Until July 2011, Sudan and South Sudan were a single country, Sudan, which straddled the continent’s north-south divide. The northern region of Sudan was largely covered by the Sahara Desert and semi-arid land, with population concentrated in the Nile River Valley, especially in the capital of Khartoum. The more fertile southern region was geographi-cally part of sub-Saharan Africa. Both regions were multiethnic, but the north was predominantly Muslim and Arab while the south was inhab-ited primarily by practitioners of Christianity and indigenous religions.
Fragmented by race, religion, and language, Sudan was torn by violent conflict in the decades after independence, including two civil wars between the northern and southern regions. The first of these wars, sparked by a mutiny in 1955, lasted until 1972. The second took place from 1983 to 2005, culminating in an externally brokered peace agree-ment that led to the independence of South Sudan in 2011. However, South Sudan was also fractured by debilitating rivalries, which pro-voked renewed warfare in December 2013. Parts of northern Sudan were similarly torn by strife and rebellion. The most serious of these conflicts, in Darfur, began in 2003 and was ongoing in 2017. Rich oil
Conflicting Interests and Inadequate Solutions (1991–2017) | 103 resources were a complicating factor. They financed Sudan’s multiple wars and stimulated new conflict between Sudan and South Sudan, as well as fighting within South Sudan. The desire for access to the region’s oil reserves also motivated outside powers like China and the United States to search for a lasting peace.
Conflict in contemporary Sudan is rooted in unequal power rela-tions, which both predated and outlasted colonialism. The dominant political and scholarly narrative characterizes the disparity as one that pitted an Arabized Muslim north against a non-Muslim African south.1 Critics have charged, however, that the north-south/Arab-African para-digm fails to account for other internal conflicts and that it collapses into a single Arab identity qualities that pertain only to the ruling elite. An alternative, more nuanced hypothesis posits that the fundamental prob-lems in Sudan are the dominance of the center—the ruling elites of Khar-toum and the Nile Valley—over the rest of the country and the instability of ruling factions, which engage in a permanent competition for power and resources. Insecure political elites, in ever-changing configurations, do not possess the capacity to make peace or to sustain political and eco-nomic structures that serve the needs of the country’s diverse popula-tions. They have maintained power by constructing patronage networks to dispense largess to supporters and by mobilizing ethnically based militias that terrorize and subdue civilians and plunder their resources, including land, livestock, and oil. Often, their interest in perpetuating war is greater than their desire to promote peace. External powers, by supporting rival factions both inside and outside the government, have helped sustain this dynamic.
Foreign intervention in Sudan has a long history. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, the territory, composed of northern sultanates and the southern periphery, was under Ottoman-Egyptian rule. In 1820 Egyptian forces invaded Sudan and incorporated it into Egypt, then a semi-autonomous region of the Ottoman Empire. In 1885, under the lead-ership of the Sufi sheikh Muhammad Ahmad ibn Abd Allah—commonly known as al-Mahdi, or the Messiah—Sudanese nationalists and Islamic reformers based in Darfur drove the Ottomans and their British advisors from Khartoum. A decade later, the British toppled the Mahdist state and established the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, which lasted from 1899 until independence in 1956. During the Cold War, Sudan, like Somalia, was first a Soviet and then a US ally. However, Sudan was never a Western
proxy. Although Washington used Khartoum to counter Moscow’s influ-ence in Ethiopia, Khartoum also courted conservative Arab governments, Muammar al-Qaddafi’s Libya, and, after the Cold War, al-Qaeda.
Proponents of the north-south paradigm often trace its origins to the period of Ottoman-Egyptian rule, when the Arabized Muslim north—
in reality an amalgam of Arab and African cultures—plundered the non-Muslim south for ivory and slaves. Although the UK had outlawed slavery throughout its empire in 1833, its Southern Policy in Sudan contin-ued the exploitative relationship between the territory’s northern center and southern periphery. To inhibit both the slave trade and the spread of Islam, the colonial administration regulated the flow of northerners to the south and prohibited marriages between northerners and southern-ers. Economic and educational resources were concentrated in the north, particularly in Khartoum and its environs. The lower ranks of the colo-nial civil service were staffed by educated northerners, while southerners were forcibly conscripted into the colonial army. Although purportedly established to protect the south from northern domination, the Southern Policy in fact stunted the southern region’s development and produced a population with little in the way of education, resources, or power.
After Sudan’s independence in 1956, northern Muslims, particularly Arabs from the Nile Valley region around Khartoum, dominated the na-tion’s public spheres. The unequal development of the colonial era contin-ued, causing serious conflicts between the center and the periphery. In the south, northerners replaced the British in the civil service, army, and police. Following a military coup in November 1958, the government ex-pelled foreign Christian missionaries from the south, took over missionary schools, introduced Arabic as a medium of instruction, and pressed non-believers to convert to Islam. A southern secessionist movement engaged in armed struggle from 1963 to 1972, when a peace accord granted some autonomy to the southern region. In 1969, after a brief return to civilian rule, the Sudanese military again seized power, this time under the lead-ership of Colonel Jaafar Nimeiri. A proponent of pan-Arab nationalism, socialism, and secularism, President Nimeiri opposed Sudanese Islamists, allied himself with the Sudanese Communist Party, and maintained close ties with the Soviet Union.2 In 1972, Sudan’s Muslim Brotherhood, an out-growth of the Egyptian organization, and the Darfur-based Ansar (Follow-ers of the Mahdi) began an armed uprising to establish an Islamic state.
The Ansar insurgents were trained by the Islamic Pan-African Legion,
Conflicting Interests and Inadequate Solutions (1991–2017) | 105 a paramilitary force organized by Libyan ruler Muammar al-Qaddafi, whose goal was to build a vast Islamic empire in Africa that incorporated Libya, Chad, and the Darfur region of western Sudan.3
After the installation of a Marxist government in Ethiopia in 1974, the United States sought a regional ally to serve as a counterweight to Soviet influence in the east and Libyan influence in the west. US interests aligned with those of President Nimeiri, who worried about Moscow’s aims in the Horn and Qaddafi’s designs on Sudan amid a growing eco-nomic crisis and mounting external debt. In 1976, Nimeiri shifted his allegiance to the United States and expelled his Soviet advisors. To re-inforce his domestic base, he reconciled with the Muslim Brotherhood, filled the Sudanese military with Islamists, and sought alliances with conservative Arab governments in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. During the Carter and Reagan administrations, Sudan was the largest beneficiary of US aid in sub-Saharan Africa. The Reagan administration made Sudan an important base for the CIA’s covert campaign against Qaddafi and a regional center of operations during the Cold War.
Having reconciled with conservative Muslim interests, Nimeiri imposed his own version of Islamic law throughout Sudan in 1983. His Photo 5.1. Armed children in southern Sudan during the civil war, March 8, 1971. Photo by John Downing/Getty Images.
actions violated the 1972 peace agreement, which had granted regional autonomy to the south. The implementation of Islamic law in the south, which was home to some 4 million Christians and practitioners of indige-nous religions, ignited the second civil war. Spearheaded by the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) and its army, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), the southern resistance called for an end to northern Muslim dominance. It also demanded greater control over the wealth produced in south, which possessed most of the country’s gold, arable land, and oil resources. Appealing to oppressed minorities throughout the country, the SPLA, under the leadership of John Garang, found support in all regions for a more equitable Sudan.4 The Soviet Union, Cuba, and Ethiopia supported the rebel cause, hoping to weaken the Khartoum regime.
Military pressures exacerbated Sudan’s ongoing economic crisis. In 1985, the country was devastated by a regional drought and famine that led to rising food and fuel prices. The effects of an IMF austerity program and a related series of currency devaluations compounded the crisis. The government’s paralysis and mounting civil unrest led to Nimeiri’s ouster in a military coup in April of that year. A return to civilian rule in 1986 and the election of Sadiq al-Mahdi, leader of the Sufi Umma Party, as prime minister increased the influence of Islamists in the political arena.5 The Mahdi government sought rapprochement with Libya and embarked on a new southern strategy. Employing Arab and other ethnic militias to fight alongside army regulars, Khartoum waged a scorched earth campaign against the southern populations. Khalil Ibrahim, who organized some of the militias, would later spearhead the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), an Islamist rebel movement in Darfur, where a different Khar-toum government would use similar tactics against civilians in 2003.