Episcopal Press and News
The Tortuous History and Background of Sudan
Episcopal News Service. August 16, 2004 [081604-2-A]
Judith Green
[Diocesan Life] The long, tortuous history of post-colonial Africa is filled with wars, revolutions, guerrilla actions, atrocities, ethnic cleansings, coups, famines, and genocides. But while most African countries have had, on and off, periods of peace and renewal, Sudan has lived with all these, many of them at the same time, as an unending civil war has raged for more than 50 years.
According to Professor Randall Fegley, an Africanist who teaches at Penn State's Berks campus, Sudan has been at war since before its independence was granted (by the Anglo-Egyptian joint rule that had ruled it since 1899) on January 1, 1956. Two months earlier, in November 1955, southern units of the Sudanese army mutinied, protesting the planned post-colonial government's dominance by ethnic groups from the north and west of the country, with the south having essentially no voice.
Sudan is Africa's largest country, a third the size of the United States. Its northern two-thirds, the most prosperous and powerful areas, had raided the southern area for slaves for centuries. In the 50 years of post-colonial rule, the south, which includes the Bari linguistic group, has never participated in the power-sharing process, and the region remains in turmoil, its people disaffected and uncontrolled.
At present, three conflicts rage in Sudan. The Sudan People's Liberation Army, formed in 1983, still fights the militant Muslim government based in Khartoum, which is known to be a supporter of Osama bin Laden and a power base for Islamic violence around the world.
In Darfur in the north, the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa tribes, supported by the SLA, called in early 2003 for an end to economic marginalization and demanded a share of power in the central government. Khartoum's answer was to back the Arab janjaweed militia, who have committed ethnic cleansing, mass rape, desecration of religious shrines, summary executions, and wholesale burning of villages on a scale not seen since Rwanda in 1994. And their victims, now numbering in the millions, are fellow Muslims.
In the south, however, the armed conflict originates in Uganda. After the overthrow of Idi Amin, a ruthless dictator who ruled Uganda from 1971 to 1979, the Acholi tribe, led by Alice Lakwena, a formidable general and Christian mystic, began in 1985 to fight for control of the country and overran a third of it until her Holy Spirit Movement was defeated and she went into exile in Kenya in 1997.
Out of the remnants of the Holy Spirit Movement, her nephew, Joseph Kony, founded the Lord's Resistance Army, which claims to be Christian and lives, as Fegley describes it, according to a looser version of the "strong and very strange mystical element" that Lakwena preached. Its goal is to overthrow the Ugandan government and establish a regime based on the 10 commandments, it says, but it has a long history of abducting children to serve as soldiers, sex slaves, and forced labor. It operates on both sides of the Uganda-Sudan border and complicates the Sudanese refugee situation by constantly shifting the frontlines of battle.
Over the past 20 years, drought and the continuing civil war have pushed an estimated 182,000 Sudanese across the country's southern border to refugee camps in Uganda. Having faced resistance from its southern territories since it ceased to be an Anglo-Egyptian colony in 1956, the Sudanese government has done little to stem the refugee tide. It prefers that the area exhaust itself into submission to the militant Muslim theocracy in Khartoum.
The Sudanese government pretends neutrality in the Ugandan conflict, but it supplied helicopter gun ships to Uganda earlier this year for use against the LRA. This aid allowed it to fight the LRA and destabilize the local population at the same time.
In April the LRA attacked a bus near the largest Sudanese refugee camp. Adjumani, and abducted some passengers. Not long after, it began a series of raids on the camps themselves, raping women, kidnapping children, and looting food and goods. The refugees began to return to Sudan in a trickle, then a stream. By summer, Kajo Keji was swollen with refugees, who arrived with nothing but what they could carry.
According to Randall Fegley, there are three kinds of displaced populations. Refugees are those who flee their homelands and cross an international border in their flight. Those who flee an area but remain with their country are internally displaced persons. The third group, repatriated returnees, comes back to their homeland from a refuge in another country. Most of those now in Kajo Keji are repatriated returnees, who fall through the cracks of U.N. and NGO (non-governmental organizations) missions alike. Essentially, these people repatriate themselves when conditions in their own country seem to be calming down. But in the case of the Kajo Keji refugees, neither Sudan nor Uganda takes responsibility for them. And foreign assistance, understandably, is impeded by the terror tactics of the LRA in the area, as well as the covert military assistance of the Sudanese government.
-- Judith Green thanks Randall Fegley for his assistance in putting together this history of modern Sudan.