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Sudan’s Eternal Civil Wars
12/09/2013
International norms grant a nation the obligatory right to monopolize the application of proportionate violence for the purpose of providing security to all its citizens within its borders. Consequently, the government of The Sudan has the right to quash internal dissent stemming from rebellious movements. But the eternal civil wars of The Sudan defy political logic.
The Sudan is home to about 600 ethnic groups speaking over 400 languages, thereby making it one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world. Coupling that with religious and cultural diversity make this land one of the most difficult territories to govern without the consent of the governed. Political dissent is a natural byproduct of this complex mixture.
In the early days after independence, Khartoum reneged its promise to southerners to create a federal system, which led to a mutiny by southern army officers that launched the first of The Sudan’s two north-south civil wars.
The first civil war killed more than 500,000 people in the south and forced another half a million to cross the borders to neighboring countries as refugees. More significantly, hundreds of thousands of southern citizens were internally displaced to other parts of the nation, before President Jaafar Numeiri conceded to a measure of autonomy for southern Sudan in a peace agreement signed in Addis Ababa and stopped a 17-year-blood letting.
In 1983 after an 11-year lull, fighting erupted again between north and south Sudan, under the leadership of Dr. John Garang's Sudanese People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), after Numeiri abolished South Sudan's autonomy. The second civil war killed two million in the south and internally displaced five million people.
Fighting in the south slowly seeped into the Nuba Mountain area killing, over a decade, more than 70,000 people and displacing over 100,000 others.
In what has been dubbed the first genocide of the century, the civil war in Darfur has killed, and continues to murder, 400,000 people mostly women, children and unarmed civilians; internally displaced two million others and forced over 100,000 Darfurians to cross the border into Chad and Central African Republic.
The murder of civilians continues in Darfur, Nuba Mountain and Blue Nile, also known as the marginalized areas. It is saddening to acknowledge that most of the soldiers killed on the government of Khartoum’s side were mainly army recruits from the same marginalized areas. The death tolls in those areas are devastating.
The loss of lives to a young nation, about three million to civil wars in half a century, is a catastrophic waste of human resources that could have benefited the nation. Additionally, the destruction of property, cost to the treasury and loss of good will between those who control Khartoum and the rest of the nation may have bred eternal animus.
Just stop the nefarious killings.
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