Sudan's Perfect War

Randolph Martin

From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2002

Summary:  After years as a pariah, Khartoum has now deftly managed to end its political isolation. The success of its new alliances and the completion of an oil pipeline, however, mean that northern Sudan could indefinitely continue its bloody civil war against the south. Only the United States has the power and prestige to help end the violence and push for a peace that would be in everyone's interests.

Randolph Martin is Senior Director of Operations at the International Rescue Committee. He has travelled extensively throughout Sudan over the last 20 years and lived there from 1985 to 1989.

Despite these improvements, the U.S. government has yet to remove Sudan from the State Department's list of terrorism sponsors, and thus American trade sanctions remain in place. Washington has been vague on what, exactly, it would take to convince it to finally lift the restrictions. Meanwhile, when the Security Council voted to lift its sanctions on Sudan last October, only one country -- the United States -- abstained.

PROXY WAR

Even as Sudan's international relations have improved dramatically, the bloody civil war has continued unabated. And the fighting seems unlikely to let up anytime soon, for Khartoum has administered the war in such a way as to limit domestic resistance (at least in the north).

Sudan's low-intensity conflict little resembles a war in the traditional sense, with national armies fighting over a contested border. The vast majority of Sudan's casualties are not combatants killed in battle but southern civilians who fall victim to famine and disease -- the products of a devastated rural economy, abandoned social infrastructure, and limited access for humanitarian groups. As for the fighters themselves, most of them -- on both sides -- are southerners: troops of either the SPLM or one of many government-supported militias drawn from rival southern tribes. Even Sudan's army is made up of large numbers of southerners, who have been rounded up on the streets of Khartoum and shipped off to battle against their southern brethren. This unmotivated army is rarely given frontline duty, however.

To deal with shortcomings in morale and appease disgruntled parents in the north who are weary of having their sons come home wounded or dead, Khartoum has raised a parallel army: the Popular Defense Force (PDF). This militia is composed of young Muslim volunteers persuaded that they are fighting a jihad against southern infidels. The mujahideen in the PDF see war as a spiritual duty and death as a means of martyrdom and instant admission to heaven.

Khartoum also keeps northern conscripts off the front line by using murahaleen militias to do its fighting. The murahaleen are Arab tribesmen who harbor a historic enmity against the neighboring southern Dinka tribe -- a feud based on ancient competition over grazing land, cattle raiding, and the abduction of slaves. Khartoum has exploited this rivalry by employing the murahaleen to harass the Dinka in Bahr al-Ghazal and to run interference for the army's resupply trains to its garrison in the provincial capital, Wau. These trains run through contested territory a few times each year, moving at little more than walking speed and stopping frequently for repairs to the tracks. The murahaleen fan out on horseback and camelback, ranging up to 20 kilometers from the tracks. They burn villages, rustle cattle, kill the elderly, and abduct women and children -- and then load their booty onto the trains for transport back to points north. The abducted are taken in as "wives" and slaves, traded for cattle, or sold off to growing numbers of well-intentioned European buyers. (One mystifying feature of Sudan's war is the small cadre of Western organizations and church groups it has inspired, which seem to believe that by buying up and then liberating these unfortunates they can end the slave trade.) Sudan's Ministry of Justice has acknowledged that abductions take place, and it even allowed the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF) to start programs aimed at its elimination. But these grim practices are unlikely to end as long as Khartoum keeps using its murahaleen proxies in the war against the south.

BLOOD AND OIL

Although Khartoum has managed quite successfully to isolate the northern impact of the war, nothing has contributed as much to the conflict's sustainability as the opening of Sudan's oil pipeline.

Until only a few years ago, Sudan's oil reserves represented no more than untapped potential. Short on cash, Khartoum had to go begging to places such as Baghdad, Damascus, Tehran, and Tripoli for the resources to continue fighting, and this dependence on outcast nations contributed to Sudan's diplomatic isolation and economic decay. With the opening in 1999 of a 1,600-mile pipeline connecting its oil fields to Port Sudan on the Red Sea, however, Sudan finally got the chance to translate its petroleum reserves into economic and political capital. The payoff has been impressive: last year, Sudan's oil income was estimated to be in the neighborhood of $500 million, and many experts believe that production could double or more in the next few years.

Sudan, therefore, now has an internal source of financing for its million-dollar-a-day war. Khartoum has used the windfall not only to buy and import more sophisticated weapons but also to start building them itself. The U.S. Committee for Refugees estimates that Sudan's military expenditures have doubled since 1998, and government sources in Khartoum proudly claim that Sudan can now produce its own light arms and munitions -- and will soon manufacture artillery and even tanks. These new industrial interests have increased the constituency for war in the north. The ability to produce its own weapons has also left Sudan far less beholden to fundamentalist regimes and international rogues.