REGIONAL AUTONOMY IN THE SOUTHERN SUDAN: A STUDY IN CONFLICT REGULATION

It is a perennial challenge for every political system to maintain political order for the good running of government. In its barest sense, political order requires the establishment and maintenance of conflict regulation. Conflict regulation means political action which controls the intensity of conflict, through means other than resolution or suppression, in such a manner as to maintain a functional role for conflict in the political process.;The Agreement did not dissolve differences among northerners and southerners, nor among southerners themselves. It did however, place conflict on a non-violent plane. The implementation of regional autonomy in the south began with the inauguration of the Provisional Government in 1972. That Government functioned for eighteen months, during a transitional period of self-rule. Discontent always existed in the south. It remained subdued during the transitional period but grew more volatile after the term of the Provisional Government expired. Controversies over language policy, Local Government administration and financial solvency were some indicators of the state of conflict relations in the south. Several crises arose during the course of events subsequent to the transitional period, which reflected a constant battle between Government leaders and their political opponents. Most outstanding among them was the successful bid by the opposition to have the Speaker of the People's Regional Assembly removed from his post. Interregional conflict constantly exerted a heavy influence on the politics of the south. Despite such continuous pressures, conflict regulation still preserved political order in the region.;In the final analysis, decision-making proved to be the key to conflict regulation in the south. Institutionalization was weak and conflict behavior vacillated among southerners and northerners as well, between the positive, regulatory variety and the negative, dysfunctional one. Three conflict regulation strategies (President Numeiry, Vice President Abel Alier, and Major-General Joseph Lagu) were crucial to the success of conflict regulation. Indeed, the credit for the success of conflict regulation in the region belonged mainly to them as decision-makers. That reality however, raised doubts about the future viability of conflict regulation. In order for conflict regulation to grow stronger or to continue to be strong, its other component elements needed to be strengthened.;In the southern Sudan, there hadn't been any conflict regulation since the first arrival of foreigners in the mid-nineteenth century. The advent of the Turks, the northern Sudanese, then the British heightened interregional conflict. Conflict within the region itself continued throughout these years in its customary forms of expression. Both types of conflict achieved their greatest intensity during the civil war years between 1955 and 1972. Successful political bargaining between northerners and southerners eventually brought an end to that war. The Addis Ababa Agreement between the Government of the Sudan and the Southern Sudan Liberation Movement formalized regional autonomy as the appropriate arrangement for the establishment of conflict regulation in the region.