Sudan

national | miscellaneous | news report Tuesday February 26, 2002 11:58 by john - pressure films johnnyc at dublin dot com 01 4960008

The Forgotten War

The piece is a brief overview of the conflict in Sudan. The country has been largely overlooked by Western Media regardless of the fact that this is one of the longest and horrific wars the continent has ever seen.

Sudan, Africa’s largest country, has been host to one of the continents largest and horrific wars for about forty years. Bar a nine year period in the 1970s Sudan has seen over half a century of fighting. The longevity of the conflict has resulted in a widespread lack of media attention. Seen by many as “slow news”, the Sudanese conflict has been termed the forgotten war.
Sudan is governed by an islamic fundamentalist regime which enforces sharia law. In simple terms this means that those who are not muslim, namely the black African of the south, to which the country is their native land, are subject to persecution. The official government is located in Khartoum in the North and regularly bombards and attacks the areas of the south, home to many tribes and religions, mostly Christian and Animistic. Resistance to the regime is fronted by the S.P.L.M./S.P.L.A. (Southern Peoples Liberation Movement/Southern Peoples Liberation Army), set up by Dr. John Garang in 1983, who control volatile areas in the south of the country. For the past seventeen years an estimated three hundred people have died each day in war related deaths in a conflict which has made development and building of infrastructure close to impossible. “Its like the wild west gone wrong” observed one English priest to me when I visited rebel held New Sudan over Christmas. In terms of aid N.P.A (Norwegian Peoples Aid) are the forerunners as they provide agricultural programs and development schemes rather than merely relief aid.
The government fronts this as a religious war (part of the more broader struggle of islamisation worldwide) but the importance of this struggle for the government lies in the oil which the southerners are sitting on, Bin Laden, who set up the al-qaeida network here in 1995, has a lot of financial interests in the country. Some of the most poorest people in the world are potentially some of the most richest. The Sudanese conflict, like many African struggles has no easy answer, but its absence in media coverage has only contributed to the lack of help by the Western community. This absence has manifested itself most in parts of Europe, with the majority of support for the people of the south coming from the United States.

Source;
I spent three weeks traveling up into the Bahr El Ghazel region in New Sudan. Myself and another colleague are producing a documentary “Dance of the Dinka” which should be finished in the next three months.