ABSTRACT
Colonel Ali Abdullah Salih has managed to continue in office as President although his position has often seemed extremely precarious and his control, at times, has extended little beyond the boundaries of the major cities. He formed a committee to prepare for a General People's Congress, but there was little apparent progress for in March 1981 he spoke of a plebiscite of 5 per cent of the population as a sort of rehearsal. In March 1980 Ismail denied in an interview that there were any splits in the leadership, but for months exiles had been saying that once again the fanatical dogmatism of the President was alienating those of his comrades who wished to deal in a pragmatic way with the difficulties confronting them. In March 1981 there were further accounts of frontier clashes in which it was said that over a score of soldiers had been killed.
