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Oil and power at center of vote to split Sudan
Loading ...Southern Sudan is scheduled to start voting on January 9 on whether to become an independent country or remain part of Sudan, Africa’s largest nation which has been wracked by decades of conflict.
So how have the people of Sudan reached the point where the country could split?
Sudan, which is a quarter the size of the United States but home to just 44 million people, was ravaged by civil war even before it gained independence from Britain in 1956. Decades of fighting, famine and factionalism followed with every horror imaginable. The referendum is a key provision of a 2005 peace treaty that ended a bloody north-south civil war in Sudan that killed 2 million people and displaced several million others, mainly from Southern Sudan, from 1983 to 2005. It pitted the powerful northern government of Arab Muslims against blacks in Southern Sudan who practice Christianity and animist religions.
What was the root cause of the conflict?
Southerners rebelled in 1955 against what they saw as domination from the north as the country neared independence. Nearly all jobs in the new national government went to northerners. The northern government later sought to impose sharia, or Islamic law, on the non-Muslim south. That further polarized the two sides. The war has had overtones of religious and racial conflict, but it’s also a fight for power. One scholar has described it as a “clash of identities in competition over power and resources.” The north-south conflict is separate from violence in the western Sudanese region of Darfur, which has undergone its own tentative peace process.
Continue Reading at CNN.com.
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