SUMMARY
Sudan Liberation Movement/Army - MM is a faction of SLM/A that broke with the main organization in October 2005. MM stands for Mini Minawi who is the leader of the organization. In October 2005 Minni Minawi (who at the time was secretary-general of SLM/A) organized a SLM/A conference in a village in Eastern Darfur called Haskanita. The conference was boycotted by SLM/A President Abdul Wahid and one reason for this was that he thought the conference was too dominated by the Minawi cattle-herding Zaghawa tribe whilst his own sedentary Fur was underrepresented.
At the end of the conference, Minawi was elected as a new leader of SLM/A, something that according to the Minawi supporters had established the movement’s new hierarchy. However, this election result was not accepted by Wahid and 5 November Izzedin Abdul head of the Khartoum office of the SLM/A said that “"He [Minawi] is not the president. And he will never be a president by this way. The president should be [the winner of] a fair and free election." Minni Minawi tried to take control over the whole of SLM/A at Haskanita but failed and after this conference, Minawi and his followers acted on their own. After this point, the Minni Minawi faction of SLM/A is referred to SLM/A - MM. However, the overall political agenda remained the same within both of the movements despite the split. They still wanted to fight for a secular Sudan with a decentralised form of governance. After this split, the SLM/A fractionalized further and the rebels in Darfur were made up of several different groups, and alliances were created and broken on several occasions.
The SLM/A - MM kept the same as they had before as part of the SLM/A. Rebels in Darfur emerged in February 2003 under the name Darfur Liberation Front but on 14 March 2003, when releasing their Political Declaration, the name SLM/A was adopted. SLM/A stated in a press release that it shall fight for a secular Sudan with a decentralized form of governance, using armed struggle as one of the means to achieve the political goals. This stated goal of incompatibility shows that the agenda of SLM/A is national and not just focused on Darfur even though they are based in that region. The SLM/A stated that they did not have any connections to the Sudan Peoples Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) that fought the government from the South but that they had “an understanding” for their struggle. Darfur is inhabited by several different tribes where some are referred to as African and some as Arab. However, ethnicity is often hard to distinguish and for an outsider, it is very hard to differentiate if a person is from an Arab or an African tribe. The main tribes making up the support base for SLM/A are the three non-Arab tribes of Fur, Zaghawa, and Masalit. The most numerous tribe in Darfur is the sedentary Fur and they have also given name to the region, Dar means home in Arabic so Darfur translates to Home of the Furs in English. When SLM/A was founded the leadership wanted to create a coalition among different tribes, therefore it was declared that the leadership should consist of people from all the three main tribes making up the movement. The two most important leaders were the head of SLM/A Abdul Wahid Mohammad al-Nur, a Fur lawyer that became the Secretary-General of SLM/A, and Minni Minawi, from the semi-nomadic Zaghawa tribe that became secretary of the rebel group.
SLM/A - MM has been involved in the intrastate, non-state and one-sided categories of UCDP organized violence.
