18 Years of Civil War in the Sudan
Prelude
In 1992, Prof. Spillmann invited me to give a talk here in Zurich about the civil war in the Sudan. Almost 10 years later, he has asked me to do the same again. Unfortunately, most of the problems we explored then are still with us today and many of the issues we discussed at that time are still being discussed now. The war situation is almost identical to that in 1992. The government controls most towns in the South while the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) controls most of the country-side. During the last 9 years, over 1m people perished, and about as many left their homes fleeing the war and famine and huge tracts of land have been devastated. Yet, peace is still as elusive as ever, while the misery is consistently being compounded. Everything has been turbulent and in flux and yet appears to have stayed the same – with the exception of the menacing factor of the growing oil wealth and its implication on duration and intensity of the war
I would like to thank Prof. Spillmann for his far-reaching contributions to peace and security studies and for asking me then and now to bring to the attention of a larger audience the predicament of the peoples of the Sudan, the largest country in Africa. Read more