In early July, Sudan’s Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC) announced that they had reached a power sharing deal with the Transitional Military Council (TMC), the junta that replaced Sudan’s long-term dictator Umar al-Bashir on April 11. However, this initial news was followed by nearly two weeks of wrangling between civilian and military negotiators over the political and constitutional declarations that would finalize the deal. The negotiators finally completed the political declaration in the early hours of yesterday morning. However, this document has left a number of contentious points to be resolved either by the constitutional declaration, which the negotiators have promised will be finalized on Friday, or by the interim government itself. While a basic framework may have been agreed on, the details still being negotiated may be crucial to determining the interim government’s capacity to undo repressive legislation, reverse regional inequality and provide transitional justice.

The deliberations have exposed some of the internals tensions within the FFC – the Sudan Communist Party, for instance, issued an independent statement rejecting a draft constitutional declaration put forward by the AU-Ethiopian mediation team, and along with the rebel Sudan Revolutionary Front has also now rejected yesterday’s political declaration as well as the principle of TMC involvement in the interim government. Meanwhile, the National Umma Party, probably the most conservative of all the major political forces in the FFC, has in this period openly praised the role of the military in ousting Umar al-Bashir. Both parties are re-enacting debates that occurred in Sudan’s previous transitional periods in 1964 and 1985.

In those previous transitions, comparatively short transitional periods prevented the more left-wing actors using the interim governments to generate radical social and political change. As I predicted in my recent African Affairs crisis briefing, the length of the transitional period has again proved to be a core area of contention. Immediately after the breakdown in TMC-FFC negotiations that followed the 3 June massacre of protestors camped within army headquarters, the Transitional Military Council insisted that the length of the transitional period would be reduced to nine months. However, under the pressure of US, African Union and Ethiopian mediation, they have now consented once more to a three year transitional period. Nevertheless, while they may have agreed to the lengthier period, they are still trying to mitigate against its most radical consequences.

One reason that the TMC are so concerned about the length of the interim period is that the FFC have pushed for the transitional government to include an interim legislative assembly, 67% of which will be constituted by the FFC itself. A transitional government with such a robust legislative arm would have much greater scope than its predecessor in 1985 to revise the former’s regime’s arbitrary legislation – whether that be oppressive labour laws, the Islamist penal codes or the bills put through the NCP dominated parliaments to bolster the powers of the National Intelligence and Security Services. This is why the TMC first of all tried to restrict the representation of the FFC in the legislative assembly to 50%, and have also pushed for its role to be purely advisory. The Sudan Communist Party rejected the document put forward by the Ethiopian mediators on the grounds that abandoned the principle of awarding 67% of the legislative seats to the FFC. One of the reasons that they are rejecting the political declaration is that it has deferred the formation of the legislative council till 90 days after the formation of the interim government, and has left it to the sovereignty council – where the military will have the strongest presence – to resolve the dispute over the percentage of seats to be allocated to the FFC.

Another area of contention is the legal immunity that TMC are demanding be granted to its membership as part of the constitutional statement. Given that the TMC vice president Himeidti – widely regarded as complicit in mass atrocities in Darfur as both a member of the Janjaweed and leader of the Rapid Support Forces – could emerge as a key player in the interim government, such a law could anger many of those who want to prioritize transitional justice. There is certainly a precedent for a political immunity clause in the 1964 transitional  constitution, which granted an amnesty to senior soldiers who had served in the previous regime. The 1964 transitional government dominated by leftist professionals went on to put former regime generals on trial regardless, only for those trials to be abandoned by the Umma Party dominated parliamentary regime that followed it. Unsurprisingly, it is the communists who are pushing back mostly strongly against the immunity clause today. They are also concerned that the current draft of the constitutional declaration will give the Sovereignty Council – the rung of the interim government in which the military are to be most represented – the initial right to appoint the interim Chief Justice and Attorney General. This would also give the military the opportunity to influence processes of transitional justice in a manner favourable to them.

At present, it is also unclear how likely the deal is to resolve the regional inequalities that have undermined the Sudanese body politic since independence. The FFC have placed great emphasis on the fact that balanced representation will be given to each of Sudan’s regions in the interim legislative council. However, this does not in and of itself achieve anything more than previous assemblies in both parliamentary and one-party systems have achieved. What is more concerning is that there appears to be no provision to ensure that the first and second tiers of the interim government – the sovereignty council and the cabinet – will represent a balance of regional interests. The emphasis on choosing cabinet members on the basis of technocratic merit risks over-privileging the central riverain areas of Sudan, where the bulk of the educational infrastructure is located following over a century of uneven development. In the 1964 and 1985 the transitional regimes attempted to appease supporters of the rebellion in the now seceded south by allocating a number of portfolios in the interim cabinet to citizens of that region, but the majority of positions allocated to the ‘north’ (now the rump Sudan) were filled by individuals from the riverain centre. There is, therefore, no immediate precedent for giving ministerial representation to the marginalized regions that are at the centre of today’s conflicts in Sudan – Darfur, Blue Nile and South Kordofan – though one desperately needs to be created. To resolve the problem of regional representation, the rebel groups fighting in the marginalized regions have proposed forming a second transitional cabinet once they have agreed peace terms with the government. This will make the question of regional representation a central element in the peace talks that will represent the first priority for the interim regime.