Monday 23 November 2009

Oil and the Civil War in the Sudan

THE CIVIL WAR IN THE SOUTH by by Dr Mohamed Suliman

Since the firing of the first bullet in 1983, the reappearance of the war between northern and southern Sudan has generally been interpreted as a typical ethno-religious conflict emanating from differences between Muslims and Christians, or Arabs and Africans. While this categorisation may have served well as a description of the earlier conflict in the 1950s, and still has some bearing on how the war is being conducted and perceived, our opinion is that the nature of the conflict has changed. Conflicts are processes, not static events. And over the last five decades developments in the Sudan have gradually if consistently changed the nature of the conflict between the North and the South from being a classic ethno-religious conflict to one primarily over resources, with the economic and resource crisis in the North emerging as the driving force in the Sudanese civil war.
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