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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Sudan
Index
The long war in Sudan had a profound effect not only on
ethnic groups but also on political action and attitudes. With
the exception of a fragile peace established by negotiations
between southern Sudanese insurgents (the Anya Nya) and the Sudan
government at Addis Ababa in 1972, and lasting until the
resumption of the conflict in 1983, southern Sudan has been a
battlefield. The conflict has deeply eroded traditional ethnic
patterns in the region, and it has extended northward, spreading
incalculable political and economic disruption. It has, moreover,
caused the dislocation and often the obliteration of the smaller,
less resistant ethnic groups.
The north-south distinction and the hostility between the two
regions were grounded in religious conflict as well as a conflict
between peoples of differing culture and language. The language
and culture of the north were based on Arabic and the Islamic
faith, whereas the south had its own diverse, mostly non-Arabic
languages and cultures. It was with few exceptions non-Muslim,
and its religious character was indigenous (traditional or
Christian). Adequate contemporary data were lacking, but in the
early 1990s possibly no more than 10 percent of southern Sudan's
population was Christian. Nevertheless, given the missions' role
in providing education in the south, most educated persons in the
area, including the political elite, were nominally Christians
(or at least had Christian names). Several African Roman Catholic
priests figured in southern leadership, and the churches played a
significant role in bringing the south's plight to world
attention in the civil war period
(see The Southern Problem
, ch.
1). Sudan's Muslim Arab rulers thus considered Christian mission
activity to be an obstacle to the full arabization and
Islamization of the south.
Occasionally, the distinction between north and south has
been framed in racial terms. The indigenous peoples of the south
are blacks, whereas those of the north are of Semitic stock.
Northern populations fully arabized in language and culture, such
as the Baqqara, however, could not be distinguished physically
from some of the southern and western groups. Many sedentary
Arabs descended from the pre-Islamic peoples of that area who
were black, as were the Muslim but nonarabized Nubians and the
Islamized peoples of Darfur.
It is not easy to generalize about the importance of physical
attributes in one group's perceptions of another. But physical
appearance often has been taken as an indicator of cultural,
religious, and linguistic status or orientation. Arabs were also
likely to see southerners as members of the population from which
they once took slaves and to use the word for slave, abd,
as a pejorative in referring to southerners.
North-south hostilities predate the colonial era. In the
nineteenth century and earlier, Arabs saw the south as a source
of slaves and considered its peoples inferior by virtue of their
paganism if not their color. Organized slave raiding ended in the
late nineteenth century, but the residue of bitterness remained
among southerners, and the Arab view of southerners as pagans
persisted.
During British rule, whatever limited accommodation there may
have been between Arabs and Africans was neither widespread nor
deep enough to counteract a longer history of conflict between
these peoples. At the same time, for their own reasons, the
colonial authorities discouraged integration of the ethnically
different north and south
(see Britain's Southern Policy
, ch. 1).
Neither Arab attitudes of superiority nor British dominance
in the south led to loss of self-esteem among southerners. A
number of observers have remarked that southern peoples,
particularly Nilotes, such as the Dinka, Nuer, and Shilluk,
naturally object to the assumption by the country's Arab rulers
that the southern peoples ought to be prepared to give up their
religious orientation and values.
Interethnic tensions also have occurred in the north.
Disaffection in Darfur with the Arab-dominated Khartoum
government led in the late 1980s to Darfur becoming a virtually
autonomous province. There has also been a history of regionallybased political movements in the area. The frustrations of a
budding elite among the Fur, the region's largest ethnic group,
and Fur-Arab competition may account for that disaffection and
for Darfur regionalism. After World War II, many educated Fur
made a point of mastering Arabic in the hope that they could make
their way in the Arab-dominated political, bureaucratic, and
economic world; they did not succeed in their quest. Further, by
the late 1960s, as cash crops were introduced, land and labor
were becoming objects of commercial transactions. As this
happened, the Arabs and the Fur competed for scarce resources
and, given their greater prominence and power, the Arabs were
regarded by the Fur as exploiters. The discovery of oil in the
late 1970s (not appreciably exploited by 1991 because of the
civil war leading to the departure of Chevron Overseas Petroleum
Corporation personnel) added another resource and further
potential for conflict. Opposition to the imposition by Nimeiri
of the sharia in 1983, and the later attempts at Islamization of
the country in the late 1980s, as well as the government's poor
handling of the devastating famine of 1990 deeply alienated the
Fur from the national government.
There were other tensions in northern Sudan generated not by
traditional antipathies but by competition for scarce resources.
For example, there was a conflict between the Rufaa al Huj, a
group of Arab pastoralists living in the area between the Blue
Nile and the White Nile, and Fallata (Fulani) herders. The
movements of the Fallata intersected with the seasonal migrations
of the Rufaa al Huj. Here ethnic differences aggravated but did
not cause competition.
The reluctance of southern groups to accept Arab domination
did not imply southern solidarity. The opportunities for power
and wealth in the new politics and bureaucracy in southern Sudan
were limited; some groups felt deprived of their shares by an
ethnic group in power. Moreover, ethnic groups at one time or
another competed for more traditional resources, contributing to
a heritage of hostility toward one another.
In the early 1990s, one of the main sources of ethnic
conflict in the south was the extent to which the Dinka dominated
southern politics and controlled the allocation of rewards,
whether of government posts or of other opportunities. In the
1955-56 census, the Dinka constituted a little more than 40
percent of the total population of the three provinces that in
1990 constituted southern Sudan: Bahr al Ghazal, Aali an Nil, and
Al Istiwai. Because no other group approached their number, if
their proportion of the regional total had not changed
appreciably, the Dinka would be expected to play a large part in
the new politics of southern Sudan. Some of the leading figures
in the south, such as Abel Alier, head of southern Sudan's
government until 1981, and SPLA leader John Garang, were Dinka
(although the SPLA made an effort to shed its Dinka image by
cultivating supporters in other groups). It is not known whether
the twenty-five Dinka tribal groups were equally represented in
the alleged Dinka predominance. Some groups, such as the Nuer, a
comparable Nilotic people, and traditional rivals of the Dinka,
had been deprived of leadership opportunities in colonial times,
because they were considered intractable, were then not numerous,
and lived in inaccessible areas (various small groups in Bahr al
Ghazal and northern Aali an Nil provinces). In contrast, some
small groups in Al Istiwai Province had easier access to
education and hence to political participation because of nearby
missions. The first graduating class of the university in Juba,
for example, had many more Azande students from Al Istiwai
Province than from Bahr al Ghazal and Aali an Nil.
Data as of June 1991
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