Not on Our Watch

by Don Cheadle

  Since achieving independence from Great Britain in 1956, Sudan has been a country at war with itself. The genocide in Darfur is only the latest in a series of horrific conflicts. Sudan’s civil wars unfold in a depressingly familiar pattern. The Khartoum government’s counter-insurgency strategy has nearly always begun with killing and displacement on a massive scale. When the international community starts to take notice and the spotlight shines on government atrocities, the regime then scales back the military assault and the chess game begins. They manipulate ethnic dynamics, sowing internal divisions within the opposition. They manipulate American, European, and African diplomats, buying time through disingenuous negotiation to gain the upper hand on the battlefield. And they manipulate humanitarian assistance, hiding behind the iron curtain of state sovereignty to deny humanitarians access to territory where vulnerable civilians need help.

  The ruling National Islamic Front (known today as the National Congress Party) has taken state-sponsored brutality to extraordinary levels, but the systematic hoarding of wealth and power by elites in Khartoum and the endless violent campaign to silence a deprived and angry population have deep historical roots.

  Colonial Times—Sowing Seeds of Discord

  Sudan is the largest country in Africa, straddling the cultural divide between the Arab and Arab-influenced societies of northern Africa and the societies south of the Sahara. Sudan’s geography and its 41 million citizens are correspondingly diverse. Follow the Nile River from Sudan’s northern border with Egypt to its southern border with Uganda and you travel from scorching desert landscapes to swamps and rain forests. The people you meet along the way are equally varied. More than 50% of Sudanese describe themselves as black or ‘African,’ and nearly 40% are Arabs. Sunni Muslims are 70% of the population and Christians are at least 5%, with the remainder adhering to traditional belief systems.

  From the early 15th until the 20th century, the northwestern region of Darfur was a prosperous independent kingdom of the Fur people. (In Arabic, Dar means ‘home’ and Darfur therefore is ‘home of the Fur.’) Successive Fur leaders, called sultans, extended the kingdom’s control southward from the Sahara. Colonialism put borders around Sudan’s diverse geography and people for the first time, creating a number of difficulties. In 1899, Britain and Egypt assumed joint authority over Sudan: Britain managed affairs in the south and let the Egyptians control the north. As a result, the two regions developed unique cultural and religious characteristics. While the Egyptians encouraged the spread of Islamic values in the north, the British developed a ‘Southern Policy’ to reduce Islam’s influence, encouraging Christian missionaries to work and promoting the English language in southern Sudan. In 1916, the British government decided to extend its own control to include Darfur, and the colonial administration annexed the sultanate. Working through local political leaders, the British established a so-called ‘Native Administration’ that loosely controlled Darfur.

  When the British government began to withdraw from Sudan after World War II, British officials reconnected the north and south and handed power to the northern elites. Northern Sudanese officials quickly replaced the British administrators in positions of influence in the south. At this time, Darfur was arguably less developed than the south, and the people of Darfur were suspicious of any central authority in Khartoum. Southerners were equally wary of northern intentions. The consolidation of power in the northern city of Khartoum at the expense of the south and the west only confirmed this distrust. The battle lines were drawn, and southerners rioted and rebelled in 1955, just before independence.

  Sudan’s First Civil War—A Nation Born into Conflict

  Internal conflict overshadowed any celebration when Sudan became independent on 1 January 1956. Two years later, the national army took power by force. General Ibrahim Abboud’s regime crushed political opposition and began efforts to Islamise the south through violent proselytisation. Southern ex-soldiers and policemen formed a guerrilla army—the Anya-Nya (meaning ‘snake poison’ in the local Dinka language)—to resist northern aggression. The Anya-Nya found sympathy among the southern population. Soon, the government’s violent counter-insurgency intensified into full-blown civil war between the government’s forces and the rebels.

  In October 1964, a popular uprising in the north toppled the military regime, but new civilian leadership failed to reach a political settlement with the south and the war intensified. Throughout the mid to late 1960s, numerous foreign powers began to funnel money and weapons to the government, to the Anya-Nya, or to both. As in many African countries, the Cold War was not ‘cold’ at all. The government maintained its close ties to the Middle East, but the Soviet Union would become Khartoum’s main patron. Even in 1969, when the military again took power by force, General Jaafar al-Nimeiri’s new government increased Sudan’s trade with the Soviet Union and other communist states. Khartoum relied on Moscow for weapons, and Moscow asserted its strategic influence in the region. Meanwhile, the Anya-Nya rebels drew support mainly from Israel and from neighbouring countries such as Congo, Uganda, and Ethiopia.

  When communists failed in a July 1971 coup attempt, Khartoum’s ties with the Soviets deteriorated and its relationship with the United States and Western Europe improved. Without Soviet military support, Nimeiri recalculated the attractiveness of war with the south and conditions for peace improved. Just months after the failed coup, Nimeiri’s government entered direct negotiations with the Anya-Nya in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. In March 1972, the two sides ratified the Addis Ababa peace agreement which provided substantial power and wealth sharing between the two sides. Darfur at this time was neglected by Khartoum and desperately impoverished, and the Addis Ababa agreement was not the first peace deal in Sudan that failed to resolve the root causes of conflict in all of Sudan, namely the hoarding of wealth and power in Khartoum.

  A War Interrupted

  Unfortunately, peace in Sudan did not hold for long. Though a military strongman, Nimeiri had very little popular support in the north. A group of powerful Islamists, supported by Libya among other governments, formed a strong and organised northern opposition. Sadiq al-Mahdi, a former prime minister, led another failed coup attempt in 1976. Nimeiri’s subsequent attempts to appease the Islamists and generate political support among northerners led him to appoint al-Mahdi and several leading Islamist opposition leaders to important government posts (usually at the expense of southerners who had achieved their positions under the Addis Ababa agreement). Nimeiri allowed opposition leaders living in exile to return to Sudan, including members of the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical religious fundamentalist organisation. The extremist Islamist scholar Hassan al-Turabi became attorney general, and an Islamist influence spread within the government.

  The pressure from the Islamists to renege on the peace agreement was compounded by the discovery of oil in southern Sudan. Driven by greed, northern elites sought to monopolise and maximise oil profits: they resented the provisions in the Addis Ababa agreement that gave the south a degree of financial autonomy as well as the right to collect the central government’s taxes on commercial activity there. Nimeiri’s increasingly uncompromising cabinet demanded that he replace southern troops with northerners in areas with significant oil deposits. Then he stole southern proceeds from an oil licensing deal and set in motion plans for a pipeline to take oil from the south to Port Sudan, for export or for processing in northern refineries.[1] These attempts to cut southerners out of the oil profits exacerbated underlying tensions.

  Southerners began to express their frustration with the Nimeiri government, and northerners became increasingly anxious about the power of southerners in the military. In January 1983, Nimeiri ordered a southern-based battalion to abandon their weapons and redeploy to the north. The troops refused their orders, negotiations to resolve the dispute failed, and in May 1983 Nimeiri ordered his army to attack the insubordinate southern troops. Outmanned and ou
tgunned, the mutineers fled with their weapons, and similar uprisings and desertions continued across southern Sudan. The southerners sought refuge in neighbouring Ethiopia and united to form the opposition Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA).

  Return to War: The Sudan People’s Liberation Army and National Islamic Front

  On 5 June 1983, Nimeiri issued an order that annulled the Addis Ababa agreement. In what is now a familiar pattern of betrayal, the government of Sudan simply turned its back on a signed treaty, and regional autonomy was instantly wiped out. Khartoum re-established and consolidated control over the administration, finances, and armed forces of the south. Further, Nimeiri’s order declared Arabic, not English, the south’s official language. Later that year the Nimeiri government passed the infamous ‘September laws’ that transformed Sudan into an Islamic state, imposing Islamic law (Sharia) on the entire country and subjecting even non-Muslims to harsh penalties. The result—another civil war.

  Southerners rallied behind the SPLA and its charismatic leader John Garang, who was a member of the Dinka ethnic group, the largest group in southern Sudan. Orphaned at the age of ten, he joined southern rebels in the first civil war when he was only seventeen. Always an excellent student, he left Sudan to complete his secondary education in Tanzania and won a scholarship to study in the United States.

  He returned to Sudan to rejoin the rebels. After the Addis Ababa agreement, he joined the Sudanese military and rose quickly through the ranks. When southern troops mutinied in May 1983 and formed the SPLA, Garang emerged as the movement’s natural leader. His vision for Sudan was broader than simple demands for southern autonomy. Instead, he sought to transform Sudan into a democratic state that respected the diversity of its citizens.

  Civil war escalated between the government and the SPLA, and a new civilian government was installed in Khartoum. Under Garang’s leadership the southern rebels took control of much of southern Sudan. Yet by June 1989, as both sides recognised that total victory would be nearly impossible, a constitutional conference to address the south’s grievances and end the war seemed imminent. Meanwhile, as we will see below, simmering resentments and escalating violence in Darfur were largely ignored.

  Later that month, however, Sudanese dreams of a lasting peace were dealt a near fatal blow on 30 June. Brigadier General Omar Hassan Ahmed al-Bashir seized power in a military coup engineered by the National Islamic Front (NIF) and its front man, the former attorney general Hassan al-Turabi. The Bashir government moved swiftly to violently crack down on political dissent, abolishing parliament, banning opposition political parties, arresting opposition political leaders, and clamping down on the press. Anyone who was judged a threat to the Islamists faced arbitrary detention. Most gruesomely, the government tortured and killed its opponents in secret ‘ghost houses’ and prisons.[2]

  The National Islamic Front pursued with renewed vigour the radical agenda to make Sudan—north and south—an Islamic state. Non-Muslims in the south would be converted through the barrel of a gun if need be, as the government intensified the war with the SPLA and, ultimately, with the people of southern Sudan. The crimes committed by the National Islamic Front during the next 15 years of civil war put Bashir’s Islamo-fascist government alongside Nazi Germany, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, Milosevic’s Yugoslavia, and the genocidal government in Rwanda as one of the 20th century’s most murderous regimes.

  It was during this war with Garang and the SPLA rebels that the Sudanese government practised and perfected the genocidal violence that it later unleashed on Darfur.

  The Second Civil War—Sharpening the Tools of Genocide

  Divide and Destroy

  Government officials, especially members of the pervasive military intelligence services, sowed and continue to sow divisions and increase tension between the ethnic groups that oppose the Sudanese government. The logic is simple: rebels are less effective in fighting a civil war with Khartoum if they are fighting among themselves. And if the motivations of the government are genocidal, as is often the case in Sudan, exploiting ethnic tensions and pitting one group against another is an effective way to exterminate people from certain ethnic backgrounds.

  In its war with the SPLA, the government skilfully engineered ethnic splits within the rebels and encouraged a ‘war within the war.’ Military planners in Khartoum devised a counter-insurgency strategy that used ethnically based militias against the SPLA rebels and civilians who supported them in the south. The government armed, trained, and provided logistical support for horse-mounted militias, giving these proxy forces total impunity and encouraging them to attack civilians from Garang’s Dinka ethnic group. (Although other ethnic groups belonged to the SPLA, the Dinka were considered the rebels’ backbone.)

  The Dinka’s historical ethnic rivals in southern Sudan are the Nuer, and the government armed Nuer militias to attack Dinka civilians and divide the insurgency. The attacks decimated the SPLA’s ethnic base by destroying Dinka livelihoods and the social fabric of their community. In the mid and late 1980s, before the National Islamic Front came to power, government-backed Arab militias had relentlessly attacked Dinka villages, leading to widespread famine in southwestern Sudan. The National Islamic Front government continued to use ethnic militias against its southern enemies, and learned some valuable lessons it would later apply to Darfur: do not support militias too transparently, in order to create a degree of separation between the regime and its militia proxies.

  To attack its enemies and civilians inside Sudan, the Sudanese government also supported human predators from neighbouring countries, including the sadistic Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a notorious Ugandan rebel group responsible for grotesque human rights violations that include cutting off victims’ lips and ears and raping small girls. The LRA rebel leader Joseph Kony sees himself as a Moses-like figure, sent by God on a mission to impose the Ten Commandments on northern Uganda. His distorted view of the Old Testament—literally an eye for an eye—is a recipe for human rights violations on a macabre scale. Kony’s army is composed principally of abducted, tortured, and brainwashed children whom he forces to commit horrific atrocities.[3]

  When we visited northern Uganda together in 2005, we met former child soldiers in Kony’s army with terrifying stories. The Lord’s Resistance Army has created a generation of children afraid to sleep in their own beds. Each night before the sun set, we saw thousands of Ugandan children march in grim procession along dusty roads that took them from their rural villages to larger towns. The children and their parents were terrified that the Lord’s Resistance Army would abduct them and force them to hunt down their friends, families, and loved ones. The children we met—called ‘night commuters’—spent their nights in churches, empty schools, makeshift shelters, and alleyways.

  The government of Sudan provides the Lord’s Resistance Army with weapons and sanctuary. In exchange, Kony and his henchmen attack the SPLA and civilians in southern Sudan. The president of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, supported the SPLA during the war with Khartoum, and Sudanese support for the Ugandan rebels is also meant as revenge.

  Twentieth-Century Slavery

  Government-supported militias in southern Sudan had a sinister ulterior motive in attacking Dinka villages: taking slaves to use for domestic labour and field work in northern Sudan. During the colonial era, one of the largest exports from Sudan was human beings. It’s difficult to imagine slavery existing at the end of the 20th century, but for the killers in Khartoum, slavery made sense, as it terrified southerners and created economic incentives for northern militias.

  The Sudanese government had a name for the slave trade: intertribal abductions. The government denied both its involvement in and the existence of an organised campaign to perpetuate slavery. Instead, Khartoum feebly claimed that ‘tribal hatreds’ were behind the systematic kidnapping of Dinka civilians. The exact number is not known, but an extensive survey by Sudan ex
perts John Ryle and Jok Madut Jok documented at least 12,000 abductions from 1986 to 2002.[4] The total number remains unknown.

  The militias would fan out on horseback to raid villages within a 50-mile radius of the railroad that ran through the south, killing and raping and then galloping away with human cargo. The trains that ran along the line became known as ‘slave trains.’ The captives were often taken to camps, where Sudanese from the north or buyers from overseas would come to purchase or trade goods for slaves. Younger boys and girls were usually used as farmhands or as domestic labourers. Older girls and women were usually taken as ‘wives’ or concubines, often subject to rape and sexual abuse. Living in subhuman conditions, the slaves were cut off from their families, stripped of their religion and culture, denied access to an education, and forced to become Muslims. Some tried to escape, but capture meant torture and possibly death.[5]

  In 1998, vicious militia attacks aimed at abducting civilians were partly responsible for a devastating famine in southeastern Sudan. Thousands died from starvation, while relief workers struggled mightily to reach vulnerable people, but these efforts regularly encountered a more menacing resistance than Sudan’s harsh landscapes.

  Starvation as a Weapon of War

  The NIF government employs vicious tactics to achieve its strategic objectives, including inflaming intertribal conflict, slavery, and the denial of humanitarian food assistance. Despite the presence in southern Sudan of one of the world’s largest and most expensive humanitarian operations, Khartoum was able to deny food to millions of southern Sudanese by manipulating humanitarian access. The regime tried to starve the civilian supporters of the rebels into submission. This genocidal policy led to the deaths of 300,000 people in 1992–1993, in an area of southeastern Sudan that became known as the ‘starvation triangle,’ and another 250,000 in southwestern Sudan, in the area of the slave raids. This tactic was honed and perfected over the years and used in the genocide in Darfur with deadly efficiency.