Emma’s War: Love, Betrayal and Death in the Sudan. Deborah Scroggins
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or just ‘Sudan’, as it is commonly called today. From Karadawi, Emma heard about The Aethiopika, the third-century Greek novel about an Ethiopian princess who was mysteriously born with white skin and was raised as a Greek, who had to travel to the ancient Sudanese city-state of Meroë to find true love and her rightful throne. From him Emma learned how the Nile River snakes out from the Sudd, the world’s biggest swamp, all the way through the deserts of Sudan and Egypt to the Mediterranean.
In ancient times, the Sudd marked the limits of the world known to geographers. The Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and Arabs sent expeditions to discover whence came the river that gave birth to Egypt, but the swamp defeated every attempt to find out. The people of the Sudan included hundreds of ethnic groups, each with its own language and customs. The northern two-thirds of the country was mostly dry, while the southern third was wet and tempting, with good grazing, fat cattle, and rivers teeming with fish. With the exception of the Nuba Mountains, the northern people were mostly Arabic-speaking and Islamic. Meanwhile the Nuba and the southerners remained ‘noble spiritual believers’, as Karadawi liked to call them, clinging to their African languages and religions. The struggle between the lighter-skinned desert peoples, drawn by the south’s water, slaves, gold and ivory, and the darker-skinned peoples of the swamp, who violently resisted intruders, had marked Sudanese history for thousands of years. Sudan’s contemporary civil war was in some ways a continuation of this antediluvian clash, Karadawi said.
Like most people in Britain, Emma had learned about the existence of huge refugee camps along Sudan’s eastern border with Ethiopia only during the famine of 1984-5. But Karadawi explained that there had been Ethiopian refugees in Sudan long before the famine. Ethiopia’s civil wars (like Sudan’s) had deep roots, and so did the tensions between the two countries. Christian Ethiopia had been at odds with Muslim Sudan since the Middle Ages, and supporting each other’s enemies had always been a feature of the contest. In 1961 the UN gave Ethiopia sovereignty over Eritrea, a partly Muslim former Italian colony that lies between Ethiopia and Sudan. When the Eritreans rebelled against Ethiopia, they set up bases in eastern Sudan with the help of the Sudanese government and its Arab allies. As refugees who had crossed an international border, the Eritreans and their families came under the protection of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), which fed them. Meanwhile, Ethiopia gave sanctuary to Sudan’s rebellious southern pagans and Christians. Ethiopia’s patron, Israel, also gave the southern Sudanese rebels military assistance, as a way of weakening the Arab coalition.
Karadawi had been a child when the Sudan gained its independence from Britain and civil war broke out in the south. The war was still dragging on in 1970, when he went to work for UNHCR in the Eritrean camps along the eastern border right after earning his degree from the University of Khartoum. The southern rebels called themselves Anyanya, or ‘poison’, and they often behaved as poisonously to each other as to the northern army. In many ways, the tactics of the northern army resembled those of the nineteenth-century slave-traders. The army operated from inside garrison towns that had been founded on the sites of the old thorn-fence enclosures called zaribas, from which Arab slave-hunters had once armed their local allies and encouraged them to take captives. Now, as then, Arab army officers now handed out weapons to allied southern peoples, urging them to attack their local enemies and loot them of their cattle, women and children. The southerners were easily manipulated, and it seemed as if the fighting might go on forever. Then a series of events suddenly changed the climate. Jafaar Nimeiri, a military officer, took over the Sudanese government in a 1969 coup and began searching for a way out of the war. Then Israel concentrated its flow of arms on a single southern rebel commander, the Equatorian Joseph Lagu, enabling him to gain control of what had been a hopelessly fractured movement.
From his position in the camps, Karadawi watched how Nimeiri used the Eritrean refugees as one card in the political game that finally led to a 1972 peace agreement between northern and southern Sudan. When Nimeiri wanted to pressure Ethiopia, the southern rebels’ patron, he simply made it easier for the Eritreans to get weapons and supplies, including food, from friendly Arab countries. When he wanted to mollify Ethiopia, he squeezed the camps. In 1971 the aged Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie agreed to act as a mediator in Nimeiri’s talks with Lagu and the Anyanya. Largely united under Lagu, the southern rebels leaders were able to seize the opportunity for peace. In 1972 they and the government signed the Addis Ababa agreement that gave the south partial autonomy and ended seventeen years of civil war.
The Addis Ababa agreement ushered in a decade that Karadawi remembered as one of tremendous hope and promise. Sudan was going to be ‘the breadbasket of the Middle East’. Nimeiri agreed to support the Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel. The United States rewarded him by making Sudan the next-biggest recipient of American foreign aid after Egypt and Israel. Sudan’s Muslim neighbours across the Red Sea were awash in oil money. Nimeiri’s government was able to borrow more than $12 billion from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and the Arab countries of the Gulf to finance its development schemes. Biggest was the watchword of the day. With a population of only about 26 million, Sudan had a land mass the size of Western Europe. It was the biggest country in Africa, and it was going to have the biggest of everything. International businessmen spent Gulf money to construct the world’s biggest sugar factory south of Khartoum at Kenana. An Anglo-French consortium brought the world’s biggest digger to Sudan and spent $75 million to construct the Jonglei Canal, a massive scheme that was going to use water from the Sudd to irrigate northern Sudan and Egypt. There were many dreams, but by the end of the decade the dreams, as well as the money, had vanished into the hands of Nimeiri’s cronies and the Western expatriates who administered so many of the foreign projects. Meanwhile the Sudanese public was saddled with a debt twice the size of the country’s gross national product.
The old siren song of treasure in the south spelled the beginning of the end. Following the 1973 oil crisis in the West, George Bush, US president Richard Nixon’s ambassador to the UN, visited Khartoum at the invitation of Nimeiri’s foreign minister. Nimeiri had started out as a socialist, and the United States had kept its distance from him during his first few years in power. Now Bush, a former oil man from Texas, advised the Sudanese government that satellite remote-sensing intelligence available to the US government showed that oil might be found in the south-eastern part of the country, especially the triangle of land located in the Sudd region between Bentiu, Nasir and Malakal. Bush named some American companies he said might be willing to undertake such a venture. In 1974 the American oil company Chevron was granted a licence to look for oil in parts of the south and south-west. Chevron also signed a secret agreement to explore the Kafi-Kengi region in northern Bahr el-Ghazal, where uranium deposits that could be refined for use in nuclear weapons had been found near the border with Darfur.
The Middle East was just beginning to churn with what the followers of political Islam call ‘the Islamic awakening’. Disappointed with the failures of independence, young Muslims were turning to Islam in search of a more natural and authentic system of governance than the secular nationalism imported from the West. Political Islam found especially fertile ground in northern Sudan, where the biggest political parties were already associated with religious brotherhoods. After Nimeiri’s communist allies attempted to overthrow him, the president drew closer to these Islamic parties. They had opposed his peace agreement with the south on the grounds that it gave what the agreement called the south’s ‘noble spiritual beliefs’ and Christianity equal place with Islam in Sudan’s constitution. They also thought the agreement gave the south too much autonomy. They had mounted three armed uprisings against Nimeiri, in 1970, 1975 and 1976, the last two with the backing of Libya. The president did not have the strength to resist them forever. In 1977 he invited their leaders to come back from exile.
The Islamic politicians pressed Nimeiri to make Sudanese law - until now a colonial hybrid of customary, Islamic and Western law - conform with classical sharia, or Islamic law. In their view, the purpose of a Muslim government was to enforce sharia. But southerners bitterly resisted any proposals to make sharia the source of all the country’s legislation. Islamic law provides for harsh punishments such as amputation, stoning and flogging. More important, under sharia law, unbelievers may not rule over believers, so that the imposition of sharia law would effectively close off the highest political offices to non-Muslims. Christians and