Sudan for beginners

Sudan and South Sudan seem like interesting places to start a discussion about world politics today. It has a recent history of violence involving some of the major powers both in East Africa and internationally. In previous centuries, this violence stemmed mostly from 3 related sources--the Nile River trade, the Ottoman/Arab slave trade, and the wars of cattle herders. P

erhaps the cattle wars are the simplest. For centuries, the main form of wealth for the patriarchs of the mostly Nilotic people living in the wetlands, savannas, and riverine areas of east Africa was cattle. It was and continues to be common for tribes to be locked into conflicts involving cattle raids, and often these conflicts have involved complex alliances among tribes. The addition of automatic weapons in the 20th century have increased the stakes of these conflicts and made them much deadlier. Warfare over cattle has also intermingled with the other wars in the region.

The taking of slaves from East Africa to the Middle East and Indian subconginent dates back centuries before the European slave trade, but it was not until the 18th or 19th century--when a backward form of capitalism was triumphant in the Ottoman Empire--that slavery became the major factor in Sudan's economy. The major powers of the time--Darfur, Sennar, the Azande kingdom--both sold slaves on a wholesale basis to Arab emirates nominally loyal to the Ottoman sultan, and incorporated slaves into their armies. Slave labor continues to be used, especially by armies.

The Nile River trade brought guns and gold to the upriver region, intensifying the deadly competition for access to the river. Besides slaves, the main export was for a long time ivory, usually carried by teams of enslaved porters.

Such was the situation in the 19th century when the khedive of Egypt, seeking land, gold, and slaves with which to carve out a European-style empire, invaded Sennar. A centerpiece of Egyptian policy at the time was the planned Suez Canal, which would allow for direct trade between the Mediterranean and India. The people of Sudan were heavily taxed to pay for the canal.

As Egypt, with the rest of the Ottoman Empire, fell on hard times, the British began taking an increasingly direct role in Egyptian affairs, including the canal from which the British would benefit the most. This was the situation when the Mahdi Army rose up against British rule.

A Sufi man claiming to be the Mahdi--a role similar to a messiah in some forms of Islam--and saying he was preparing the way for the 2nd coming of Issa (Jesus as the Islamic prophet) organized a major rebellion against Turkish-Egyptian rule. Building a modern army with its own factories for manufacturing guns--the first such in African history--he captured Khartoum, the ancient city where the White Nile and Blue Nile converge. The movement he began, the Ansar, continued to be involved in Sudanese politics into the 20th century.

Islam is a relatively recent import to Sudan. For centuries, the upper Nile basin was a stronghold of Christianity, specifically the Oriental Orthodox Christianity practiced by the Nubian kingdoms established in the wake of the collapse of the ancient kingdom of Meroe. These kingdoms were protected by geography and military organization from the conquests of early Islam. However, as Islam became established in Egypt to the north, the powerful and long-lasting Kanem-Bornu Empire to the west, and powerful Red Sea trading ports like Mogadishu, Mombasa, and Zanzibar to the east, and in less powerful states in their cultural orbit, and as Muslim traders became frequent visitors to Nubia, conversion to Islam spread from the periphery to the centers of power. By about the time of the height of Ottoman power (15th century), the rulers of the 3 major Nubian kingdoms, along with most of the powerful tribes, had converted to Islam, often foollowing civil wars between Christian and Muslim factions. The rise of Darfur and Sennar, who had adopted Islam from their neighbors in Nubia, Kanem-Borni, and Wadai, also helped spread the Islamic faith while killing or selling into slavery many of the remaining Christians of northern Sudan.

Ironically, the Nilotic, Central Sudanic, and Ubangian people of South Sudan, who are most likely to be Christian today, were mostly Christianized after Christianity had long been practiced, and later abandoned, farther north. Missionaries concentrated on this area partly because the natives were less hostile to Christianity here than farther north (they were less organized politically, they had little history of conflict with Christian powers, despite some slave trades by Christian Ethiopia, and the Nilotic people's traditional religion worshipped a single male sky god, creating a fertile ground for conversions), and partly because missionaries believed that by Christianizing the people who lived in the heartland of the Arab slave trade, they would help stamp that trade out.

Christians and other non-Muslims resented the Mahdi's attempt to impose shari'a law. After the British and their Egyptian lackeys regained control with the help of a large army equipped with repeater rifles, Britain consciously pitted Muslim north Sudan against Christian/"animist" south Sudan, setting the stage for civil war once Sudan gained its independence.

The three-way Cold War among the U.S., USSR, and China, and the shifting positions of powerful neighbors (Ethiopia, Egypt, and the Kinshasa regime) in this war, as well as the destabilizing conservative pressures from the Ansar on the side of the conservative Muslim establishment, and Israel on the side of the resistance, helped turn the struggle against shari'a law into a series of bitter factional fights involving repeated massacres in South Sudan. Cattle raiding helped intensify these fights, as did the discovery of large oil deposits in South Sudan.

A leftist resistance force based in the South, the Sudanese People's Liberation ARmy, was expertly maneuvered by the U.S. from a revolutionary force seeking nationwide power, an end to shari'a, and social equality, into a secessionist movement by southerners. A peace agreement reached in 2006 led to the referendum in which South Sudanese overwhelmingly voted for independence this year, which they achieved just recently. This independence will make it easier for the U.S. to control South Sudan's oil.

In the meantime, the SPLA, hoping to open up a 2nd front in the northwest, encouraged the Fur and Saharan people of the Darfur region to rise up against the government. Some initial successes by the Darfur rebels were impressive, but they were largely unable to capitalize on their victories because of infighting among the major tribes (conflicts stemming partly from opposing attitudes toward shari'a law and partly because of political conflicts in Chad and other countries that have spilled over into tribal conflicts in Darfur). Many Arab mercenaries have also assisted the government in putting down the rebellion.

The role of the Arabs in Darfur has been much misrepresented. First, although there is often conflict between "Arabs" and "Blacks," there is a substantial Arab component in some rebel factions (in fact, anti-Arab sentiment is one cause of infighting among the rebels). More interesting is that the "Arabs"--although they speak Arabic, keep alive Arabic cultural traditions, and trace their ancestry to patriarchs from the Arab world--are as Black in color as the "Blacks" who are culturally identified with a sub-Saharan tradition and speak an African language. Second, the Arab janjawid militias have been represented as murderous, genocidal maniacs in oversimplified presentations of the conflict by pro-interventionist parties. Certainly the lure of weapons supplied by Khartoum has tickled the avarice of a few Arab leaders, and certainly there have been too many acts of brutality by the janjawid. But it is wise to recall that most of Darfur is a desert, that pastoral Arab herders are among its poorest residents, that Arabs had long been accustomed to water their herds at some of the few oases in Darfur, and that the first attacks of the janjawid began after rebel leaders, involved in their own tribal faction fight, cut off access to the most important of these oases. It is also often alleged that the Arab Muslims are oppressing the Black Christians in Darfur. This misconception probably comes from a confusion of the Darfur conflict with the Sudanese Civil Wars in South Sudan. In fact, Darfur is overwhelmingly Muslim and was the center of a powerful pre-modern Islamic sultanate.

The 2010 peace agreement in Darfur was transparently the result of American pressure to sign any agreement irrespective of the roots of the conflict. It was signed by only 1 of the 3 major rebel movements, namely the Justice & Equality Movement dominated by the Zaghawa tribe--notably the only one of the three to support shari'a law and to be allied with the ultra-Islamist opposition to Sudan's Islamist president Omar al-Bashir. The agreement would increase the influence the most powerful Darfurian Black tribes have in Khartoum, but make no steps toward autonomy or independence, the avowed goal of the JEM. The JEM has recently repudiated this agreement as rival groups have gained territory. The latest development here, though, is the fall of the Qaddafi regime in Libya which was the main source of military support for the rebels in Darfur. This, as well as the apparent stabilization of the situation in the south and the east (where an Eritrean-backed insurgency allied with the Nilotic and Darfurian rebels has reached a peace agreement as part of a general agreement between Sudan and Eritrea), can be expected to strengthen the government's brutal fist in Darfur.

The discovery of oil also prompted a major highway construction project overseen by none other than Saudi billionaire industrialist Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden was also allegely major shareholder in the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, which was the main supplier of medicine (for war injuries, sleeping sickness, malaria, tuberculosis and other endemic diseases for all of east Africa and the source of 90% of Sudan's pharmaceuticals including all its anti-tuberculosis medication. This plant was destroyed by an American missile attack in response to the U.S. embassy bombings. The U.S. claimed that nerve gas was being manufactured there, but blocked Sudan's demand for a chemical analysis of the site by UN-appointed experts. Sudan's government continues to enjoy friendly relations with al-Qaeda and allied groups.

As we look to the future, there is still an unresolved border dispute between Sudan and South Sudan; nearly a dozen armed rebel groups jockeying for influence within South Sudan; the ongoing conflict in Darfur; and 2 visible problems on the horizon. The first is the plan announced by Ethiopia to dam the Blue Nile, source of 2/3 of the Nile's total flow, which could wreak havoc on Egyptian and Sudanese irrigation. This could potentially draw Sudan into a war with Ethiopia, which has one of the world's largest tank armies, is already engaged in propping up an allied government in Somalia, and has a long-standing border dispute with Eritrea, which has recently become increasingly friendly toward Sudan.

The 2nd problem I mentioned is the depradations of the Lord's Resistance Army in central Africa. The LRA is a militant group of Acholi (a Nilotic tribe) nationalists seeking to establish a theocratic state based on the 10 Commandments. It is known for atrocious massacres and abduction of child soldiers. It was supported by the al-Bashir regime in Sudan, a long-time enemy of Uganda where the LRA is most active and where the entire Acholi population was recently forcibly relocated, and it carried out attacks (slave raids) on SPLA-allied tribes such as the Dinka during the 2nd Sudanese Civil War. More recently, South Sudanese leaders at the national as well as tribal and village levels have allegedly paid ransoms to the LRA to prevent attacks. Now the U.S. is sending forces to the area of LRA strength--also a border region that is home to the ongoing Ituri conflict between farmers and herders, to displaced armies from the Second Congo War and the race wars in Rwanda and Burundi, and also not coincidentally a major source of both oil and rare metals with high-tech industrial applications (e.g., coltan)--resources coveted not only by the U.S. and the French who already have forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a neighboring nation to which the U.S. is also committing special forces--but also to China, which is already heavily invested in Africa, a major supplier of arms to the Sudanese government, and poised to build a navy capable of effectively projecting Chinese power in Africa. Incidentally, the main U.S. base and the main French base in Africa are both in Djibouti, on the borders of Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia, and across the Red Sea from Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. Yes, Sudan and South Sudan seem likely flashpoints for the earliest battles of the coming great war.