Political and military intervention in Sudan after the Cold War assumed diverse forms and served a variety of interests. The complexities can best be understood if the narrative is broken into four case studies. The first,
“Al-Qaeda and the United States,” focuses on the period 1991 to 1996, with reflections on the period following the 2001 attacks on the United States. The second, “The North, the South, and the International Com-munity,” concentrates on the years 1991 to 2017. The third, “Internal and
Conflicting Interests and Inadequate Solutions (1991–2017) | 107 Regional Roots of the Darfur Conflict,” examines the struggle in Sudan’s western region from 2003 to 2006. The fourth, “Darfur and the Interna-tional Community,” considers the same conflict from 2003 to 2017.
Some generalizations can be made about all four case studies. In the 1990s, foreign intervention in Sudan was limited. Concerns about terror and pressure from domestic constituencies framed Western policies. The north-south civil war and the establishment of al-Qaeda’s headquarters in Sudan led to increased external involvement, but scant attention was paid to the growing conflict in Darfur, which was exacerbated by popula-tion movements driven by climate change and war in neighboring Chad.
External interest grew after the turn of the millennium, motivated in large part by the responsibility to protect. Foreign powers helped broker peace agreements that officially ended the war between north and south and also the Darfur conflict. However, fundamental weaknesses in both agreements, which failed to redistribute power and resources from center to periphery, ensured that violence and destabilization would continue.
Multilateral peacekeeping forces were sent to both regions, but govern-ment and rebel forces were considerably stronger, and they continued to promote disorder to protect their interests. The presence of petroleum resources complicated the issue, as oil became both an object of struggle and a means of perpetuating the violence.
Case Study 1: Al-Qaeda and the United States (1991–96)
In June 1989, when the prospect of a peace accord with the south threat-ened the nationwide status of Islamic law, Colonel Omar al-Bashir staged a coup that toppled the civilian government. Although Bashir was the titular ruler, the power behind the throne was Hassan al-Turabi, a lead-ing Islamist politician who had helped establish Sudan’s Muslim Brother-hood, spearheaded the institution of Islamic law throughout the country, and advocated the establishment of an Islamic state. Turabi’s influence was immediately apparent. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Bashir announced that Sudan would join Egypt and Saudi Arabia in sup-porting Kuwaiti sovereignty. However, Turabi perceived an opportunity to undermine the anti-Islamist Gulf monarchies that had lined up be-hind Kuwait, and his position ultimately held sway. In the Gulf War that ensued, Sudan threw its support to Iraq and opened its doors to militants from across the Muslim world. Among them was Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organization. With Soviet-Afghan War veterans from North
and East Africa, the Middle East, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Chechnya as his base, bin Laden established al-Qaeda training camps in Sudan and a network of cells and allied organizations in the Greater Horn.
US relations with Sudan deteriorated rapidly as the war on terror paradigm shaped its political and economic response. In August 1993, the State Department designated Sudan a “state sponsor of terrorism,”
resulting in an arms embargo and the suspension of nonhumanitarian aid.6 Khartoum turned to Muslim banks, charities, and businesses to fill the funding gap. These organizations augmented the influence of fun-damentalist strains of Islam, which challenged the more tolerant Sufi traditions practiced in much of the country. The perceived threat to US interests and allies deepened. In 1996, after the attempted assassination of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak by Sudan-based militants, Washing-ton withdrew its diplomatic mission from Sudan and supported a series of UN sanctions.
Terrorism, like communism, provoked disputes within the US State Department. During the Cold War, some officials argued that the con-fusion of radical nationalism with communism, and the consequent iso-lation of radical regimes, actually pushed some independent actors and governments into the communist camp. In the 1990s, another cohort contended that Washington’s alliances with corrupt, secular regimes in the Middle East, which tended to categorize all Islamists as terrorists, stimulated rather than discouraged radicalism. These officials advocated negotiation, rather than isolation, as a mechanism for ending Khartoum’s support for terrorism. A series of inconsistent US actions followed, their nature determined by which factions held sway at the time. When the United States vacated its embassy in Sudan in early 1996, for instance, departing Ambassador Timothy Carney urged Washington to accept an olive branch—Khartoum’s offer to provide information about bin Lad-en’s finances, contacts, and support for terrorism in Africa.7 Khartoum hoped for the lifting of sanctions in return. Hardliners in the Clinton administration, however, opposed a quid pro quo and showed no interest in Khartoum’s offer. Madeleine Albright, who became secretary of state in 1997, and Susan Rice, who served as senior director for African affairs in the National Security Council, joined other officials from the State Department and CIA in rejecting Khartoum’s advances. Their position, that Sudan should expel bin Laden without a concomitant US promise to revoke sanctions, prevailed. In May 1996, under pressure from the
Conflicting Interests and Inadequate Solutions (1991–2017) | 109 United States, Saudi Arabia, and the UN Security Council, Sudan ex-pelled bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network. Any hope that bin Laden’s ejection would lead to the end of economic restrictions was quashed by CIA reports that Sudan continued to support international terrorism—
an assessment that was contested by the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Instead, the Clinton administration intensi-fied Sudan’s isolation, imposing a comprehensive trade embargo in 1997 and freezing all Sudanese government assets in the United States.
US relations with Khartoum deteriorated further in 1998. In August, al-Qaeda operatives bombed the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Some 224 people were killed and thousands more were injured. Most of the victims were Kenyans and Tanzanians. In response, the Clinton administration ordered a cruise missile attack on a factory outside Khar-toum, which, it alleged, manufactured chemical weapons components and was linked to Osama bin Laden. Independent investigators found no credible evidence to support either charge. Instead, they found that the factory made pharmaceuticals and had produced approximately half of Sudan’s medications. The factory’s destruction, combined with obstacles posed by economic sanctions, may have resulted in thousands of Suda-nese deaths from otherwise treatable diseases.
Increasingly isolated at home and abroad, Bashir was desperate for allies and foreign investors to develop Sudan’s oil industry and to al-leviate the country’s $22 billion debt. Toward this end, he sidelined a number of Islamist associates in late 1999 and early 2000, including Has-san al-Turabi, whom Bashir perceived as a threat to his own power. In late 2000, Washington and Khartoum began to cooperate on counterter-rorism matters, and after the al-Qaeda attacks in September 2001, their collaboration deepened. During the George W. Bush administration, the CIA reopened its station in Khartoum and began to work with Sudanese intelligence. At Washington’s request, the Bashir regime arrested foreign militants who were transiting through Sudan and delivered them to the United States. The rapprochement allowed US Special Operations Forces to hunt down presumed Saudi terrorists on Sudanese soil and helped Washington locate alleged al-Qaeda operatives in Somalia. Still, Wash-ington refused to remove Sudan from its list of state sponsors of terror-ism or to lift sanctions. Khartoum’s ongoing atrocities against civilians in southern Sudan, and from 2003 in Darfur, impeded closer political and economic ties.
Case Study 2: The North, the South, and the International Community (1991–2017)
If the war on terror shaped US policy during al-Qaeda’s Sudan years, Su-dan’s brutal civil war and its aftermath framed international actions more broadly from 1991 to 2017, when the response to instability/responsibility to protect paradigm prevailed. By the 1990s, the ongoing drought and war-induced famine threatened the health and well-being of up to 3 mil-lion Sudanese civilians. Both government and rebel forces used food as a weapon, destroying crops, blocking humanitarian relief efforts, and stealing food to feed fighters rather than civilians. The UN and other international relief agencies became reluctant collaborators: they paid off warlords to allow food to reach civilians in need and exchanged hard currency at half the commercial rate, knowing that the profits would be used to finance the war. Neighboring states also got involved. Threatened by Khartoum’s support for radical Muslims and terrorist organizations, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda provided weapons to the SPLA. However, the four East African countries, worried about regional instability, also initiated peace talks under IGAD auspices. This initiative led to the 1994 Declaration of Principles, which identified underlying problems that needed to be resolved to ensure a lasting peace. Among the central issues were the distribution of the country’s wealth and power, the right of the south to self-determination, and the relationship between religion and the state. Khartoum signed the declaration in 1997 following significant military losses to the SPLA, and the principles were incorporated into the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005 (CPA).
The civil war had begun with disputes over central versus regional power and over religious and cultural domination. However, by the late 1990s, economic interests had become the dominant driver. After 1999, when crude oil was first exported from Sudan, control of the south’s sig-nificant oil supplies became a primary objective of the war, as well as the main means of financing it. In 2001, the Sudanese government generated
$580 million in oil revenues, 60 percent of which went to the military.
With the oil proceeds, Khartoum acquired sophisticated weapons that it used to expel hundreds of thousands of southern farmers and herders from their oil-rich lands.
The United States found itself in an awkward position. Khartoum had become a US ally in the war on terror, and US companies were heavily invested in Sudanese oil. Yet from the American perspective,
Conflicting Interests and Inadequate Solutions (1991–2017) | 111 northern Muslims were enslaving and killing southern Christians in a devastating war that had cost 2.5 million lives and displaced 85 percent of the southern population. Driven by political and economic interests and in response to pressure from its conservative Christian base, the George W. Bush administration joined IGAD, the UK, Norway, and Italy to push for a negotiated settlement.8 All parties justified their intervention as a response to instability that was costing civilian lives.
In 2002, Khartoum and the SPLM/SPLA signed the Machakos Pro-tocol, which embraced the north-south paradigm and recognized the south’s right to self-determination. In January 2005, the CPA ended the civil war and provided for democratic elections, power sharing between north and south, and equitable distribution between regions of the nation’s wealth. The accord stipulated that the south, represented by the SPLM, would join the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) in a Khartoum-based coalition government for six years. It would also have its own autono-mous government based in the southern city of Juba. A referendum in 2011 would determine whether the south would remain a part of Sudan or secede to form an independent nation-state. However, many in the in-ternational community hoped that the efforts of the transitional govern-ment would make continued unity appealing. The agreegovern-ment would be monitored by the United Nations Mission in Sudan (UNMIS), a force of some 10,000 military and 715 civilian personnel who were authorized to observe and verify the implementation of the ceasefire agreement, help establish disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration programs, and assist in related nation-building and peace-building tasks.
The CPA was problematic from the outset. The product of a top-down process pushed through by foreign governments and institutions, it was essentially an agreement between two military organizations that excluded everyone but the ruling NCP and the SPLM. Civil society, the democratic opposition, and parties to the Darfur conflict were not part of the process. Nor were other aggrieved parties, such as those in South Kordofan and Blue Nile States, whose identities did not conform to the north-south paradigm. The agreement did little to shift power and re-sources from the center to the marginalized populations in Sudan’s mul-tiple peripheries. It failed to address local issues, such as disputes over land, which were at the root of many tensions. For leaders such as John Garang, who had envisioned a democratic, secular, and unitary coun-try with a more equitable distribution of power and resources, the CPA
was an imperfect compromise imposed under duress. Because it catered to the interests of the central power elites rather than the marginalized populations of the periphery, it risked perpetuating rather than resolving regional conflicts and instability.
The CPA faced major obstacles to implementation. Important pro-visions were ignored as the UN and the four Western nations pushed IGAD to the side. With key issues unresolved, continued conflicts were inevitable. Although 80 percent of Sudan’s oil reserves were lo-cated in the south, most of the country’s economic development and heavy infrastructure—including oil refineries, pipelines, and the major port—were in the north. The two sides rapidly reached an impasse over the determination of the north-south border, with the north demanding more oil-rich territory in its domain, and over division of the country’s enormous oil revenues. Neither side disarmed, and both strengthened their militaries in the disputed areas, particularly in the Abyei region, which contained most of Sudan’s oil wealth. In 2008, violence broke out and thousands of civilians were again caught in the crossfire. The April 2010 national elections, stipulated by the CPA, were boycotted by opposi-tion parties that protested widespread fraud, bribery, and violence in the lead-up to the elections.
A power shift in the south also weakened the prospects for peace.
Following the death of John Garang in July 2005, his vision of a more equitable but unitary country was replaced by the agenda of Salva Kiir, who replaced Garang as the south’s vice president in the coalition gov-ernment. Kiir was a committed secessionist. During the transitional period, he mobilized a vast patronage network funded by oil resources to achieve his goal. In January 2011, the population of southern Sudan voted to secede. On July 9, 2011, the independent state of South Sudan was established before agreements had been reached on boundaries in contested regions and on the apportionment of oil wealth. In one stroke, Sudan lost three-quarters of its oil production and half of its revenues.
With the dispute over profit sharing unresolved, South Sudan shut down its oil fields from January 2012 to September 2013. The closure had a dev-astating impact on both countries’ economies.
Once again, violence flared, not only in contested regions such as Abyei, but in the Sudanese states of South Kordofan and Blue Nile, where issues unaddressed by the CPA continued to fester. Diverse populations in these areas, many of which had supported the south in the civil war,
Conflicting Interests and Inadequate Solutions (1991–2017) | 113 resisted Khartoum’s continued control of their natural resources and the imposition of Islam as the state religion, shari’a as the source of law, and Arabic as the official language. In November 2011, former SPLA fight-ers from these regions regrouped under the banner of SPLM-North and joined the major Darfur rebel organizations to form the Sudan Revo-lutionary Front (SRF), which was supported by South Sudan.9 The SRF argued that each region’s concerns were part of a larger national problem that could be resolved only through regime change in Khartoum, the decentralization of political authority, an equitable distribution of re-sources, and an inclusive national identity. None of these issues had been adequately addressed by the externally brokered CPA.
Meanwhile, in South Sudan, Salva Kiir’s Juba government was beset by corruption and mismanagement as Kiir governed through patronage networks rather than strong institutions. Loyalties were cemented by the distribution of oil wealth, which constituted 98 percent of government revenue, and the regime repressed political dissent. The security system expanded rapidly, growing from 40,000 employees in 2005 to more than 300,000 in 2011. Military, police, and militia commanders mobilized their families and ethnic groups to make claims on the central state and to target other communities. At the same time, the general population suf-fered from a severe absence of government services and infrastructure, increased food insecurity, and mounting violence. As the oil wealth dis-appeared and the government deficit grew, the patronage system began to collapse. No longer able to buy the loyalty of political rivals, Kiir began to oust them from government.
A power struggle within the ruling SPLM came to a head in July 2013 when President Salva Kiir fired his longtime political rival, Vice Presi-dent Riek Machar, who had announced his plan to run for presiPresi-dent. Kiir also dissolved the cabinet. Tensions between Kiir and Machar dated to an earlier struggle during the north-south civil war, when Machar, after failing to oust John Garang as head of the SPLM, split from the move-ment and mobilized his largely Nuer splinter group against the Dinka, an ethnic group whose members included both Garang and Kiir. In the Bor Massacre of November 1991, Machar’s Nuer militias slaughtered some 2,000 Dinka civilians, leading to a seven-year conflict during which both sides committed atrocities, thousands of Dinka and Nuer civilians were killed, and tens of thousands starved to death as a result of war-related famine. Political struggles within the SPLM were not halted by the end of
the north-south war, nor by the independence of South Sudan. After in-dependence, continued economic marginalization and climate change–
induced drought also exacerbated longstanding competition for grazing land and water.
In December 2013, a cluster of former cabinet ministers who had been fired in July accused President Kiir of abusing his power. The president in turn charged Machar, the dismissed vice president, with spearheading a coup attempt. The national army, cobbled together from the SPLA and undisciplined ethnic militias, broke down. As Dinka soldiers loyal to Kiir slaughtered Nuer civilians in the capital, Nuer soldiers defected to Mach-ar’s side. MachMach-ar’s SPLA in Opposition, which also included non-Nuer dissidents, led mutinies in the oil-rich Jonglei, Unity, and Upper Nile States, where it took control of the oil fields and retaliated against Dinka civilians and others seen as sympathetic to the Juba government. Uganda, an ally of the SPLM during the north-south civil war, and JEM rebels from Darfur sent soldiers to fight alongside the national army and protect the
In December 2013, a cluster of former cabinet ministers who had been fired in July accused President Kiir of abusing his power. The president in turn charged Machar, the dismissed vice president, with spearheading a coup attempt. The national army, cobbled together from the SPLA and undisciplined ethnic militias, broke down. As Dinka soldiers loyal to Kiir slaughtered Nuer civilians in the capital, Nuer soldiers defected to Mach-ar’s side. MachMach-ar’s SPLA in Opposition, which also included non-Nuer dissidents, led mutinies in the oil-rich Jonglei, Unity, and Upper Nile States, where it took control of the oil fields and retaliated against Dinka civilians and others seen as sympathetic to the Juba government. Uganda, an ally of the SPLM during the north-south civil war, and JEM rebels from Darfur sent soldiers to fight alongside the national army and protect the