Civil Wars, 1955 and 1962-72

The Sudanese civil wars had their roots in the nineteenth-century slave trade, which sowed the seeds of suspicion and hostility between the Arabic-speaking north and the black African south; in the racial and cultural arrogance displayed by Muslim northerners for southern religious traditionalists; and the failure of the departing British and the northern Sudanese politicians to provide for southern interests in the constitutional arrangements for independence in 1956.
 
 
From 1946 the British rulers of the Sudan reversed their earlier policy of encouraging separateness in the south. Henceforth the south was to be welded with the north, whether the Sudan chose unity with Egypt or independence as a sovereign state. The small southern elite produced by the Christian missionaries of the 1920s and 1930s was alarmed - at the prospects of domination by the north which was much more advanced than the south educationally, economically and politically.
 
A Legislative Council with enhanced powers was set up in 1948, but the British never fulfilled their promise of including safeguards to protect southern interests in the ordinance that created the assembly. The actions of northern politicians in the assembly after 1948 were hardly calculated to allay southern fears.
 
Arabic was introduced as the language of education in the south; many northern administrators in the south were corrupt, boastful and openly insulting towards southerners; after internal self-rule in 1953 the educated elite of the north formed political parties which actively sought support in the south while the few educated southerners had no political organization; when the civil service was Sudanized, 800 expatriates were replaced by 794 northerners and only six southerners.
 
This accumulation of factors, and the fear among southerners of coming independence and the total transfer of power to the northern Sudanese, who were thought to be antipathetic to the south, led to an armed revolt in the south in August 1955.
 
It took the form initially of a mutiny by the southern army, the Equatoria Corps, but it soon developed into a widespread uprising in the three southern provinces of Equatoria, Bahr-el-Ghazal and Upper Nile. Many northern administrators and their families were killed. The government reaction was to rush in police and army units from the north and in the reprisals many villages were destroyed, thousands of southerners died, and thousands more fled into the forests or as refugees across the borders into Uganda, Zaire, Kenya and Central Africa. By October 1955 the uprising in the south was under control.
 
The northern politicians, having crushed the southern rebellion, were shrewd enough at first to adopt a-conciliatory tone towards the south. Southern MPs in Khartoum voted for the parliamentary motion for independence on 19 December 1955, because they were promised by the northern majority that their proposal for a federal system of government would be given "full consideration' after independence. But in the constitutional committee set up in 1956 the south had only 3 representatives out of 46. Moreover, after independence the northern politicians of the National Unionist Party (NUP) and the Umma Party were too busy in parliamentary in-fighting to have time to attend to more serious matters like national unity or economic development.
 
The military regime of General Abboud (1958-64) was disastrous for southern interests. Abboud believed national unity could be achieved by enforced Arabization. He forced southerners to abandon Christian names in favour of Arab ones, ordered the use of Arabic only in administration and the courts, and the ending of teaching in southern languages with the resultant dismissal of thousands of sub-grade teachers, encouraged the establishment of Koranic schools and expelled all Christian missionaries from the south in 1962.
 
Abboud also displayed a heavy anti-southern bias in recruitment into the police and the army. For example, between 1959 and 1964, out of a total number of cadets recruited to the military college, only four were southerners. The effects of Abboud's repressive policy were to inspire the creation of a number of southern political parties in exile and, of more significance, to provoke a second southern uprising, this time not a short-lived affair but a ten-year civil war of frightful intensity and immense destruction- Southerners were divided on the issues of regional self-determination or secession (complete independence and a new state), but were generally united on acceptance of the need for an armed revolt to achieve either objective. The uprising began in November 1962 with an attack on a police post near the Uganda border. Then in 3 963 various guerilla groups united to form the Anyanya ('snake-poison') organization, pledged to fight for complete independence for the south.
 
Abboud's overthrow in 1964 and the emergence of a new civilian government offered some hope at first of peace in the south through a negotiated settlement. The conciliatory Sayed Sir el-Kharim el-Khalifa became Prime Minister; he appointed two southerners to his Cabinet and called a Round Table Conference in Khartoum in March 1965 to work out a peace agreement. However, the Anyanya refused to accept a ceasefire and insisted on complete independence, thus undermining the moderate southern representatives who favoured a confederation, But although the conference failed, the Khartoum government continued to make conciliatory moves towards the south, by starting to appoint southerners MI the southern administration and releasing many political prisoners.
The work of Sir el-Kharim's government, however, was undone when he was replaced as Premier by the conservative anti-southerner Muhammad Ahmed Mahgoub. Prime Minister Mahgoub's policy of military repression in the south (1965-9) showed he had learnt nothing from the failure of the Abboud regime's approach to the Southern Question.

The shift in policy in Khartoum encouraged northern troops to carry out massacres against southern civilians in July 1965. In the town of Juba, southerners' houses were destroyed and over a thousand people were killed. At Wau northern soldiers attacked a southern crowd gathered at a wedding reception, and 76 people were killed. These incidents shattered all hope of reconciliation. The Anyanya stepped up the war. In 1967 the different Anyanya groups agreed to set up a full-scale administration, the Southern Sudan Provincial Government (SSPG) with its headquarters in Yei district. Southern resistance became even more determined when Khartoum began to consider proposals for an Islamic constitution in 1967-8.
By 1969 it was clear that the southern rebellion could sustain itself indefinitely. Anyanya was not universally popular in the south but it had broad mass support. This is evident front, the numbers of those who refused to live under the government administration in government-held towns and 'peace-camps'. Seventy-five per cent of the people remained in the countryside under Anyanya control, and therefore subject to indiscriminate government attacks. Scores of thousands moved their homes deeper into the forests to avoid army patrols. In the middle of 1969 a new Anyanya military government was formed in Eastern Equatoria under Colonel Joseph Lagu.
 
In 1970 Lagu's leadership was accepted by all guerilla factions in the interests of unity. Under Lagu, the Anyanya and the SSPG made substantial progress towards establishing an alternative civil administration. Poll taxes, market dues, customs duties and trading licence fees were collected, and justice was maintained through chiefs' courts, with auxiliary police and prison services. In 1971 there were a hundred primary schools with 5000 pupils, following the East African pattern of education. Medical services were rudimentary, but in 1971 20 000 people were vaccinated against cholera and an epidemic was contained. The rebellion was able to draw on the large numbers of Sudanese refugees across the borders, especially in Uganda, for recruits and supplies.

Nimeiri Introduced "Sharia" & Rebellion re-emerged in the South
The Anyanya could not, it seemed, be defeated; on the other hand, it could not win. For much of the period 1965-72 there were two administrators in the south, the government in the towns and military posts and the insurgents in large areas of countryside; but at all times there were large areas with no effective administration, varying in size according to the relative strength of the opposing forces.
 
Government gains in the dry season were invariably cancelled out by rebel advances during the rains- Anyanya could not prevent government forces destroying crops and attacking farmers in an effort to deny food to the rebels; there was much hunger in the rebel-held areas. Thus by the early 1970s the rebels were ready to consider a political settlement, if a realistic and fair-minded one was proposed to them. In its turn, Khartoum had to face the fact that the Sudan's economy was nearly in ruins largely because of the civil war which consumed one-fifth of the country's budget. The failure to win or end the war in the south and grapple with very serious economic problems led to the second military coup in Khartoum in September 1969. Colonel (later Major-General) Jaafar al-Nimeiri came to power, determined to end the war on the basis of national self-determination for the south.
 

Nimeiri Introduced "Sharia" & Rebellion re-emerged in the South

Nimeiri's southern policy was enlightened from the start- He recognized the cultural and historical differences between north and south; he created a Ministry of Southern Affairs, under a southern minister, to work out details of policy; he appointed several southerners to important positions; he set aside money for reconstruction work; he recruited southerners into the police force; and he allowed Christian missionaries to return to the south. These policies gradually won over the people of the south. Late in 1970 Nimeiri ordered a government military offensive against Anyanya in Equatoria, using Soviet helicopters without any hope of wiping out resistance, but in order to force the Anyanya leaders to the conference table.
 
Nimeiri hoped for a negotiated settlement, among other reasons to undermine Israel's growing role in the southern Sudan. There was increasing evidence that the war was supported militarily and financially by Israel. Arms, vehicles and medical supplies were all part of Israel's strategy to keep the war in the south alive. Again, there was increasing evidence that this support came in part through Uganda, with or without the blessing of Obote's government in Kampala.
 
A critical factor to be borne in mind is that it was in Israel's strategic interest to keep the third largest army in the Arab world busy with an internal civil war. The paramount interests of Israel were not in obtaining autonomy or independence for southern Sudan, but in maintaining a state of affairs serious enough to tie down a substantial part of the Sudanese army to a civil war in the south. There was also the calculation that this diversion of the Sudanese army to a southern war might in turn necessitate the diversion of part of the Egyptian army to northern Sudan. This is precisely what did in fact happen. Thousands of Egyptian troops were moved by President Sadat to northern Sudan as thousands of northern Sudanese troops fought in the south. In 1970 Nimeiri put diplomatic pressure on Obote concerning the arms-running activities of the Israelis in Uganda. Obote had brought Israelis into Uganda as trainers of his air force and advisers on other aspects of Uganda's military needs. But in 1970 Obote became increasingly uneasy about his links with Israel. There was a rethinking of his policy on the Middle East, away from links with Israel to a policy of sympathetic support for the rights of Palestinians. Obote's overthrow in a military coup by General Amin in January 1971 gave the Israeli military mission a new lease of life in Uganda, at least for a year. It was all the , more imperative, therefore, for Nimeiri to make strategic gains there.

LT. GEN. JOSEPH LAGU organized the “Anyanya” freedom fighters.

On 27 March 1972, an agreement was signed in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, between the Sudan government and representatives of the south, to conclude a peace conference held under the sponsorship of the All African Council of Churches and with the full approval of the OAU. The agreement stipulated a ceasefire, regional autonomy for the three southern provinces, with an elected people's Regional Council to be responsible for internal affairs; an amnesty for the Anyanya fighters; English to be the working language in the south, besides local languages; and arrangements for the return of refugees to their homes, whether from neighbouring countries or resettlement camps and forests in the Sudan.

ABEL ALIER,  a southerner who served as Vice President of Sudan


After the signing of the Addis Ababa Agreement Nimeiri set up a regional government in the south under the presidency of Abel Alier, who remained Vice-President of the Sudan. Lagu was appointed commander of the Sudanese army in the Southern Region with the rank of General. Thus Sudanese unity had been preserved on the basis of a recognition of the cultural diversity of the Sudan's northern and southern, communities.
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National Movements and New States in Africa