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Death and Dissension in Sudan
Africa
Mankind’s ancestral homeland, Africa, spent most of the 19th and 20th century under colonial rule. Prodigal children from distant lands carved the continent like a roast, squabbling over its vast resources and drawing national and political boundaries, with little relationship to the territories established by Africa’s existing clans and cultures. Today, colonialism is gone, but its effects remain. Civil wars and ethnic cleansing sweep through Africa as its inhabitants struggle to forge some kind of equilibrium amidst the chaos and despair left by two hundred years under the yoke of colonialism
Long ago, this area was known as Kush, and it was a powerful and persistent enemy of ancient Egypt. In recent centuries, the country was ruled first by modern Egypt, and then by the British Empire. The people of the area did not easily submit to foreign rule; both Egypt and Great Britain regarded it as almost not worth the considerable effort to require to rule it. On the first day of 1956, Sudan received its independence, but that’s done little to stop the conflict in the area.
On open paper, Sudan’s second civil war ended in 2005; but people are still dying.
Sudan has always had a wild gulf between its northern and southern regions. The north’s population is ethnically Arab and religiously Muslim, while the south’s population is mostly non-Arab, largely practicing animism or Coptic Orthodox Christianity. War between the north and south began even before Britain officially granted the country independence; despite a lull hostilities from 1972 to 1983, the battle continues today.
Britain found the divide so large that it ruled the country as a semi-independent colonial districts, banning movement and trade between the two provinces. The departure of British rule left the southern territories mostly controlled by English-speaking northerners; the northern government promised to decentralize power, but that never occurred. Instead, for decades north Sudan has controlled the natural resources and wealth of the south-including some of Africa’s most fertile cropland and richest oil fields-while pushing the southern tribes toward religious and cultural conformity with the Muslim north.
The primary resistance to the Sudanese government comes from the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, nominally a secular, democratic organization. Since the January 2005 peace treaty, the SPLM has become a recognized government party, and southern Sudan was granted semi-autonomous rule and limited exemptions from Muslim Shari’s laws. According to the treaty, southern Sudan will vote in 2011 on continued integration or peaceful secession and self-rule; whether the northern government will honor the treaty long enough for that to happen remain to be seen.
Meanwhile, scattered fighting continues throughout the south. Starvation and disease follows in the wake of fields burned and corpses left unburied. Several humanitarian organizations, including Human Rights Watch, maintain that slavery (never entirely abolished in Sudan) has risen sharply. Partisans backed by the northern government are said to be taking thousands of slaves from among non-Muslim southern tribes. The Sudanese government has repeatedly dismissed these reports as propaganda.
Meanwhile, on the western borders of the country, a second conflict continues. Though the war between north and south focuses largely on religious and economic divisions, the conflict in the Darfur region stems from tribal hatred. On one side are the Baqqarah, and Arabic tribe of nomadic cattle herdsmen; on the other side are several settled agrarian peoples of African stock, including the Fur, for whom the region is named. (“Darfur” is Arabic for “Abode of the Fur.”)
Conflict between Arabs and Africans in the region goes back for centuries, but ecological damage over the past few decades has created increased friction between the herdsmen and the farmers. As the Sahara desert spread rapidly from the north edge of the country, the Baqqarah have driven their grazing animals further into the rainier croplands of the south, creating competition for water and fertile soil. In 2002, a rebel group calling itself the Darfur Liberation Front ( later Sudan Liberation Movement) began a series of terror attacks, claiming the Sudanese government was waging undeclared war against non-Arabs.
The Sudanese military suffered a series of embarrassing defeats in battles against the Darfur Liberation Front. Already embroiled in a lengthy conflict against non-Arabs in southern Sudan, the northern government turned to a cat’s-paw; the Janjaweed, a paramilitary organization recruited from the Arabic herdsmen of the region. With the Sudanese government providing money and military-grade weapons and equipment, the Janjaweed began a brutal and effective campaign against the non-Arab farmers.
Since then, reports have constantly surfaced of rape, tortured, and mass executions; stories tell of non-Arab villages razed to the ground while bordering Arab settlements were untouched. Journalists and human rights advocates investigating the death toll have a tendency to die or disappear, but conservative estimates suggest a quarter of a million deaths, and over two million forcibly displaces. The true numbers may be much higher.
The Darfur conflict continues today, even spilling over into the neighboring countries of Chad and the Central African Republic-each already embroiled in a civil war of its own. The Janjaweed have failed to adhere to the terms of several ceasefire talks and peace agreements, while the Sudanese government disclaims responsibility for its actions. A UN Security Council resolution promised a peacekeeping force for the region, but the United Nations has so far failed to deliver on its promise. How long the butchery will continue-and how history will judge it-remains to be seen.
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