The fault line running across Sudan and Chad around the twelfth parallel, dividing the Muslim north from the non-Muslim south and ‘Arab’ from ‘African’, was the cause of endless conflict. At independence in Sudan in 1956, northerners gained control of the central government in Khartoum, eventually precipitating a revolt by southerners. In a reverse sequence in neighbouring Chad, southerners gained control of the central government in Fort Lamy (N’Djamena) at independence in 1960, eventually precipitating revolt by northerners. Like the British in Sudan, the French had treated Chad as a country of two halves: the south they called le Tchad-utile; the north, considered inutile, was known as le pays des sultans. Both conflicts stemmed from ancient hostility between northerners and southerners, dating from the days when Muslim chieftains raided the south for slaves. But they were made infinitely more complex by rivalries and feuds among northerners and among southerners and further aggravated by the way in which foreign governments sought to meddle in the warfare for their own advantage.
The first sign of trouble in Sudan came in the run-up to independence. As British officials departed, they were replaced largely by northerners, enhancing southern fears about northern domination. Out of a total of some 800 senior posts in the civil service filled in 1954, only six were awarded to southerners. The presence of northern administrators, teachers and traders in the south, often abrasive in their dealings with the local populace, soon rekindled old resentments. The Southern Corps of the army, commanded by northern officers but consisting almost entirely of southern troops, mutinied in August 1955. The mutineers, led by southern junior officers and non-commissioned officers in league with disgruntled southern politicians, succeeded in gaining control of the whole of Equatoria province except for the capital Juba, and received widespread local support. Northern officers, administrators, traders and their families were hunted down and killed. The Khartoum authorities re-established control by despatching some 8,000 troops from the north. Some mutineers were caught, tried and executed; most fled south into exile in Uganda.
In the months before independence, northern politicians promised to consider southern demands for a federal constitution that would protect southern provinces from subordination to northern control. But, once in power, northern parties gave the southern case short shrift, arguing that a federal arrangement would be tantamount to a first step towards breaking up Sudan. When the army took control in 1958, General Ibrahim Abboud set out to promote Islam and the use of Arabic in the south in the belief that this would encourage national unity. He considered Christianity an alien religion that foreign missionaries had foisted upon the south and imposed restrictions on their activities. He also expressed contempt for African religions, disparaged indigenous languages and customs and ordered the construction of Muslim religious schools and mosques in the south. The day of rest, previously observed on Sunday in the south, was changed to Friday to concur with Muslim practice in the north. When Christian missionaries objected to Abboud’s policies, they were expelled en masse. Southern protests met increasing repression, prompting a number of southern politicians to flee into exile, where they joined ex-mutineers. The exile movement they formed, the Sudan African Nationalist Union, proclaimed their goal as independence for the south. In 1963 armed groups of dissidents, known colloquially as Anyanya, a name derived from a poison concocted in Madi country from snakes and rotten beans, launched a sustained guerrilla attack.
The first civil war lasted for ten years, claiming half a million lives. When General Abboud stepped down in 1964, the northern politicians who succeeded him rejected any form of self-determination or regional autonomy for the south and pursued the same policies of repression. Their goal was the establishment of an Islamic republic.
A military coup in 1969 brought to power a Revolutionary Command Council determined to sweep aside religion-based political groups. It was headed by a 39-year-old officer, Gaafar Numeiri, who had seen service in the south and who advocated a political settlement involving regional self-government rather than military repression. But Numeiri’s regime was beset by opposition factions intent on overthrowing him. The first challenge he faced came from conservative forces led by Imam al-Hadi al-Mahdi, a grandson of the fabled Mahdi, Mohammed Ahmad. (In the nineteenth century the Mahdi’s Ansar warriors had fought to rid Sudan of the Egyptian army and captured Khartoum in 1885, killing a British general, Charles Gordon, on the steps of the governor’s residence. The Islamic state they set up lasted for thirteen years.) Attempting an armed Mahdist uprising in 1970, Imam al-Hadi’s Ansar forces were crushed by Numeiri’s army and the Imam himself was killed as he tried to escape to Ethiopia. A second challenge came from communist dissidents within the army who staged a brief coup in 1971, imprisoning Numeiri, before being overwhelmed by loyal troops.
Having consolidated his personal control, Numeiri sought an accommodation with the south. At peace negotiations with the Southern Sudan Liberation Movement in 1972, he agreed to allow the south a wide measure of local autonomy. The three southern provinces were linked together as a separate region endowed with its own elected assembly and executive authority, while Anyanya guerrillas were accepted into the ranks of the Sudanese army. A new constitution in 1973 established Sudan as a secular state, with freedom of worship not only for Christians and Jews, designated ‘people of the book’, but for followers of traditional religions as well – the vast majority in the south – hitherto denigrated by Muslim law as kuffar – ‘unbelievers’. A secular law governed civilians in civil and criminal matters, while personal and family matters were covered by sharia law for Muslims and customary law for rural populations in the south.
The outcome was a rare example in Africa of a negotiated end to a civil war. But it was not to last. And one of the architects of its demise was Numeiri himself.
Chad’s difficulties began soon after independence when its first president, François Tombalbaye, a southerner from the Sara tribe, imposed an increasingly repressive regime from Fort Lamy, dealing particularly harshly with the Muslim population whom he disliked and distrusted. Numbering about half of the population, southerners had gained ascendancy during the colonial era, welcoming French rule as a protection against slave raids from the north, accepting French education and working their way up through the lower ranks of the administration into political life and finally into national government. As peasant farmers, they had also benefited from French development of the cotton trade, the country’s sole earner of foreign exchange.
Northerners, by contrast, had preferred their nomadic existence, resisting French endeavours to draw them into the modern world. The authority of the sultans had existed for centuries. In the far north lived the fiercely independent Toubou, black Muslims of the Sahara, who had fought against the imposition of French rule until 1930. Their Saharan zone – the provinces of Borkou, Ennedi and Tibesti, usually referred to as BET – remained under the control of French military officers until 1965, five years after independence.
Once in power, Tombalbaye lost little time in imposing a personal dictatorship. Intolerant of opposition, he banned political parties, enforced a one-party system and arbitrarily arrested opponents. But it was the Muslim population who bore the brunt of his rule. As French officials in Muslim areas were withdrawn, their place was taken by Sara administrators, often poorly qualified, who enforced government measures with a heavy hand, regardless of Muslim traditions. Tax collectors gained particular notoriety for their harassment of the local population. The army, too, recruited mainly from southern tribesmen, became renowned for its brutality and indiscipline. At Tombalbaye’s instigation, Muslims were gradually edged out of public life; the authority of their sultans and chiefs was stripped away. Addressing a group of northern dignitaries, Tombalbaye declared: ‘The present evolution of our country cannot be judged from the height of a caparisoned saddle, nor does it proceed at the slow pace of a camel. It is time, gentlemen, that you come down from your [high] horse.’
The first revolt, marking the beginning of a prolonged civil war, broke out in Malgamé, an isolated region in central Chad, in 1965. Muslim peasants rioting against tax collectors were fired on by government troops and many fled to take up arms. The rebellion spread eastwards, to the Batha, Ouaddai and Salamat regions. Bands of Muslim dissidents roamed about the countryside, attacking administrative and military posts, murdering government officials and local collaborators, stealing cattle and burning crops. In 1966 Muslim politicians living in exile in Sudan, formed Frolinat, the Front pour la Libération du Tchad, with the aim of coordinating rebels in the field. By 1969 the government controlled no more than fifteen postes administratifs out of a total of about one hundred in the central and eastern regions of Chad.
In the BET provinces of the far north, popular uprisings erupted soon after French military officers were withdrawn in 1965, handing control to Tombalbaye’s army. Sara troops stationed in the north acted as an occupying force. New restrictions were imposed to control the unruly Toubou, including a ban on the wearing of turbans and on meetings of more than three persons. The movement of livestock was regulated. Attempts were made to force nomads into fixed settlements. Both men and women were subjected to humiliating punishment. In 1965 the entire population of the settlement of Bardai was arrested after a soldier had been killed during an affray between Toubou and the army. The following year, a prominent Muslim leader, the Derdeï of Tibesti, fled to Libya with 1,000 followers when government troops were sent to arrest him for protesting against the diminution of his office. In 1968 Toubou Nomad Guards in Aazou mutinied and attacked the small local garrison manned by southern troops.
Having lost control of most Muslim areas, Tombalbaye was compelled to plead for help from France. The French agreed to commit troops to Chad on condition that Tombalbaye implemented measures to restore to Muslim chieftains many of their original powers and broadened his administration by appointing Muslim ministers excluded from office since 1963. After driving back rebel groups in the east and the north, French troops departed.
No sooner had they left than Tombalbaye was beset by plots and intrigues, among the Sara now as well as his northern opponents. Once more, he reacted by ordering arbitrary arrests. He also tried to exert control over the Sara by embarking on a cultural revolution, replacing French customs with a revival of the cult of Yondo, the traditional Sara initiation rites. Yondo ceremonies, involving gruesome ordeals in the bush for weeks on end, were made compulsory for Sara youths and for candidates seeking admission to the civil service or appointment to high public office. TombalbaYethen tried to extend the Yondo campaign by requiring the induction of existing senior civil servants, politicians and high-ranking military officers. In southern Chad Yondo acquired the status of a semi-official religion. All individuals were obliged to assume authentic indigenous names and register them. Tombalbaye changed his first name from François to Ngarta, and the name of the capital from Fort Lamy to N’Djamena. Christians who refused to submit to the Yondo campaign were persecuted.
The eventual result of Tombalbaye’s cultural revolution was that he provoked opposition at every level, from urban officials, university students, army officers and Christian missionaries. When he then attempted to purge the army officer corps of suspected opponents, the army struck back. In 1975 Tombalbaye was killed during an army coup. Describing his last moments, the Cameroonian journalist Jérémie Ngansop wrote: ‘Tombalbaye had died weapon in hand. He had, in effect, fought to the last cartridge against his attackers, aided by only a few faithful members of his praetorian guard. Everybody had let him down. No one, not his celebrated Compagnie Tchadienne de Sécurité, nor his secret police directed by the Frenchman [Camille] Gouvernec, nor the French troops who had a unit stationed not far from the presidency, wished to “get their feet wet” in this reckoning.’
Chad’s new military leader, General Félix Malloum, a southern officer whom Tombalbaye had imprisoned two years previously, emptied the jails of political prisoners and pursued a more conciliatory course. But he found his regime harassed by rebel Muslim groups which showed no interest in negotiating a settlement. Added to all Chad’s difficulties, a new phenomenon had arisen.
The army coup in Libya in 1969 brought to power a 27-year-old signals officer driven by grand ambitions, fierce hatreds and a pathological penchant for meddling in the affairs of other countries, made possible by the huge flow of oil revenues at his disposal. Muammar Gaddafi was born into a poor Bedouin family. In his student years he had devoured the revolutionary ideas which poured out of Nasser’s Egypt, listening avidly to Cairo Radio’s ‘Voice of the Arabs’ and memorising word for word Nasser’s speeches urging Arab unity and vilifying Western imperialism. Following in Nasser’s footsteps, Gaddafi moved quickly to rid Libya of British and American military bases; he nationalised foreign-owned property and business interests, including the oil industry; and he imposed an austere form of Arab socialism, revising the legal code to conform to sharia law and banning alcohol, prostitution, nightclubs and Christian churches. Like other leaders in Africa – Nkrumah, Nyerere, Kaunda, Mobutu – he devoted much time to devising what he believed was a unique vision of society, publishing three volumes of a ‘Green Book’ on how to implement it. Based on Islam, it was called the Third Universal Theory and purported to provide an alternative to decadent capitalism and atheistic communism. The ‘Green Book’ was taught in schools and became required reading for all Libyans.
Gaddafi also issued a stream of proposals designed to forge Arab unity ‘from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf’. Scarcely three months after he seized power came the Tripoli Charter intended to link Libya’s destiny with Nasser’s Egypt and Numeiri’s Sudan. In 1971 came the Benghazi Treaty linking Libya, Egypt and Syria. In 1973 came the Hassi Messaoud Accords linking Libya and Boumedienne’s Algeria. In 1974 came the Djerba Treaty linking Libya and Bourguiba’s Tunisia.
None of Gaddafi’s schemes for greater Arab unity survived. Soon after Nasser’s death, Gaddafi fell out with his successor, Anwar al-Sadat, who scorned his Pan-Arab dreams; his subsequent feud with Sadat culminated in a brief border war in 1977 which left Gaddafi humiliated. In Sudan Numeiri decided that closer involvement with Egypt and Libya, in accordance with the Tripoli Charter, would jeopardise his hopes of reaching an accommodation with Sudan’s southerners and dropped the idea. As with Sadat, Gaddafi soon fell out with Numeiri: in 1976 Numeiri accused Gaddafi of involvement in a bloody coup attempt in Khartoum and diagnosed Gaddafi as ‘a split personality – both evil’. The arrangements that Gaddafi made with Tunisia and Algeria also came to naught. During the 1973 Arab–Israeli war, Gaddafi, despite his abiding ambition to participate in the annihilation of Israel, was left by Sadat and his Arab allies to sit it out on the sidelines.
‘Neither the fire and passion of the Libyan revolution, nor its money could turn history around and revive an exhausted idea,’ wrote Fouad Ajami, in his book The Arab Predicament. ‘The Pan-Arab idea that dominates the political consciousness of modern Arabs has become a hollow claim.’
Thwarted on the diplomatic front, Gaddafi turned increasingly to subversion to achieve his aims, using his oil revenues to support a host of dissident factions and insurgent groups, engaging in plots to overthrow Arab governments opposing him and sending out death squads to murder his opponents living in exile. His readiness to use proxy violence, assassination and bribery made him widely detested and feared, as much in the Arab world as in the West. Among the causes he supported were an array of Palestinian factions; the Irish Republican Army; Basque separatists; and Muslim insurgents in the Philippines and Thailand. In Africa he backed Eritrean guerrillas against Haile Selassie’s regime; Polisario guerrillas in the Western Sahara; southern African liberation movements; and opposition factions in Niger and Mali. He also spent heavily getting some thirty African governments to break ties with Israel, striking up a notable alliance with Uganda’s Idi Amin, a fellow Muslim. When Amin’s army faced defeat in 1979, Gaddafi despatched an expeditionary force to Uganda to try to prop him up, a venture that ended in humiliating failure. In support of his foreign ambitions, Gaddafi built up massive armed forces, including 700 aircraft, submarines and helicopters, relying first on France and then on the Soviet Union as supplier, spending an estimated $29 billion between 1970 and 1985. He also established an Islamic Legion, largely consisting of recruits from African states, to further his aims in Africa.
Gaddafi’s greatest endeavour came in Chad, his southern neighbour. The civil war there opened up new opportunities for territorial aggrandisement. In 1971 he began a campaign to infiltrate the Aozou Strip, an elongated stretch of desert about 450 miles long and 90 miles wide extending the full length of the border between Libya and Chad. One of the witnesses to the Libyan campaign in northern Chad was Hissein Habré, a young newly qualified Toubou lawyer recently returned from his studies in France whom President Tombalbaye sent on a mission to northern Chad in 1971 to negotiate with anti-government rebels.
The Libyans began distributing Libyan identity cards to the inhabitants of Tibesti and Aozou, predating them [Habré told Le Monde]. They invited the traditional chiefs to Libya and corrupted them. On the ground, their agents explained that Libyans and Chadians were one and the same people who were only divided by colonialism. At the same time they prepared the minds by distributing food and clothing to the population. When they had enough clients, they came to install themselves in the locality of Aozou and then the whole region.
In 1973 Gaddafi sent troops into the Aozou Strip, claiming that it rightfully belonged to Libya on the basis of an unratified agreement between France and Italy in 1935. He built an airbase at Aozou, set up a civil administration and issued maps showing the Strip as Libya’s sovereign territory. He then used the Strip as a forward base for deeper involvement in Chad.
Gaddafi’s occupation of the Aozou Strip caused a deep rift among northerners in Chad. One faction, led by Goukouni Oueddeï, the last surviving son of the Derdeï of Tibesti, was willing to accept Libyan involvement. Another faction, led by Hissein Habré, who had abandoned Tombalbaye and joined the rebel movement in Tibesti, was adamantly opposed. Both men were Toubou, but from separate clans. Their rivalry plunged Chad into prolonged conflict.
With Gaddafi’s backing, Goukouni succeeded in ousting Habré from northern Chad and moved his forces southwards. In eastern Chad, meanwhile, Gaddafi supported a second insurgent group known as the Volcan army. In a joint offensive in 1978, Goukouni’s forces and the Volcan army, supported by Libyan troops, made a rapid thrust towards N’Djamena. To stave off defeat, General Malloum called for help from France. A thousand French troops and combat aircraft were thrown into battle and routed rebel forces on the road to N’Djamena.
In the aftermath of the 1978 clashes, a new alliance was formed between General Malloum and Habré, giving northerners a prominent role in the government for the first time. Since his defeat in the north, Habré had regrouped in eastern Chad, raised a new army with support from Sudan and established a strong enough position in negotiations with Malloum to obtain the post of prime minister in a new ‘government of national unity’. The alliance did not last long. In February 1979, in what became known as the first battle of N’Djamena, Habré’s forces and Malloum’s national army fought for supremacy, precipitating communal violence between northerners and southerners in which thousands died. Encouraged by the southern leader, Colonel Abdelkadar Kamougué, southerners fled en masse southwards, leaving the administration in N’Djamena to collapse. As the cycle of revenge continued, thousands of Muslim traders in the south were killed. Southern officials set up a comité permanent to run their own affairs, creating, in effect, a state within a state, levying their own taxes. At a national level, Chad had no government at all.
A host of international mediation attempts – by France, Nigeria, Niger, Sudan and Libya – was launched to try to devise a solution. Eventually, in November 1979, a shaky coalition government was formed, comprising no fewer than ten Muslim factions together with southern representatives. Goukouni was chosen as president, Habré as minister of defence, and Kamougué as vice-president. In N’Djamena, troops from five different armies patrolled the streets. Within a matter of weeks, the bloody struggle for power was resumed. Habré’s forces clashed with pro-Libyan factions. Sporadic fighting continued for months. Half of the population fled to neighbouring Cameroon, leaving N’Djamena a ghost city. Finally, in December 1980, Libyan troops, backed by tanks, heavy artillery and units of the Islamic Legion, combined with Goukouni’s forces to drive Habré’s fighters out of the capital, forcing Habré to seek refuge in Sudan. In January 1981 Gaddafi consolidated his military victory by announcing, at the end of a visit by Goukouni to Tripoli, a merger between Chad and Libya and talked of forming an Islamic Republic of the Sahel.
Gaddafi’s takeover caused uproar. In the south the Sara threatened to secede. Kamougué denounced the ‘marriage’ as ‘impossible’; ‘black Africans’, he said, could not tolerate ‘Arabo-Berber’ rule. Throughout the region, one government after another lined up to attack Gaddafi, fearing his expansionist schemes and regarding ‘unification’ as a euphemism for Libyan annexation. Nigeria closed the Libyan embassy and called for sanctions against Libya. Senegal and Gambia broke diplomatic relations claiming Libya was supporting dissident groups. Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Ghana, Guinea and Cameroon took similar action. Egypt and Sudan claimed Gaddafi was acting as a Soviet proxy. Facing universal condemnation, Gaddafi was forced to declare that his agreement with Goukouni was nothing more than an initial move towards a future merger.
After a year’s occupation, Gaddafi decided to withdraw his troops from N’Djamena, hoping that it would boost his chances of hosting the OAU’s summit in 1982 and gaining the OAU presidency for a year. As the Libyans withdrew, Habré’s forces, which had regrouped in Sudan and obtained the support of Egypt and the United States, crossed the eastern frontier, occupied eastern Chad and then took the capital, forcing Goukouni to flee to Libya.
The plight of Chad in 1982 was pitiful. One of the poorest countries in Africa, it had disintegrated into a mêlée of rival factions. All semblance of central authority had collapsed. The north had fragmented into a collection of fiefdoms ruled over by warlords who frequently fought each other, while the Libyans continued to fortify their bases there. In the south Kamougué held sway with his comité permanent, but the comité itself was torn by quarrels over money. Ex-soldiers in the south, meanwhile, formed their own commando groups – codos, as they were known. After successive rounds of fighting, the capital, N’Djamena, was a wreck.
‘There was a country, a population, but no state power,’ recalled Gali Ngothé, a government minister at the time. ‘On the contrary there was a multitude of armed bands who went up and down the country holding the people for ransom . . . the state shattered . . . There were no revenue collection posts any more. Government buildings – schools, hospitals, post offices – were confiscated and turned into lodgings. Even the prisons had become residences. The offices were looted and the equipment sold in neighbouring countries at give-away prices. The archives and museums were sacked and burned down.’
Overshadowing everything, after nearly two decades of civil war, was the prospect of yet more conflict. Having failed to secure his election as OAU chairman, Gaddafi resumed his offensive in Chad in 1983. Goukouni’s forces, supported by the Libyans, advanced on N’Djamena once more. In response to Habré’s appeals for help, French troops and aircraft were sent to Chad to act as a buffer between the two sides, holding a line against northern incursions on the sixteenth parallel. In 1984 France and Libya agreed to withdraw their forces, but while the French duly left, the Libyans stayed, constructed military bases at Ouadi Doum, Fada and Faya-Largeau, occupied the principal Saharan oases south of the Aozou Strip, issued their own identity cards and prepared their allies for further ventures. In 1986, when Libyan-supported incursions across the sixteenth parallel began again, the French were obliged to return. As part of its wider campaign against Gaddafi, the United States joined in with increased assistance to Habré’s forces.
Encouraged by the Americans, Habré sent his forces northwards across the sixteenth parallel in December 1986, overwhelming a major Libyan garrison at Fada. Over the next three months they succeeded in chasing the Libyans out of nearly all of northern Chad south of the Aozou Strip, inflicting a devastating defeat at their base at Ouadi Doum. Demoralised and poorly trained, Gaddafi’s army abandoned vast amounts of equipment, an estimated $1 billion worth, including tanks, aircraft, helicopters and air defence systems. After nearly twenty years of meddling in Chad, Gaddafi’s dreams ended in debacle. As a result of a decision by the International Court of Justice in 1994, Gaddafi also lost all claim to the Aozou Strip.
For Chad, there was only more misery. Habré’s regime turned into a violent and corrupt dictatorship, relying on death squads to maintain control until his overthrow in 1990. A subsequent commission of inquiry reported that 20,000 people had been killed and thousands more tortured in his jails.
In Sudan the peace agreement between the north and the south survived for eleven years, but came under increasing strain. On both sides there were factions that were never reconciled to the compromises involved in the 1972 agreement. Southerners were aggrieved by the central government’s continued control over economic planning in the south and the limited funds it allocated for southern development. The discovery of oil deposits in the south in 1978 became a particular bone of contention: the southern regional government wanted an oil refinery to be built in the south, close to the oilfields; ignoring southern demands, Numeiri ordered the construction of an oil refinery in the north and a pipeline to the Red Sea for the direct export of crude oil. Other disputes broke out over Numeiri’s persistent intervention in southern politics. There was further distrust in the south at Numeiri’s rapprochement with Islamic factions.
Attempting to broaden the base of his support in the north, Numeiri in 1977 brought into his government two prominent Islamic politicians: Sadiq al-Mahdi, a great-grandson of the nineteenth-century Mahdi, who in 1976 had been involved in a Libyan-backed plot to overthrow him; and Sadiq’s brother-in-law, Hassan al-Turabi, leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and founder of the National Islamic Front, a militant Islamic party, whom he had previously imprisoned. Sadiq had a doctorate from Oxford; Turabi, a doctorate from the Sorbonne. Appointed attorney-general, Turabi exerted steady pressure for the Islamic reform of the legal system and promoted the establishment of Islamic banks, enabling them eventually to gain financial dominance. He also led a sustained attempt to redraw the boundaries of the north so as to include both the south’s oilfields and the agriculturally productive areas of Upper Nile province. Control of oil resources became a key factor in the contest between the north and the south.
In 1983 Numeiri abandoned the careful balance he had once tried to achieve and declared an ‘Islamic revolution’. Sudan was to be an Islamic republic, he decreed, governed by Islamic law. Traditional Islamic law – such as amputation for theft, flogging for alcohol consumption and death for apostasy – would apply on a nationwide basis. Government officials and military commanders were required to give a pledge of allegiance to Numeiri as a Muslim ruler. Numeiri even attempted to take the title of Imam, albeit unsuccessfully. By presidential order, new ‘Islamic’ laws were added in piecemeal fashion to suit Numeiri’s whims, without consultation with the attorney-general or the chief justice. Circumventing the established judiciary, he set up special ‘prompt justice’ courts. Thousands were arrested and brought before government-appointed judges who routinely handed out punishments such as flogging. To emphasise his dedication to the task, Numeiri poured $11 million worth of alcohol into the Nile and banned European-style dancing.
In the same arbitrary manner, he dissolved the southern regional government and decreed the division of the south into three smaller regions, corresponding to the old provinces under which the south had been governed before 1972, in effect terminating the constitutional arrangements of the peace agreement
Once more, Sudan descended into civil war. Mutinies broke out in garrisons in Bor and Pibor; thousands of southern troops deserted and regrouped across the eastern border in Ethiopia where they formed the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM). Its leader, Colonel John Garang de Mabior, was a Dinka officer with a doctorate in agricultural economics from Iowa State University and military training at Fort Benning in Georgia. Garang called not for southern secession but for a united, secular and socialist Sudan, free of Islamist rule. He portrayed the SPLM as a national movement striving for ‘the liberation of the whole Sudanese people’. The movement had emerged in the south, he said, because government repression there was most intense. ‘The marginal cost of rebellion in the south became very small, zero or negative; that is, in the south, it pays to rebel.’ During the course of 1984, SPLM guerrillas spread out from border areas reaching ever deeper into the interior.
As in the case of Chad, Sudan’s second civil war drew in an array of foreign players. Mengistu’s regime in Ethiopia supported the cause of the southern Sudanese in retaliation for Khartoum’s support for Eritrean secessionists and Tigrayan rebels. In Libya, Gaddafi, who had once supported the Eritreans but who switched sides when Mengistu came to power, joined Mengistu in supporting the southern Sudanese. Numeiri meanwhile supported an anti-Gaddafi Libyan group, the National Front for the Salvation of Libya, which set up offices in Khartoum in 1981 and broadcast propaganda programmes attacking Gaddafi. Numeiri also gave assistance to anti-Gaddafi groups from Chad. The United States, for its part, despite the repression Numeiri unleashed in southern Sudan, invested heavily in his regime to bolster him as a counter-weight to Gaddafi and Mengistu, both of whom it regarded as pro-Soviet activists; US assistance to Numeiri totalled $1.5 billion.
With American support, Numeiri was confident he could deal with any threat posed by rebels in the south. But he was beset by a host of other difficulties. Hoping to establish Sudan as the ‘breadbasket’ of the Middle East, Numeiri had encouraged massive investment in mechanised agriculture, but the overall result was a decline in agricultural production and a foreign debt of $12 billion that Sudan had no means of repaying. When drought struck in 1983 and again in 1984, causing mass hunger, Numeiri, like Mengistu in Ethiopia, ignored the consequences, desperately trying to avoid jeopardising Sudan’s image as a suitable destination for agricultural investment. Only after an estimated quarter of a million people had died was he prevailed upon to take action. Forced by foreign creditors to accept austerity measures, Numeiri found his grip on power slipping. Shortages, inflation, unemployment, deteriorating social services and rampant corruption caused widespread discontent. The famine itself provided a rallying point for organised protest. A coalition of trade unions and professional groups, including lawyers, doctors and civil servants, led the opposition. When urban strikes, riots and demonstrations erupted, not even the army was willing to stand by Numeiri. In April 1985, after sixteen years in power, he was overthrown.
An election in 1986 brought to power northern politicians fully committed to the establishment of an Islamic state. As prime minister, Sadiq al-Mahdi, the leader of the Umma Party, pronounced himself in favour of ‘the full citizen, human and religious rights’ of non-Muslims. But he also declared: ‘Non-Muslims can ask us to protect their rights – and we will do that – but that’s all they can ask. We wish to establish Islam as the source of law in Sudan because Sudan has a Muslim majority.’ The sharia code introduced by Numeiri in 1983 remained in force.
Under Sadiq’s regime the north experienced many of the benefits of liberal democracy – parliamentary debate, a vigorous press, an independent judiciary, active trade unions and professional associations. But for the south there was unrelenting warfare. The SPLM refused to accept a ceasefire or to take part in the election, demanding a constitutional convention. Sadiq responded by arming Baggara Arab militias in western Sudan – murahalin – licensing them to raid and plunder at will in the Dinka and Nuer areas of Bahr-al-Ghazal, just as their forefathers had done in the nineteenth century. Dinka and Nuer villages were attacked and burned, their livestock stolen, their wells poisoned; men, women and children were killed or abducted and taken back to the north where they were traded or kept as slaves. Atrocities were commonplace. In revenge for an SPLM attack on a Rizeigat militia group in March 1987, Rizeigat survivors attacked Dinka men, women and children in the town of Al Diein in southern Darfur, setting fire to six railway carriages where they were sheltering, killing more than 1,000; those who were not burned to death were stabbed and shot as they tried to escape. A report on the massacre, written by two Muslim academics at the University of Khartoum, blamed the killing on the government. ‘Government policy has produced distortions in the Rizeigat community such as banditry and slavery, which interacted with social conflicts in Diein to generate a massacre psychosis . . . Armed banditry, involving the killing of Dinka villagers, has become a regular activity for the government-sponsored militia.’ Rizeigat militias, they said, made a practice of selling Dinka women and children to Arab families for use as servants, farm workers and sex slaves. ‘All this is practised with the full knowledge of the government.’
Similar tactics were employed elsewhere in the south. In an age-old custom used by the north, the government readily exploited divisions and rivalries among southern groups, arming tribal militias to attack rebel factions. ‘Aktul al-abid bil abid’, was the saying – ‘kill the slave through the slave.’ Garang’s SPLM, a predominantly Dinka group, was opposed by a variety of southern factions, some supported by the government, others acting independently. Some sections of the Nuer fought with the SPLM; other sections fought against it. Caught in the middle of this maelstrom was the civilian population. The SPLM struck particularly hard at civilian populations deemed to support hostile militias, acting in places like an army of occupation. But all factions sought to destroy communities presumed to be supporting their opponents. In far-flung, scorched-earth sweeps, heavily armed fighters torched villages, stole livestock and food, planted land mines, conscripted boys and raped women and girls.
The devastation of war culminated in 1988 in the most severe famine in Sudan’s modern history. Both sides used food as a weapon. Inflicting hunger became a key military strategy. Army commanders and government officials prevented relief supplies reaching displaced populations and constantly thwarted relief initiatives by foreign donors. In one instance, relief food donated by the European Community sat for more than two years in wagons in a railway siding in Muglad, just a few hundred yards from a refugee camp where Dinka were starving. SPLM units besieged government-held towns, where a million refugees sought refuge, attacking and intercepting relief convoys. An estimated quarter of a million southerners died in 1988 as a result of war-related famine; some three million were displaced, many of them fleeing to the slums of Khartoum.
In an attempt to prevent recurrences of mass starvation, international agencies set up a permanent relief system. Both sides in the war used it to their advantage. The government considered itself absolved from dealing with famine. ‘It is no longer a serious problem because international aid has been forthcoming,’ Sadiq told an American correspondent. The system provided a regular supply of food for the SPLM’s guerrilla army that they were routinely able to commandeer. ‘I make deals with Garang,’ an aid official explained. ‘To get 90 per cent to my people, I let him have 10 per cent. If you don’t feed the soldier, you push the soldier to rob the civilian. If you stopped any assistance, it would be the children who would die. It’s a vicious circle. You cannot solve it.’ Aid workers in the south quickly became cynical about their task. ‘They don’t care how many people die,’ an official remarked. ‘The lesson they have learned is that if you keep fighting, the West will keep feeding you.’
By 1989 the tide of war in the south had turned against the government. SPLM guerrillas were able to move without hindrance through much of southern Sudan; government forces were confined to garrison towns. Pressed by the army, facing massive financial difficulties, Sadiq entered into negotiations with the SPLM, agreeing to freeze the implementation of Islamic law as part of a peace process. But the concessions he was prepared to make went too far for Islamic militants. Shortly before Sadiq was scheduled to meet Garang in Addis Ababa, a group of militant officers, supported by the National Islamic Front, staged a pre-emptive coup.
The coup on 30 June 1989 not only scuppered peace negotiations with the SPLM. It placed Sudan in the hands of Islamic militants determined to impose their own brand of Islamic rule on the country. The constitution was suspended, parliament was dissolved, political parties and trade unions were banned and newspapers closed down. Leading politicians, including Sadiq al-Mahdi, were arrested, and the army officers corps was drastically purged. ‘Khartoum will never go back to being a secular capital,’ declared General Omar al-Bashir.