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105 ChapTEr 6 Religion, War, and Peacemaking in Sudan l Shari’a, Identity Politics, and Human Rights CaroLyN FLuEhr-LobbaN Sudan has attracted global attention for its chronic conflicts,history of repressive rule, and human rights violations. Few African nations are as deeply divided or have experienced as much chronic war and conflict since its independence in 1956. Indeed, decades of war and poor governance have brought the country to the brink, and the South will separate in 2011. However, this oft-mentioned fact fails to mention the nearly permanent state of war and the suppression of rebellion that characterized the prior colonial period, 1898–1956. Notably, the Sudan was the only African region to defeat and expel initial British colonization efforts in 1885 when the Sudanese Mahdi overran Khartoum and executed Major-General Charles “Chinese” Gordon. General Gordon had suppressed the Taiping Rebellion (1863–64) securing British occupation before coming to Sudan in 1873 (Lobban, Kramer, and Fluehr-Lobban 2002, 113). The post–Cold War new world order noted by Little in his chapter in this volume affected the newly independent Sudan. During the Cold War, Sudan was more often aligned with the Soviet Union than the West, and presaging the new enemy of the West, it embraced Islamism in 1983 shortly after the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Today Chinese influence has engaged in ways unimaginable in the heyday of European colonialism with deep economic interests in Sudan’s oil and complex political support for one of the world’s pariah regimes. While prominent in human rights campaigns, Sudan has generally escaped the attention of the United States and the West for its booming economy (now Africa’s eighth largest) and the dramatic growth and demographic transformation caroLyN FLuehr-LobbaN 106 of its primate city,Khartoum,now estimated at 8 million,making it one of Africa’s largest cities. In a reversal of colonial history, Sudan is gaining attention for the likely permanence of Chinese dependence on Sudanese oil (7 percent of its total import) and the “China model” for African development and bilateral relations. This loss of perspective in the West results from nearly two decades of boycott, sanctions, and a nonexistent or weak diplomatic presence that has left the United States unengaged and poorly informed. After the 2005 signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), which ended Africa’s longest civil war between the central government and the South, a trickle of scholars began to return to study the complex effects of four decades of war, twenty-five years of Islamism, the state of human rights on the ground, and the fragile implementation of peace in one region of this vast nation equal to one-third of the continental United States. Khartoum as a major African conurbation now holds as many as one-quarter to one-third of the nation’s population, perhaps half of whom are the internally displaced (at least 2 million in IDP [internally displaced person] camps that ring the city) who fled decades of conflicts in the South, or more recently, in Darfur. One-quarter are non-Muslim.This is not only a major demographic transformation of the primary city but of the nation. Uncounted economic male migrants have left the northern towns and villages for work in the Persian Gulf, leaving the vast areas north of metropolitan Khartoum predominantly composed of the female, the very young and very old, and male internal economic migrants from the South, the West, and from nearby Chad and Nigeria. Since most Western researchers stopped coming to Sudan after the 1989 Islamist coup with its brutal suppression of dissent in the North and intensification of the war in the South, these dramatic changes have not been studied. After more than fifty years of independence, Sudan has known only eleven years of relative peace.Generations of Sudanese have grown up only knowing civil war and chronic conflict. Its decades of chronic military rule by an elite of Northern Arab-Muslims place it in Little’s category of “illiberal” states characterized by high degrees of intolerance and authoritarian rule. Untold millions of persons have died, have been internally displaced, or have fled to neighboring countries to live for extended periods in refugee camps or as exiles in Kenya, Egypt, Ethiopia , or Uganda. A smaller and more fortunate North American and European diaspora has developed but has yet to perform the vital role it might play in future conflict management, resolution, and stability of the nation.This chapter assesses the...

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