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  • Ethiopia’s Involvement in the Sudanese Civil War:Was It as Significant as Khartoum Claimed?
  • Yehudit Ronen

Conflicts in Africa have arisen from a long list of antagonisms. Stephen John Stedman's list of problems generating conflict is very relevant to understanding the prolonged and complex Sudanese conflict. This list includes "the tugs and pulls of different identities, the differential distribution of resources and access to power, and competing definitions of what is right, fair and just." Stedman states that when individuals and groups turn to violence to solve such problems, conflict takes on a second dimension, that of security and survival, and this, in turn, makes conflict resolution as multifaceted as the conflict itself. In such a scenario, the conflict might become prolonged because the antagonists come to fear the consequences of settlement, in which parties choose mutual security arrangements over the individual pursuit of security.1 Moreover, the frequent spilling of an internal conflict across borders inherited from the colonialist period, and thus the consequent interweaving of the internal dispute into regional and sometimes even international political intrigues, reinforces the complexity of the conflict. The longer the conflict continues, the greater the military and political dependence of the warring parties on their respective foreign supporters.

In the search for a model of a conflict that includes all the above-mentioned sources of antagonism and even contributes substantial elements of its own, Sudan's civil war and Ethiopia's involvement in it provide an ideal example. Although Ethiopia was not the only country in the region to intervene in the Sudanese war, it was the most consistently involved, [End Page 103] being during the 1980s and early 1990s the sole active black African actor.

This article aims at chronicling and examining Ethiopian political and military interference in Sudan's civil war. The discussion will be presented mainly through the viewpoint of Khartoum's governments. An extensive survey of Sudanese and non-Sudanese sources was made, in order to ascertain the allegations and counterallegations of the parties involved. Non-Sudanese sources include varied Arab and Western publications, mostly written by specialists on East Africa, many of them reporting directly from Addis Ababa, Khartoum, and neighboring capitals. Ethiopian sources were also referred to, yet in a less systematic way, as the article's focus is the Sudanese point of view. The principal question to be answered is to what degree, if at all, Sudanese governments magnified Ethiopian intervention in the war and thus manipulated official media in order to influence Sudanese and foreign opinion so as to rally public support and obtain Western aid for unpopular governments.

The Civil War: Roots and Background

The principal conflict in Sudanese society involves two major groups that are geographically, ethnically, and culturally more closely related to contiguous territories in neighboring countries than to each other.2 The Arab-Muslim majority, mainly concentrated in the north and center of the country, identifies with the adjacent Arab-Muslim world, while the black African minority, composed of Christians and believers in African religions, mainly in the south, perceives itself as part of the black African world. These two societies, despite their heterogeneity, will be referred to as north and south, respectively.

Although violence broke out between the north and the south shortly before the establishment of statehood in 1956, the origins of the conflict are deeply rooted in the 1820s, when the army of Muhammad 'Ali, the Ottoman-Egyptian ruler, occupied the region that later became known as the Sudan. His troops, assisted by Arab Muslims from North Sudan, infiltrated into the south and enslaved many non-Arab and non-Muslim southerners. This first encounter [End Page 104] positioned northerners in the collective consciousness of many of the southerners as responsible for their suffering.3

Sixty years later, a further cause of enmity was heaped upon the southerners' collective consciousness vis-à-vis the northern community. In 1883 the Arab Muslim northern Mahdists raided the south, fighting to uproot the Ottoman-Egyptian presence from the whole Sudanese region. In some cases, there was some cooperation between Mahdist and southern elements, but after the removal of the Ottoman-Egyptian threat, the Mahdist forces launched enslavement operations and impoverished the...

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