In 1987 investigators for the Anti-Slavery Society were offered black children by Arab merchants for 40 Sudanese Pounds (Ls40 equals about $8.80 US), less than the cost of international postage from Sudan. Other observers found that the price of a boy had fallen from Ls60 in early 1987 to about Ls10 (about $2.20 US) at the end of that year. The monitors estimated that in 1987 alone, Arabs enslaved at least 7000 women and children from the South. In a US State Department report of May 1993, southern women and children were found to have been forced into slave labor on Arab farms or as domestics in Arab homes, while others have been exported to Libya. In addition, hundreds of thousands of young men (many of them children as young as 10 to 13 years of age) have been forcibly pressed into military service. These children, kidnapped from villages in the Bahr-el-Ghazal Province and the Nuba Mountains (where the people are predominantly Muslim), are coerced under the threat of death to mount further slave raids on other indigenous peoples.

Ethnographer Hugo D'Aybaury, who in early 1993 clandestinely visited the Nuba Mountain region of Southern Kordofan (controlled by the SPLA), witnessed villages burned to the ground by the Sudanese Army, large scale massacres of innocent non-combatants, and massive confiscation of lands which had been controlled for thousands of years by the Nuba people. Such data have become commonplace since the war intensified in the late 1980s. They are typified by incidents like the 1987 attacks on Diein and Marial Bay, which resulted in thousands of deaths, slaves taken, burned villages and farmlands, thefts of cattle and grain stores, and scores of human rights atrocities. In early 1993, similar military operations were reported throughout Bahr -el-Ghazal.

The exploitation of water resources became a major factor in the colonialist conflict, especially for the Dinka. Closely following independence from Britain in 1956, Sudan and Egypt concluded the Nile Water Agreement of 1959, the most momentous decision of which was to construct massive dams at Aswan (Egypt) and Roseires (in the Blue Nile Province close to the border of Ethiopia). The deal also included an agreement to undertake other projects designed to increase the yield of the Nile waters. The Permanent Joint Technical Commission (PJTC), created to implement those water projects, was organized without any representatives from the South.

In 1974, the PJTC submitted a plan to the Sudanese and Egyptian governments which called for the construction of the Jonglei Canal. The 300 km. canal would be capable of carrying 25 million cubic meters of upper Nile water per day from southern Jonglei Province north to Sobat Province, effectively denying the use of that water in the moist and fertile "Sudd" region of the river valley, which had been traditionally the homeland of many Dinka people. The Dinka were faced with severe disruption of their livestock and agriculture-based lifeway. The canal would have changed the ecology of the Sudd entirely, greatly reducing ground water recharge, resulting in the loss of dry season pasture and fisheries and wildlife. In addition, the canal created a physical barrier to the free movement of cattle and wildlife, upon which the Dinka heavily depend.

The decision to construct the canal was made without the consultation of the Dinka, who protested vigorously that the project would result in the loss of their culture. They demanded to be included in any decision affecting their lands and resources. The government responded by promising to improve both river and road transportation, provide a year-round water supply, and reduce the impact of floods. However, it soon became clear that the government had no intention to live by its commitments. Some 267 km. of the canal had been dug by November 1983, when construction was brought to a halt by the initiation of the SPLA rebellion in the area. That response was soon met with Sudanese military attacks and the enslavement and starvation of the Dinka population. The project remains stalled today due the violence and instability which now besets the region.

When the SPLA was created in 1983, its stated intent was to re-unite all the peoples of Sudan and return the government to a system characterized by individual freedom and national self-determination. In its first few years, the SPLA had significant military victories which contributed heavily to the 1985 coup and overthrow of the Numeiri regime. Then, the movement experienced factionalization and division, in the context of the subjection of the entire country to the conditions of Islamic Law.

Challenges arose against the autocratic leadership of John Garang who stood consistently for national integration and unification. The dissidents (the Nasir faction), led by Reik Machar, called for liberation and secession from the Islamic regime in Khartoum, and the creation of the independent state of "North Azania." In 1991 the SPLM/SPLA fragmented into two elements. Efforts to reconcile the differences of Garang and Machar have failed, but a popular consensus now seems to be building toward the idea of partitioning Sudan. Garang himself may now perceive separation as a positive outcome.

The Beshir regime, however, is determined to preserve the territorial integrity of Sudan as it presently exists. The military has begun a campaign of total confiscation of all lands of the South. It is pursuing that goal with the financial assistance of Iran, Yemen, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. While not all of these Islamic states conform to the fundamentalist Shari'a Law which Beshir promotes as policy, none of them wants to see any Arab or Islamic state divided as a result of an African/Christian resistance movement, which many consider to be instigated and subsidized by the West. Beshir maintains that "Arabism without Islam will degenerate into tribalism," while Islamic movements elsewhere look to Sudan (a member of the Arab League) as a model for comprehensive social, political and economic change. With as much support as it is receiving, the Sudanese military has had a distinct advantage in the fighting.

As recently as early 1992, the SPLA controlled about 90% of the South, but in late February of that year, the government began a major dry-season offensive on four fronts in the South. Many of the attacks were launched from Ethiopia and were brought to bear on the main SPLA forces which, although cornered in the southeast, managed to inflict heavy casualties upon government forces. Stalemated in May 1992, the two sides (both factions of SPLA and the government) met for negotiations in Abuja, Nigeria. (The Nigerian government, itself dominated by an Islamic military dictatorship, proposed a federalist solution modeled on its own continuing experiment with "nation-building" and suppression of "ethnic separatist" movements.)

Fourth World Bulletin • December 1993

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