Fractured by centuries of brutal slavery, colonialism, ethnic conflicts and underdevelopment, Sudan is a text-book case of everything that can go wrong with nations. It’s also a text-book case of how anaemic the world order is when it comes to resolving massive human suffering. That’s bad news for a world facing multiple challenges no nation can solve alone.
New Delhi: The King of the White Nile, Alphonse de Malzac, had proclaimed himself: ‘The former French diplomat’s camp at Gondokoro was ornamented with the bodies of his enemies hanging from the trees in the jungle, or their skulls hammered onto stakes.’
Assigned to Egypt in 1850 as a diplomat, he had travelled into Sudan, into the Bahr el-Ghazal, the region poetically called the Sea of Gazelles. There he decided to leave service and begin his own business: That business was the capture of men who could be sold for ivory or cash, used to extract grain and cattle, or sold to fight as mercenaries.
From their homelands, the slaves were sent to fight for the army in Egypt, to fight alongside colonial forces from Kenya to Congo to Uganda. They fought in the Middle East, they fought in the Crimean Wars against Russia, and even served French Emperor Napoleon III in Mexico, returning to parades in Paris where they were awarded the Légion d’Honneur. The Dinka people of South Sudan, historian Peter Martell writes, called that “the time when the world was spoiled.”
Last week, European donors committed a billion dollars to relieve suffering in the latest phase of the civil war in Sudan, which since it began two years ago, is estimated to have claimed tens of thousands of lives, displaced 14 million people, and pushed large parts of the country into famine. Twenty-five million people are at risk of dying of hunger, the World Food Programme has said, in what it describes as, “the world’s largest humanitarian crisis”. Yes, the largest. Bigger than Afghanistan, than Haiti, than anywhere else.
Welcome to this episode of ThePrint Explorer, and a special thanks to those of you who have been watching this series regularly. I’m Praveen Swamy, and I’m a contributing editor with ThePrint. As you know, this series usually examines ongoing geopolitical crises, taking you on an adventure through their tangled histories.
The thing is, Sudan has no real geopolitical significance. It’s not where the next world war is going to happen, or massive rare earth deposits will be found. There are, to be sure, some oil fields, which are controlled by the China National Petroleum Corporation and Sinopec, which are connected to Port Sudan through pipelines.
The pipelines were destroyed in the fighting last year, but drilling has just begun again, protected by private Chinese security companies. This isn’t a story about oil, though. Sudan’s reserves make up just a third of 1 percent of the world’s hydrocarbons, which, in the grand scheme of things, is nothing.
If those oil fields disappeared tomorrow, very few people, apart from those whose livelihoods are linked with them, would care. But even though this story doesn’t involve rare earth minerals or Pakistan’s nuclear programme, it is still enormously important.
First, it’s important because, and I think we too often forget this, it involves enormous human suffering, and empathy is what makes us human.
Second, because it shows us how savagery and violence can shape the course of history for generations, long after the wars that caused them are forgotten.
And third, Sudan teaches us what happens when societies and world powers fail to become functional nation-states, and when violence becomes a way of life. Then all you’re left with is a kind of genocide-making perpetual motion machine, crushing human lives with each mindless oscillation. That aid last week is a good gesture, and it will probably save some lives. The truth is, though, that the world just doesn’t care enough to do what needs doing.
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The merchants of men
For many generations, historian Frederic Thomas records, slave traders from the Middle East had conducted raids down the Bahr el-Ghazal, the main western tributary of the Nile, capturing women, children and men to serve the elites of Egypt and the wider Ottoman world. The traffickers came from across the Islamic world, Turks, Syrians, Egyptians and Sudanese themselves, some of them former slaves, participating in this brutal traffic.
The slow abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, which began to be choked slowly from 1807, drew many European traffickers to Sudan and its open market. Large numbers of Middle East slave traders cast their barbarism as a religious mandate.
Their trade outposts flew black flags painted with Quranic exhortations to jihad. There was, of course, no attempt to convert people to Islam, for if the slaves were Muslims, that would prohibit their capture and so stop this dark trade. The new European slave traders, ironically, raised the black banners of jihad for convenience too, along with their national flags.
Flags from many nations flew, among them, Martell writes, the US stars and stripes. Imperial powers arrived in Sudan later in the 19th century, almost by accident. In 1869, the opening of the Suez Canal drastically shortened the trade route to India and the British Empire knew it could not afford to leave political control of the canal to chance.
In 1882, with Egypt in the midst of a financial and social crisis, the Royal Navy bombarded the port of Alexandria and sent troops ashore to seize the canal and the country with it. England’s efforts, half-hearted and tentative, to discourage the slave trade played a key role in what happened next. In 1881, Muhammad Ahmad, the son of a humble boat builder from north of Khartoum, claimed to be the Mehdi or ‘the Guided One’, who had been sent to restore order to the world before the Day of Judgment.
He called for jihad against the foreigners in Khartoum who lived in luxury while its own residents suffered. The powerful slave merchants of Khartoum, angered by British niggling to end the slave trade, helped finance this rebellion.
The British dispatched an army of 10,000 men to confront the Mahadis. Led by General Charles Gordon, the British succeeded in holding out for almost a year. Two days before reinforcements arrived in 1885 though, Khartoum fell and Gordon was killed. This also exposed British outposts in the south of Sudan like Darfur.
Battle of Abu Klea, 17th January, 1885
During the Mahdist War in Sudan, a British column marching to rescue the British forces under General Charles Gordon, who were being besieged at Khartoum, were attacked
1400 British fought off over 14,000 opponents pic.twitter.com/vsgzc8CBmI
— Alexander's Cartographer (@cartographer_s) October 5, 2023
Finally, the British built the infrastructure they needed to secure Egypt’s underbelly, historian Michael Barthorp explains. A railway line was built bypassing the rapids of the Nile to ensure troops could never be cut off again. The railway enabled a massive build-up of troops and artillery outside the thick mud walls of the Mahadis capital of Omdurman, just across the river from Khartoum.
Winston Churchill, then just 23, watched what happened as religious fervour took on modern industrial warfare: ‘From the direction of the enemy, there came a succession of grisly apparitions. Horses spouting blood, struggling on three legs, men staggering on foot, men bleeding from terrible wounds, fish-hook spears stuck right through them, arms and faces cut to pieces, bowels protruding, men gasping, crying, collapsing, expiring.’
Ten thousand Mahadis were killed. The British recorded the loss of 48 soldiers. Then the British looked further south and soon realised there wasn’t all that much to be exploited. To still the wounds of centuries of slave trading though, they closed off the southern districts of Sudan to the north. Even the manufacture and sale of Arab-style clothing was forbidden in the south.
Northern and Egyptian officers were removed from South Sudan in 1910 and replaced with the new Equatorial Corps. But among the things that didn’t move south was modernisation. South Sudan remained a place where the sunlight never fell.
The coming of the nations
The world came anyway though, uninvited. In 1940, as Britain fought claw and tooth for survival against Nazi Germany, Italy took the opportunity to move some 100,000 troops into Africa. Khartoum was bombarded.
The British responded with cunning. Fake forts were built complete with roaring bonfires to persuade the Italians that the Sudan border was well defended. Fighting alongside their tribal soldiers camouflaged in hippopotamus fat and mud, British officers succeeded in holding back the Italians at the Sudan border and slowly pushed them back all the way towards Addis Ababa in Ethiopia.
England’s victory in the Second World War though, bankrupted the empire. The time had come home for a long march to begin from the colonies. To prepare for the inevitable independence of Sudan, imperial authorities initiated a policy called ‘Sudanisation’.
For all practical purposes, this meant the better educated, relatively modernised communities of the north would hold power over the entire country. All of South Sudan had a single modern school, which had opened only in 1949. In 1947, the chiefs of the southern tribes were brought together at the sole cinema hall in Juba to discuss their region’s future.
They voiced an almost unanimous fear of Khartoum. “The ancestors of the northern Sudanese were not peace-loving and domesticated like cows,” said Lolik Lado, a leader of the Lokoya people. “The younger generation claim they mean no harm to us, but only time will show what they will in fact do.”
The problem was the deal was already done. South Sudan was dependent on the financial muscle of the north, ruling out independence. In 1953, the British Parliament passed a resolution giving Sudan the option of becoming a part of Egypt or a separate nation.
There was no mention of any federal rights for South Sudan. For four days in 1954, the leadership of South Sudan met to consider their options. They chose independence from Egypt. On that, there was consensus in both parts of the country. The south, however, was clear they could only be part of a united Sudan if they had a federal system with wide-ranging autonomy. If that was not possible, the leaders called for South Sudan to be a separate country.
Even though seven government-allied delegates argued against partition, interestingly pointing to the bloody division of India and Pakistan, the vote could not have been more emphatic: 227 to 0. The moment of independence, though, was clouded by terror. Fueled by rumours that the soldiers of the Equatorial Corps, the South Sudan army, who were being sent north would be converted to Islam, rebellion flared.
Troops at a parade ground in Juba turned on their northern comrades, hacking and killing all they could find. The troops then broke open the locks of the armoury and began handing out weapons. Large numbers of northern civilians who had taken refuge in a local police station were machine-gunned, looting spread into the town, targeting shops owned by northerners.
Ten days later, leaderless and outgunned, the mutineers fled into the bush, defeated. The real war was just beginning, though. Sudan was beginning a descent into an endless horror of ethnic hatred and civil war.
The decades of war
General Ibrahim Abboud’s military regime, which seized power in 1958, pushed through a programme of Islamisation and Arabisation in an effort to cut at the roots of southern separatism and build a united country. This, together with pressures on both the church and political dissidents, led to the birth of an opposition-in-exile in Uganda, Emeric Rogier writes. The new southern political formation, the Sudan African Nationalist Union or SANU, campaigned for self-determination without ever stating whether it was willing to accept this self-determination within the framework of a unitary state or whether secession was necessary.
Today marks the 60th anniversary of the glorious October Revolution, that national epic which erupted on October 21, 1964. In a mere ten days, this revolution shook Sudan to its core, challenging the regime of the late President, General Ibrahim Abboud. This revolution heralded… pic.twitter.com/c4dAr4d7u0
— 𝓗𝓪𝓽𝓲𝓶𝓐𝓵𝓶𝓪𝓭𝓪𝓷𝓲-حاتم المدني (@HatimElmadani) October 21, 2024
The fall of General Abboud’s government in 1965 created some opening for a political dialogue. The southerners were allowed to form a new political party in Khartoum, the southern front, and its leader Clement Mboro was appointed Minister of the Interior. This led to a sharpening of divisions among the southerners, though, between those willing to accept federalism and committed secessionists.
Even though the two factions agreed that a plebiscite would settle the debate, this time the northern parties refused to go along. Faced with resistance from the south, the parties of the north again began pushing the Arab-Islamic agenda. The Muslim Brotherhood, the largest Islamist formation in the Middle East, had also acquired growing power in northern Sudan through this time.
The north thus began to push for a new constitution, which was designed to turn Sudan into an Islamic state governed by Sharia religious law. The conflict, not surprisingly, grew even more fierce through the 1960s as both sides acquired Cold War sponsors. Colonel Jaafar Nimeiri, who seized power in Khartoum at the head of a socialist-leaning group of military officers, got support from Egypt and from the Soviet Union.
Trained in Uganda and with bases in Ethiopia, SANU’s military wing Anyanya, also received substantial assistance from Israel. Khartoum, for its part, turned to Egypt and got a large amount of financial aid from the Soviet Union.
Nimeiri had a problem, though. He hoped to build a new power base for his regime. He appointed a southern communist, Joseph Garang, as Minister for Southern Affairs. Garang, however, proved unable to deliver the South into Nimeri’s hands.
For one, Nimeiri didn’t want to alienate his northern supporters even more by engaging in direct talks. Meanwhile, Garang, being a socialist, was mistrusted by many in the devoutly Christian South. Even more important, Nimeri’s regime refused to engage in dialogue on autonomy, insisting economic parity would heal the ethnic fissures.
The two sides, though, were forced into a kind of compromise. Faced with an abortive coup, Nimeiri purged the communists from his regime and followed up by making peace with Ethiopia and Uganda. This provided an opening to Colonel Joseph Lagu in the South, who reached an agreement to share power with Nimeiri.
Nimeiri and Lagu signed on to a new secular constitution in 1973 and Abel Alier was appointed to head the first government of the autonomous southern region. A country was being born, or so it seemed.
Endless war
From its outset, the peace deal of 1973 was beset by enormous challenges. There were coup attempts in September 1975, led by officers from Darfur and Kordofan, who wanted for their regions the same privileges that had been granted to the South. Libya backed another coup in July 1976, led by former prime minister Sadiq al-Mahdi. Nimeiri now concluded that he was more at threat from northern dissidents than his southern allies.
Accordingly, he announced a policy of reconciliation with Islamic fundamentalists. Sadiq al-Mahdi was invited to return from exile and his brother-in-law Hassan al-Turabi, leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, was released from prison and appointed Attorney General. The Islamic parties now pushed for abrogation of the 1973 accord, seeing it as the roadblock for the formation of a single, unitary Islamic state.
The Islamic parties also adopted an increasingly predatory approach to the South’s resources. Among other things, they built the Jonglei Canal, which diverted water from the South through the Great Central Swamps without consulting any of the southern parties. The discovery of oil in 1979 had even more serious consequences, with the government redrawing provincial boundaries to place the oil fields in the North.
Simultaneously, Arabic was declared the official language in the South instead of English and control of the armed forces in the South was transferred to the central government. In 1983, Sharia law was imposed across the entire country and thus began the Second Civil War. Like the First Civil War, the Second began with a mutiny of southern soldiers, this time from the 105th Battalion, who resisted orders to be transferred to the North.
Troops from the Sudanese army stationed in Juba were then sent by Khartoum to quell the mutiny. However, instead of following orders, government army officer Colonel John Garang encouraged the mutinies and led the rebellion against Khartoum. The abolition of the southern region a few months later prompted further mutinies and desertions by southern soldiers, who formed the bulk of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army or SPLA, which was established in July 1983 in Ethiopia.
As the war wound on, the southern rebels also splintered along ethnic and regional lines. John Garang’s SPLA came to be perceived as dominated by the Dinka people, while the older organisation Anyanya recruited mainly among the Nuer people.
Economic collapse and the continuous toll of the war led Nimeiri to be overthrown in April 1985. He was replaced by his Defence Minister and Commander-in-Chief Abd al-Rahman Suwar al-Dahab, who led the Transitional Military Council until elections were held in 1986. The political alliance which led opposition to Nimeri now opened negotiations with Garang. Islamist political parties, however, flatly declined to roll back the Sharia system, leading the talks to stalemate.
RANDOM
30 June 1989, Khartoum, Sudan.
Brigadier Omar Hassan Ahmed Al-Bashir, 45, leads a coup d’etat mounted by military sympathizers of the National Islamic Front, against the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Sadiq Al-Mahdi who came to power 1986 pic.twitter.com/bmQE3W2ejP
— BEEGEAGLES BLOG (@beegeaglesblog) June 30, 2023
Then, in 1989, a new coup was staged by hardliners led by General Omar al-Bashir. Tehran now stepped in and equipped and trained the Sudanese Armed Forces and helped establish paramilitary organisations called the Popular Defence Forces or PDF. This came at a difficult time for the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SLPM).
The fall of Ethiopian strongman Mengistu Haile Mariam in 1991 deprived the southerners of their rear base. Then, fighting broke out between Garang and a second militia in the south, Kerubino Kwanyin Bol. A decade of civil war, though, was starting to wear out all the factions.
Around this time, facing intense pressure from the United States, the North and the South finally agreed to negotiate. In 2005, an autonomous region was formed in the South, administered by the SPLA. In 2011, after a referendum, South Sudan became independent. The youngest, but also the very poorest country in the world. It was poor, but many thought it at least had hope.
A state of entropy
Freedom turned out to mean very little, though. Fresh fighting broke out in 2011 when South Sudan President Salva Kiir dismissed his deputy, Riek Machar, as Vice-President, accusing him of plotting a coup. The ensuing conflict, largely fought along ethnic lines between the supporters of the two leaders, resulted in an estimated 400,000 deaths and 2.5 million people being forced from their homes. That’s a fifth of the population of South Sudan.
As part of an eventual peace deal in 2018, Machar was reinstated as Vice President within a unity government that was meant to pave the way for elections. The fragile deal collapsed in March that year, though, when the White Army militia, which was allied to Machar during the civil war, clashed with the official army in Upper Nile state and overran a military base in Nazir. Then, on March 7th, a United Nations helicopter attempting to evacuate troops came under fire, leaving several dead, including a high-ranking army general.
Three weeks later, Machar and several of his associates were again arrested, accused of trying to stir up a war. Fighting has also been raging in the north since 2023, pitting the Rapid Support Forces, an offshoot of the Janjavid militia, who staged brutal attacks on the southern tribes, and the official Sudanese Armed Forces. The government reclaimed control of Khartoum in March, but fighting is ongoing in large parts of the country.
There is a simple lesson in the story of the two Sudans for all of us. War, just like elections or the rule of law, is a culture which is built up over time. When the world cares enough, it can commit the troops and the resources needed to end the slaughter.
America did that, after all, in the Balkans. But the truth is, Sudan doesn’t matter enough to any great power for that to happen. The other way wars end is when one side comprehensively wins.
That process, the famous American political scientist Charles Tilly taught us, eventually led to the birth of nation-states in Europe, after three centuries of slaughter. Perhaps that’s what lies ahead for Sudan and other countries mired in civil wars too. If it does, Sudan will hold up a mirror to our values as a global civilisation and our ability and commitment to end unnecessary suffering.
The picture in the mirror, unfortunately, is not a very pretty one.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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