(Estimated Pub Date) the Challenge of Ethnic Conflict to National and International Order in the 1990S: Geographic Perspectives- October 1995

Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268
Current Ethnic Conflicts
In Africa it often is difficult to distinguish ethnic con-
flict of the kind being discussed here from local or
temporary strife resulting from political processes.
The worldwide democratization movement is also
affecting African countries, and frequently this has
ethnic overtones because one-party rule tends to mean
one-culture dominance and because military rule often
(although not always) means the same. When multi-
party politics reached Togo, there were deathly riots
that might have led to ongoing ethnic strife, but that
did not follow. In Ghana, the continued rule of strong-
man Jerry Rawlings is greased by comparatively
strong economic growth, but ethnic issues are forcibly
submerged. In Chad, seemingly always on the verge
of civil war, successive coup attempts and French mil-
itary involvement punctuatethe apparently hopeless
struggle toward representative government. Indeed, in
1994, full-scale ethnic conflict was in progress in sev-
eral locations.
Liberia
ECOMOG, the Economic Community of West Afri-
can States (ECOWAS) peacekeeping force, has sup-
pressed but not eliminated the carnage. What began as
the ouster of the Americo-Liberian regime in Mon-
rovia (and thus as a reformist conflict) evolved into an
ethnic struggle involving supporters of the strongman,
President Samuel Doe, and two rebels, Taylor and
Johnson. Now a tribal conflict, the struggle has no end
in sight, and the survival of Liberia as an entity is in
doubt
Sudan
The latest phase of four decades of regional conflict in
the Sudan is more than l0 years old. It is classic reli-
gious-ethnic struggle on the northem perimeter of
black Africa, but it is not simply a contest between
north and south. Sudan has a complex ethnolinguistic
mosaic. The northern provinces contain about 60 per-
cent of the total population, and, while the north is
overwhelmingly Muslim, only about two-thirds of the
northemers speak Arabic as their native language. The
Muslim but non-Arab northemers—including the Fur
and Zaghawa in Darfur, the Nuba in South Kordofan,
the Nubians of the far northjand others-—have been
propaganda targets of the (south based) Sudan Peo-
ple‘s Liberation Movement (SPLM). In the years lead-
ing up to and following the coup that ousted Nimieri,
conflict among non-Arab Northern ethnic groups,
notably the Nuba and the Beni Amer in Red Sea Prov-
ince, continued even as the larger war intensified.
The SPLM’s military wing, the Sudan People’s Liber-
ation Army, began its war against “the North” in 1983,
in opposition to the Nimeiri government, which in that
year announced the imposition of the sharia law over
all of Sudan. The North-South war has swept back and
forth across the countryside, devastating infrastructure
and livelihoods and seemingly incapable of resolution.
In the southern provinces, too, joint opposition to
Khartoum’s rule was not enough to submerge ethnic
conflicts. The schism between the Dinka-dominated
faction, led by John Garang, and the mainly Nuer fac-
tion, a breakaway group led by Riek Mashar, has pro-
duced a three-way struggle. (The Dinka are from the
west bank of the Nile, the Nuer, from the east, on the
Ethiopian border). In mid-1992, a further power strug-
gle produced still another split in the southern ranks.
In June 1992, the warring parties met but without a
settlement. In 1994, the North appeared poised to
overcome the divided Southern forces, and promises
of freedom of belief and religious observance, made
by the govemment in 1992 in Abuja during negotia-
tions under Nigerian auspices, were no longer heard.
The regime that took power in 1989 is intransigent
and virulently anti-Christian and anti-Westem; in the
wake of the World Trade Center bombing, when the
United States declared Sudan a “terrorist state,” it
expressed fears it shared with the southerners about to
come under Khartoum’s sharia heel. The human cost
of the Sudan conflict is staggering: in 1994 there were
an estimated 7 million malnourished and 3 million
starvation-threatened refugees in Sudan. Both the
Khartoum regime and the southern factions have
impeded the flow of relief to these refugees on the
grounds that such aid has “strategic” value.
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Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268