Civil Wars in the Sudan

Abstract

AbstractThis article spans the fifty years of the independent Sudan (1956–2006) during which the country was torn by five civil wars made manifest by the historic marginalization of the Sudanese on the periphery by the powerful riverine Sudanese living in the heartland along the Nile, the awlad al‐bahr (people of the river) and the deep cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and religious differences between those of the center and the periphery that have produced four of the five civil wars. The longest, most violent, and destructive were the two civil wars between the northern and southern Sudanese, the Anya‐Nya civil war, 1963–1972 and the second southern civil war, 1983–2006. Moreover, the second southern civil war experienced from 1991 to 1996 its own internal civil war between the Dinka and Nuer that caused enormous casualties and suffering before the Sudan People's Liberation Army could establish its supremacy. After the military coup détat (June 30, 1989) and the subsequent Islamist revolution, insurgencies erupted both in the East led by the Beja Congress in 1994 and in the West in Darfur by the Sudan Liberation Movement and the Justice and Equality Movement in 2003. The Beja insurgency was settled in 2006 but the disaster in Darfur continues after great loss of life. This article summarizes each of these insurgencies, interprets their ideology, and analyzes the deep tensions which produced them.