Lessons from the African Union High-Level Panels for Sudan and South Sudan
In 2024, Sudan and South Sudan are in a calamitous condition. Neither state is currently viable. The people of each country are suffering a humanitarian catastrophe. Famine conditions exist in many parts, portending societal disruption and, in extreme cases, collapse. Sudan is torn by a war that appears as devastating as intractable. Barely more than a decade after achieving independence with high hopes, South Sudan is a land of misery. When South Sudan seceded, the leaders in Khartoum and Juba vowed to work together to achieve ‘two viable states’. Until that promise is fulfilled, there cannot be legitimate governments and people’s basic needs, let alone the higher aspirations, cannot be met.
Peace in the Sudans is essential for the people of the two countries, Africa, and the world. This report explores the challenges faced by the African Union High-Level Panel for Darfur (AUPD) and its successor, the AU High-Level Implementation Panel (AUHIP) (hereafter, ‘the Panel’) during the period 2009-14 in trying to achieve this goal and why that experience is relevant to the Sudans today and to peacemaking in Africa.
The Panel was the AU’s most ambitious, comprehensive, and sustained engagement in peace, reconciliation, democratisation, and seeking the viability of states. Its experience provides a living library for addressing complex political conflicts. The Panel’s work will be comprehensively detailed in a forthcoming book, Negotiating the Sudans.
The Panel developed and applied a methodology to the challenges of peace, justice, democracy, and state viability. This began with consulting the people of Darfur to define the problems they faced. Accordingly, the Panel defined the crisis as ‘Sudan’s crisis in Darfur’, to be resolved by a nationwide process of democratisation in which the people of Darfur would gain their correct place in a country long disfigured by inequality and intolerance. The Panel also identified specific issues of reconciliation and local peace that could be resolved only by the communities of Darfur themselves once the shooting had stopped and conducted in a manner that would render armed groups and militia subordinate to the civilian community agenda.
In dealing with the Sudan as a whole on the eve of the referendum in southern Sudan, the Panel defined the challenge as having two fundamental components. First, after secession, Sudan and South Sudan would both be African states characterised by diversity, each with the challenge of achieving a government that was democratic and fully respectful of diverse ethnic and religious identities. Second was achieving ‘two viable states’, which were at peace internally and with one another, and meeting the economic aspirations of their people, including through cooperation with one another and with their African neighbours, and with sufficient autonomy to be able to determine their national goals and strategies.
The Panel engaged politically in a manner consistent with the norms, principles, institutions, and procedures of the African Union, drawing upon its Constitutive Act and other solemn commitments undertaken by the AU and its member states.
This report is the outcome of a collaboration between the Thabo Mbeki Foundation, the United States Institute of Peace and the World Peace Foundation and was funded in part by a grant from the USIP.
