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All About Africa
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Sudan Now:In Spring 2005, the United Nations Security Council voted unanimously to send 10,000 troops and more than 700 civilian police to southern Sudan for an initial period of six months to support the peace agreement between the Government of Sudan and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), which ended more than two decades of civil strife. One day in the summer of 2004, more than 400 armed members of the janjaweed militia attacked the western Sudanese village of Donki Dereisa. They killed 150 civilians, including six young children, aged 3 to 14, who were captured during the assault and burned alive later that day, according to the Washington-based human rights group Refugees International. A man who tried to save the children was beheaded and dismembered. Eyewitnesses say that a military aircraft bombed the village during the attack and that Sudanese Army foot soldiers joined in the fighting on the ground. Afterward, government sources denied any involvement and downplayed the incident. That response pattern has typified the ongoing crisis in the Sudanese province of Darfur from the start. In the face of such disclaimers, journalists, relief workers and human rights monitors describe a scorched-earth operation waged jointly by the government and the janjaweed of wholesale massacres, summary executions, the razing of entire villages and the depopulation of wide swathes of farmland. “The government and its janjaweed allies have killed thousands of Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa — often in cold blood — raped women, and destroyed villages, food stocks and other supplies essential to the civilian population,” says a recent Human Rights Watch report. At least 70,000 civilians have been killed, 400 villages destroyed and more than 1.5 million people displaced — 200,000 fleeing to neighboring Chad — in a brutal campaign that has devastated Darfur over the past year, leading UN officials to term this “the world's worst humanitarian crisis.” Though large-scale attacks slowed over the summer after a parade of reporters, diplomats and relief workers trooped through the area — including Secretary of State Colin Powell — acts of terror continue. Militiamen are raping women and girls as they leave camps to collect firewood, says Dennis McNamara, a senior official in the UN's Nairobi Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance. Terror has become a daily fact of life for Darfuris, according to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's Special Representative for Sudan Jan Pronk, who told the Security Council on October 8 that since August “there was no systematic improvement of people's security and no progress on ending impunity.” In response, Annan established a five-member commission to determine whether genocide is being committed. Headed by Antonio Cassese, an Italian judge who served as the first president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the commission includes members from Egypt, Pakistan, Ghana and Peru. Its appearance signals a growing international outcry over this slaughter, muted for nearly a year as the bodies piled up, even as punitive action is delayed. In mid-October, the Dutch foreign minister raised the prospect of European Union sanctions on Sudan, and Britain, Australia and New Zealand have offered to send peacekeepers. Congress has called the killing “genocide” and, on September 18, the Bush administration shepherded a resolution threatening sanctions through the UN Security Council. George W. Bush has echoed the Congressional charges of genocide (as has Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry), but, like everyone else, he has taken no action to stop the carnage. In fact, for all the public hand wringing, precious little action has resulted from any quarter beyond the dispatch of a few dozen African Union monitors to document the deteriorating situation. Nor is it likely to, apart from efforts to send more monitors and to accelerate a belated relief effort — which suits the Khartoum government and just about everyone else involved, outside of Darfuris themselves. Source: William Bowles, Mar 29 2005. GeographyThe Sudan, in northeast Africa, is the largest country on the continent, measuring about one-fourth the size of the United States. Its neighbors are Chad and the Central African Republic on the west, Egypt and Libya on the north, Ethiopia and Eritrea on the east, and Kenya, Uganda, and Democratic Republic of the Congo on the south. The Red Sea washes about 500 mi of the eastern coast. It is traversed from north to south by the Nile, all of whose great tributaries are partly or entirely within its borders. HistoryWhat is now northern Sudan was in ancient times the kingdom of Nubia, which came under Egyptian rule after 2600 B.C. An Egyptian and Nubian civilization called Kush flourished until A.D. 350. Missionaries converted the region to Christianity in the 6th century, but an influx of Muslim Arabs, who had already conquered Egypt, eventually controlled the area and replaced Christianity with Islam. During the 1500s a people called the Funj conquered much of Sudan, and several other black African groups settled in the south, including the Dinka, Shilluk, Nuer, and Azande. Egyptians again conquered the Sudan in 1874, and after Britain occupied Egypt in 1882, it took over Sudan in 1898, ruling the country in conjunction with Egypt. It was known as the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan between 1898 and 1955. The 20th century saw the growth of Sudanese nationalism, and in 1953 Egypt and Britain granted the Sudan self-government. Independence was proclaimed on Jan. 1, 1956. Since independence, the Sudan has been ruled by a series of unstable parliamentary governments and military regimes. Under Maj. Gen. Gaafar Mohamed Nimeiri, the Sudan instituted fundamentalist Islamic law in 1983. This exacerbated the rift between the Arab North, the seat of the government, and the black African animists and Christians in the South. Differences in language, religion, ethnicity, and political power erupted in an unending civil war between government forces, strongly influenced by the National Islamic Front (NIF), and the southern rebels, whose most influential faction is the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA). Human rights violations, religious persecution, and allegations that the Sudan had been a safe haven for terrorists isolated the country from most of the international community. In 1995, the UN imposed sanctions against it. On Aug. 20, 1998, the United States launched cruise missiles that destroyed a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility in Khartoum that allegedly manufactured chemical weapons. The U.S. contended that the Sudanese factory was financed by Islamic militant Osama bin Laden. Since 1999 international attention has been focused on evidence that slavery is widespread throughout Sudan. Arab raiders from the north of the country have enslaved thousands of southerners, who are black. The Dinka people have been the hardest hit. Some sources point out that the raids intensified in the 1980s along with the civil war between north and south. Ever since Lt. Gen. Omar Bashir's military coup in 1989, the de facto ruler of Sudan had been Hassan el-Turabi, a cleric and political leader who is a major figure in the pan-Arabic Islamic fundamentalist resurgence. In 1999, however, Bashir ousted Turabi and placed him under house arrest. (He was freed in Oct. 2003.) Since then Bashir has made overtures to the West, and in Sept. 2001, the UN lifted its six-year-old sanctions. The U.S., however, still officially considers it a terrorist state. A cease-fire was declared between the Sudanese government and the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) in July 2002. During peace talks, which continued through 2003, the government agreed to a power-sharing government for six years, to be followed by a referendum on self-determination for the south. Fighting on both sides continued throughout the peace negotiations. In May 2004, a peace deal between the government and the SPLA was signed, ending 20 years of brutal civil war that resulted in the deaths of 2 million people. Just as Sudan's civil war seemed to be coming to an end, another war intensified in the northwestern Darfur region. After the government quelled a rebellion in Darfur in Jan. 2004, it allowed pro-government militias called the Janjaweed to carry out massacres against black villagers and rebel groups in the region. These Arab militias, believed to have been armed by the government, have killed more than 30,000 and displaced more than 1 million. While the war in the south was fought against black Christians and animists, the Darfur conflict is being fought against black Muslims. Although the international community has reacted with alarm to the humanitarian disaster—unmistakably the world's worst—it has been ineffective in persuading the Sudanese government to rein in the Janjaweed. Despite the EU and the U.S. describing the killing as genocide, and despite a UN Security Council resolution demanding that Sudan stop the Arab militias, the killing continued throughout the summer and fall of 2004. A UN report in February 2005 concluded that although there was no definitive evidence of genocide in Darfur, the Janjaweed were carrying out "no less serious and heinous” crimes. On Jan. 9, 2005, after three years of negotiations, the peace deal between the Southern rebels, led by John Garang of the SPLA, and the Khartoum government to end the two-decades-long civil war was signed. Source: InfoPlease, Feb 13 2005. Online Resources |
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