Sudan
War, Development and Identity Politics in Sudan
Sudan’s colonial history of Turco-Egyptian and Anglo-Egyptian rule paved the way for highly unstable and divisive relations throughout the country. Since independence, civil war between governments based in Khartoum and rebel movements operating in the south has raged for three of the last four decades. There are several overlapping fault lines that explain the ongoing war. First, Sudan is divided between an Arab north and an African south and west. Second, Sudan is divided between a Muslim north and west and a south where Christian and traditional faiths dominate. Third, the north has historically extracted resources from its southern periphery without investing in it, a pattern which dates back at least to the colonial period. The civil war started in 1955.
The Islamist State and Sudanese Women
The Islamist government in Sudan recently celebrated the third anniversary of the military coup that brought it to power by building a huge public park south of the Khartoum airport, featuring hundreds of hurriedly transplanted trees, bushes and flowers. The impressive determination and efficiency the project commanded seemed calculated to prove to Khartoum’s masses that this is a can-do government.
Democracy and Liberation Movements: The Case of the SPLA
The Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) has been fighting a succession of Khartoum governments since 1983. Though its stated goal is to build a unified “new Sudan,” it is widely perceived as representing the interests of the south, where most of its fighting is done and which it now almost entirely controls.
After more than eight years of remarkable cohesiveness, the SPLA witnessed its first serious coup attempt on August 28, 1991. Since it posed no immediate threat to the rule of SPLA commander-in-chief John Garang, in conventional terms the coup was a failure. But it raised issues of crucial importance to the SPLA, to Sudan, and to all liberational and nationalist movements, issues which are rarely acknowledged and even more rarely tackled.
An Interview with Francis Deng
Francis Deng is a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies program at the Brookings Institution in Washington and a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School. He served as Sudan’s ambassador to Canada from 1980-1983, to the United States from 1974-1976 and to Scandanavian countries from 1972-1974. He was minister of state for foreign affairs from 1976-1980. Khalid Medani interviewed him in Washington in late June 1991.
How would you assess the impact of the Bashir regime on Sudanese society?
Where Famine Is Functional
Images of African famine once again scan Western television screens, prompting a renewed search for causes and solutions. In this worried atmosphere it is easy to overlook that international relief operations have now become a widespread and accepted response to this unfolding crisis. While Sudan and Ethiopia spring to mind, such interventions have also occurred in Uganda, Mozambique, Angola and Liberia.
The National Islamic Front and the Politics of Education
In a country like Sudan, those with access to education become the object of intense competition on the part of political parties of all stripes, especially those with no traditional base of support. Secondary schools and especially universities become the hunting ground — and sometimes the killing ground — for groups whose success on campus represents a shortcut to political hegemony in the country. Whatever the nature of their rhetoric about “the people,” these parties rely on elites, recalling the crucial role that the Graduates Congress played in Sudan’s struggle for independence. Sections of the elite were again instrumental in toppling military regimes in October 1964 and April 1985. [1]
“The Regime Has Simply Barricaded Itself in Khartoum”
Bona Malwal was elected to the Sudanese parliament in 1968. He was minister for culture and information from 1972 to 1978 and minister of finance and economic planning for the south from 1980 to 1981. His English-language newspaper, the Sudan Times, was banned when the current regime seized power in June 1989. He now lives in Britain and publishes the Sudan Democratic Gazette. Joe Stork and Gayle Smith interviewed him in Washington in June 1991.
Will the developments in Ethiopia and Eritrea make it more or less difficult to move things forward in Sudan?
Funding Fundamentalism
While Islamic fundamentalism has become a major political force in the Arab world in recent years, particularly in the countries of the Maghrib, it is in Sudan where the Islamist movement has realized its greatest ambition: controlling the levers of state power and setting itself up as a model for similarity oriented movements. Its leaders in Sudan have actively supported groups elsewhere — reportedly helping to plan a recent failed military coup in Tunis and convening meetings with high officials of Algeria’s Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) in Khartoum. [1]
From the Editors
Iraq and Kuwait, on the eastern frontier of the Arab world, represent one face of the region’s future. Sudan, on the southern frontier, represents another. Unlike the regimes of Saddam Hussein and the Sabahs, the Khartoum junta led by Omar al-Bashir has experienced neither constraint nor favor from the “new world” moral custodians in the White House. The depredations of this regime are homegrown.
The Famine This Time
Gayle Smith coordinates the Africa program at the Washington-based Development Group for Alternative Policies. In the past ten years she has worked extensively in the Horn of Africa on relief and development issues. Her most recent trip to Ethiopia and Sudan was in June 1990. She spoke with Joe Stork in Washington.
Compared to the famine of 1984-1985, what is the scope of the problem in the Horn today?
In terms of numbers, the famine is somewhat less severe than it was five years ago. There are an estimated 5 million in need as opposed to 7-9 million in 1984-1985. Just over 1 million of these people are in Eritrea; another 2.2 million live in Tigray. The rest live elsewhere in the north of Ethiopia, areas now also affected by the war.
Absolute Distress
Most discussion of the food crisis in Africa is a model in which subsistence economies remain essentially intact and food insecurity is a transitory phenomenon, the result of external factors such as drought or war which temporarily upset the normal balance between sufficiency and dearth. My experience suggests that in Sudan subsistence economies have all but disappeared. Food insecurity no longer defines one or another period but is a constant condition of the market economy that has come to dominate the country.
Mediations
Intifada Chic We’re not really sure what this tells us about the present state of the Israeli Jewish psyche, almost two years into the intifada, but here are some of the designer T-shirts being sold these days in Jerusalem:
Khartoum Diary
July 25 The predawn landing, with the swollen Nile below and a touch of freshness in the air, feels reassuring after two years away from Sudan. But at the airport exit a nervous officer holds back the passengers: security is tight since the inqilab, he mutters, using the Arabic word for “overthrow” instead of the official reference — “National Salvation Revolution.” The drive into town — usually a ten-minute dash, swerving around potholes and debris — slows drastically. Soldiers stop the car six times, scrutinizing the special papers that allow us to travel during the nighttime curfew. After this wary silence at night, what will be the mood on the sun-blasted streets during the day?
Sudan’s Killing Fields
In 1988 Sudan reaped its best harvest in at least a decade, yet as many as half a million Sudanese may have died of starvation. Most were victims of the civil war raging in the southern provinces, and anarchy in the west. Hundreds of thousands of people have fled the war zones, seeking refuge in camps in Ethiopia and other neighboring countries or in northern Sudan.
Medical Education: The Struggle for Relevance
A recent World Health Organization report on the state of health practitioners in the Middle East suggests that the region now has a satisfactory number of physicians; some countries even have an excess. Yet health, as measured by standard indicators such as infant mortality, is hardly satisfactory. The report suggests that large numbers of physicians may not, in fact, have a positive effect on health. [1] In recent years, a small number of medical educators in the Middle East have become concerned about the persisting poor health among people in their countries and the questionable appropriateness of medical care. They have attributed this state of affairs to the training offered in medical schools.
Birth (Al-Maulid)
BIRTH (Al-Maulid)
Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Majdhoub (1921-1982)
Hand on the Prophet, God
Help and support me with him
who speaks for the people
on Judgment Day —
with him who drinks pure water
from al-Kauthar, Paradise river.
On the square’s other side
clear light spreads
a rainbow of hope and joy,
a spring flowing through
the darkness of night,
dance driving souls here
slowly one moment,
another faster than breath!
The Wing of the Patriarch
The relationship of women’s emancipation to liberation parties or movements raises a number of questions. The basic one is whether or not women are making their own revolution in their own name or being handed it by “another revolution.” [1]
Mahmoud, The Sudanese Bourgeoisie
Fatima Babiker Mahmoud, The Sudanese Bourgeoisie, (London: Zed Press and Khartoum: Khartoum University Press, 1984).
