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Sudan

Despite a major peace agreement in 2005, Sudan is in the throes of Africa's longest-running civil war. There has been fighting in one area or another almost continuously since the country gained independence from Britain in 1956. Millions of refugees and displaced persons—some without identification papers—live in limbo in Chad, Egypt, Eritrea, Uganda and elsewhere.

Often wrongly portrayed as an Arab-African or Muslim-Christian conflict, the war is in reality a series of conflicts between the central government in Khartoum and outlying areas of the south, east and west. These conflicts result, at root, from the inequitable distribution of political power and resources between the center and the periphery. A resource-driven revolt against Khartoum in the western Darfur region led to the humanitarian emergency there—and to the mass killings and displacement that the US has called "genocide." The discovery of significant oil deposits in the south has helped to protect the regime from international sanction.

Sudan is a country of tremendous ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity, and the Khartoum government's periodic attempts to "Arabize" or "Islamize" peripheral regions have created demands for cultural autonomy, particularly in the south, where many people are animist or Christian. The hardline Islamist military junta that grabbed power in 1989 provoked many Muslims to join the opposition with its sectarian policies. The north-south conflict appears to have ended with the January 2005 deal between Khartoum and the southern Sudan People's Liberation Movement, but other opposition groups (including those in Darfur) remain at odds with the regime.

If its internal wars finally end, Sudan faces great problems of poverty and underdevelopment, as well as potential disputes with Egypt over allocation of the Nile waters.


Facts and Figures »