Sudan’s fledgling civil society is demanding a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) – along the lines of South Africa’s after apartheid – to ensure peace in a country that has witnessed Africa’s longest-running conflict.

The Government and the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army are expected to broker a peace-deal to end the war, which has killed over two million and displaced over four million in this Horn of Africa nation since 1983.

‘The TRC will act as a tool for bringing harmony, co-existence and forgiveness among the people of Sudan,’ said Suzanne Jambo, co-ordinator of the groups calling for the commission, the New Sudanese Indigenous NGOs Network (NESI). ‘We are educating the people about it. We already have a mechanism in place to try to unite warring factions in the south,’ she says.

Sudan’s conflict has been fuelled by animosity between the Arab Muslim north and Black Christian south since the country’s independence from Britain in 1956.

This article is from the March 2004 issue of New Internationalist.

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