The partition of Sudan, which has nearly become certain and needs only for the official results of the referendum to decide the fate of the South to be announced in a hundred days' time, raises questions about the role played by the Islamic movement which took power in Khartoum after the 1989 coup in bringing the country to such terrible failure in preserving geographic and civil unity, paving the way for further division, perhaps in the Darfurian West, or about whether this movement, which also overthrew its own founders, had “succeeded” in removing the “main obstacle” to establishing a pure Islamic “emirate” in the North. And between “failure” and “success”, history records that Sudan will be the first Arab country in the post-colonial period to be partitioned by virtue of an internal “de facto situation”, Arab silence and international sponsorship. Meanwhile, the theory of the “conspiracy”, ready for use every time an Arab regime faces a crisis in finding common grounds between the constituents of its religiously and ethnically diverse population, as is the case in Iraq and in Lebanon, is receding. Al-Bashir's regime presents itself as the “victim” of accumulated circumstances and internal as well as external factors that have deprived it of any choice other than to accept the results of the referendum, within the framework of its agreement to end the longest civil war in Africa. Meanwhile, its critics respond that it in effect encouraged secession when it refrained from engaging in real partnership with the Southerners represented in the Khartoum government in the first place, rejected the principle of effective division of power, delayed offering the Southerners any incentives to remain within the motherland and dealt with them in advance on the basis that they are an independent entity, resuming negotiations with the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) which represents them on issues pertaining to the post-partition phase and on the division of the oil wealth, water and other resources – to such an extent that it did not hesitate to announce that it would strip the Southerners of citizenship the moment the results of the referendum are announced, thus blocking the path to any possibility of pluralism in the North. Critics also say that the Islamists came to power at a time when the world was taking advanced steps towards recognizing the right to be different, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its splitting into national republics, then the fragmentation of countries such as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia on ethnic and religious bases. The Islamists in Sudan did not realize the importance of such a change in international concepts, and did nothing to avoid meeting the same fate, even if they truly wished to avoid it. Indeed, they insisted on Islamizing the laws and imposing the application of Sharia law without taking into consideration the pluralistic reality, and on harassing minorities and gradually depriving them of their rights. Furthermore, they did not provide their partners with practical reassurances about the fact that the spread of fundamentalism would not endanger national unity and would not lead it to experiments the results of which are not guaranteed, as it in fact has. The regime in Khartoum has behaved according to a single principle, that of ensuring its own survival, and thus did not pay heed to the fact that geographically “internal” wars are no longer issues internal to a country, but have come to acquire an international dimension that can lead to punishing regimes and even overthrowing them. It thus also got implicated in the temptation of making use of force in Darfur, which led to making its President a man wanted by international justice, and to increasing its attempts to gain the world's approval by further relinquishing its South under purely verbal conditions.
