Country of the week.

Sudan is a country not getting enough notice these days, although the American press is now slowly waking up to the humanitarian crisis going on there. This country should be interesting to us on many fronts.

On the forefront, the government based in Khartoum is performing what some are calling ethnic cleansing of the residents of the Durfur area in western Sudan.

Second, that Scud missiles were discovered there belonging to the Syrians and Khartoum, fearing US attention, ordered Syria to take them back. I would like to say that I found links to stories about that, because I did, but I can’t find them now. The press is curiously quiet about it.

I’ll get to all that later. First a brief history. The area of Sudan has been inhabited for over 60,000 years, and studies have shown that contact and inter breeding occurred with the Egyptians all along this timeline. Trade with Egypt seems a given considering the opportunities for transport the Nile river offers.
Sudan is the largest country in Africa, situated on the south border of Egypt, north of Uganda, with Ethiopia and Chad on either side. The north is arid, except for the Nile valley, the West and Northeast, along the coast of the Red sea, is mountainous. The south is dry, but swampy, and area called the Sudd. The White Nile and the Blue Nile come together here in a vast flat expanse.
In the 6th century, the Byzantines began to introduce Christianity to the early Nubian kings of the south. Legend puts this around 540 AD. The Nubian Christian kingdoms lasted until the 9th and 10th centuries.
Arab pressure caused the nations to become one, called Dunqulah, but the Arabs found that reducing the Nubian culture by force was a losing prospect. But the Arab north cut off the Nubians from the Coptics in Egypt and therefore Southern Sudan was cut off from the rest of the Christian world.
The Nubian culture continued to decline until the coming of the Ottoman empire. The Ottomans didn’t micro-manage that part of the empire, holding only seaports for the most part, and ruled the interior with military leaders who ruled the interior in autonomous fifes, and were only concerned with taxes, slave trades, and terrorizing the population as well as fighting amongst themselves.
After the rule of Muhammad Ali (not the boxer), who was a strong Ottoman ruler, European pressure to end the slave trade came down on the region, until the British came in and under Charles George Gordon eradicated the slave trade.
The British control of this region continued until after WWII. During that time it was thought that the south of Sudan could not exist economically on it’s own, so it was administered with the north. Up to the point of independence, the British withdrew troops and support from the south, which made the south nervous, as they already felt oppressed by the more Arabic north.
The North-South civil war has its roots in the 1950s (earlier if you consider the early Christians and the Muslim invasions). Southern freedom fighters, supported from outside the country (the north was supported by Egypt and the USSR as well) fought a stubborn battle, but hundreds of thousands were killed by the late 60s. An agreement was reached with the help of Ethiopia in the early 70s, but Nimeiri, the Sudanese dictator, lost touch with his population and let things degrade back into civil war by the end of the 1980s.
During the 80s, Sadiq al Mahdi, who was the leader of the Umma party, won control of the country through elections, but in the ensuing years was never able to put together a government that the people would accept, and also was unable to stop the conflict with the south. In 1989 Colonel Umar Hassan Ahmad al Bashir overthrew Sadiq and has been the leader of Sudan ever since.
The government of Sudan has a constitution and a representative type government in theory, with Bashir as president and prime minister, and also a National Assembly and a Supreme Court. The President is theoretically elected by popular vote, but most people are skeptical that the last few elections have been fair. The Assembly is also mostly elected by popular vote, but 90 of them are elected by a group of special interests. The government does not represent the interests of the south, as many in the south boycott the elective process anyway, and control over the electoral process is in the north.
Recently, the civil war with southern Sudan has given way to an effort by extremists, not opposed by the government, to eradicate the residents of the Durfur area. The culture of Durfur is Islamic, but also non-Arabic and the Islam they practice is not the same, exactly, as the more Arabic population of the rest of the country.
Indeed this country is so divided culturally, religiously and ethnically that it would be a wonder if Sudan could ever remain one country and still live in peace.

Check out the Darfur Information Center.
Also this site is regularly updatd with happenings in Darfur.
This is a good comprehensive, but not too long, history of Sudan.
Powell was recently in Sudan viewing refugee camps.
This is a speech by him regarding that.
Also this.
The UN and Kofi Annan are finally hearing about this. Will he do anything constructive?
The government continues to deny that there is a crisis.
Rebels say they will not attend peace talks until the attackers (read government) stops attacking them.