Online Symposium About the Future of Sudan

Making Sense of Darfur will be holding an online symposium over the next few weeks dedicated to analyzing what is likely to happen in Sudan in 2010 and 2011.  Here is how it’s described by Alex de Waal, with whom I rarely agree but always respect:

Sudan faces two momentous events in the next fifteen months. The first is the general election, intended as the first multi-party nationwide elections in the nation’s history (earlier multiparty elections in the 1960s and 1980s did not include war-affected areas in the south, an exclusion that doomed the resulting governments). The second is the referendum on self-determination in southern Sudan, which if indications of southern opinion are reliable, will lead to a decisive vote for secession. With all the attention on ‘CPA implementation’—which consists of safely getting to the point of the referendum—there has been far too little attention to what happens afterwards.

Two reports on scenario exercises, by the Clingendael Institute in the Hague and by the U.S. Institute of Peace have filled that gap in the public discourse. Over the next weeks, we will be debating these on this blog.

The authors of the two reports will outline the findings of their exercises and we have invited some of those who contributed, and who have thought about these issues, also to contribute.

It should be an interesting discussion, especially as the symposium will not just be limited to the blog’s roster of regular contributors, a disturbing number of whom are the most obvious Bashir apologists.  (Including a former speechwriter for the Sudanese government, who not surprisingly sees all of Sudan’s problems as the fault of everyone other than Bashir.)

Check it out!  The first post is already up.