Making Peace while Waging War - a Peacemaking Effort in the Sudanese Civil War, 1965-1966

Abstract

In March 1965, Northern and Southern political leaders gathered in Khartoum in an attempt to solve the conflict in the South by peaceful means at a conference called the Round-Table Conference (RTC). This was the first attempt by a civilian government in the Sudan to find a political solution to the civil war.1 The Conference resulted in the setting up of a Twelve-Man Committee (TMC), whose proposals were handed over to Prime Minister Mahgoub in June, 1966. 2 Some of those proposals were comparable to those of the Addis Ababa Agreement of 1972, which was followed by 11 years of peace, but they were never implemented by any of the civilian governments of the 1960’s. The main focus of this thesis will be to analyse the work and results of the Round- Table Conference (1965) and the Twelve-Man Committee (1965-66). Why and how did this first attempt to find a peaceful solution to the civil war come about? What were the main issues, and how were they approached? And finally, why did this peacemaking effort fail?