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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Sudan
Index
The military force that eventually became the Sudanese army
was established in 1898, when six battalions of black soldiers
from southern Sudan were recruited to serve with Britain's
General Herbert Kitchener in his campaign to retake Sudan
(see Reconquest of Sudan
, ch. 1). In the succeeding thirty years, no
fewer than 170 military expeditions were sent to establish order,
halt intertribal warfare, and restrain occasional messianic
leaders, mostly in Darfur in the west.
During the period of the Anglo-Egyptian condominium (1899-
1955), participation of southerners in northern units of the
Sudanese armed forces was all but eliminated. The British had
developed a policy of administrative separation of the Muslimdominated northern Sudan and the mostly non-Muslim south, where
the separate Equatoria Corps commanded by British officers was
maintained
(see The Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, 1899-1955
, ch.
1). Sudanese troops in the north were commanded largely by
Egyptian and British commissioned officers until an anti-British
mutiny in 1924, apparently incited by Egyptian officers, caused
Egyptian troops and units to be sent home. In 1925 local forces
were designated the Sudan Defence Force (SDF), and the Sudanese
assumed an increasing share of responsibility for its command.
After 1900 the British sought to develop an indigenous
officer class among educated Sudanese, mostly from influential
northern families. Consequently, the SDF came to be viewed as a
national organization rather than as an instrument of foreign
control. The prestige of the 20,000-man SDF was enhanced by its
outstanding performance in World War II against numerically
superior Italian forces that operated from Ethiopia. In the
decade between the end of World War II and Sudan's independence,
the SDF did not grow significantly in size, but Sudanese assumed
increasingly important posts as British officers were reassigned
or retired. Sudanese officer candidates were screened and
selected, but Sudanization of the armed forces in practice meant
their arabization. The underdeveloped education system in the
south produced few qualified candidates, and most lacked fluency
in Arabic, the lingua franca of the armed services. The British
had hoped to use the recruitment of southerners into the army
after World War II to spur their integration into Sudanese
national life.
On the eve of independence, in 1955 the SDF's Equatoria
Corps--made up almost entirely of southern enlisted men but
increasingly commanded by northerners as the British withdrew--
mutinied because of resentment over northern control of national
politics and institutions. Northern troops were sent to quell the
rebellion, and the Equatoria Corps was disbanded after most of
its men went into hiding and began what became a seventeen-year
struggle to achieve autonomy for the south.
At independence in 1956, Sudan's 5,000-man army was regarded
as a highly trained, competent, and apolitical force, but its
character changed in succeeding years. To deal with the southern
insurgency, the army expanded steadily to 12,000 personnel in
1959 and it leveled off at about 50,000 in 1972. After
independence, the military--particularly the educated officer
corps--lost much of its former apolitical attitude; soldiers
associated themselves with parties and movements across the
political spectrum.
Data as of June 1991
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