the fields at Bentliu before the peace, the movement forced it to stop working because the oil revenues were being used by the government to buy arms to fight the movement. The revenues were letting the government be obstinate and not accept the peace process, he explains, “so we stopped them militarily and politically. They were terrorized first and then expelled by our current movement politically, when our people in Canada made demonstrations and pressured them.
Today, the SPLM wants it members abroad to organize again. The movement claims that Khartoum is unwilling to fully implement the peace deal. According to Faraj Allah, the National Congress Party of President Omar Al-Bashir has blocked the full implementation of the treaty, specifically protocols addressing the demarcation of borders, the creation of a national oil commission and the equitable sharing of oil revenues. Under the deal, the South and North each take 49 percent of the revenues, with 2 percent of the total given to the village from which the oil was drawn.
“All people are supposed to be in the picture, he says, arguing that the National Congress wants to keep opposition parties in the dark. “We’re all supposed to know how many barrels are produced daily, where they are sold and for how much. But the National Congress does not want this commission to be formed.
The SPLM wants the world to pressure Khartoum to live up to its commitments. Now that the Bashir regime appears intransigent in its commitment to the deal, Faraj Allah warns of the dire consequences of a peace deferred.
“We want more transparency in this area, he says, sipping tea beneath a framed picture of the revered Garang in his stuffy office. “We are making a campaign of internal and external pressure, by telling the international community that the National Congress is not serious, and wants people to go back to square one. Otherwise, people will go back to war.
