1995-10-01a- CIA Conference Report: THE CHALLENGE OF ETHNIC CONFLICT TO NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL ORDER IN THE 1990S GEOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVES 01-Oct-95

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Current Ethnic Conflicts propaganda targets of the (south based) Sudan Peo-
ple's Liberation Movement (SPLM). In the years lead-
In Africa it often is difficult to distinguish ethnic con- ing up to and following the coup that ousted Nimieri,
flict of the kind being discussed here from local or conflict among non-Arab Northern ethnic groups,
temporary strife resulting from political processes. notably the Nuba and the Beni Amer in Red Sea Prov-
The worldwide democratization movement is also ince, continued even as the larger war intensified.
affecting African countries, and frequently this has
ethnic overtones because one-party rule tends to mean The SPLM's military wing, the Sudan People's Liber-
one-culture dominance and because military rule often ation Army, began its war against "the North" in 1983,
(although not always) means the same. When multi- in opposition to the Nimeiri government, which in that
party politics reached Togo, there were deathly riots year announced the imposition of the sharialaw over
that might have led to ongoing ethnic strife, but that all of Sudan. The North-South war has swept back and
did not follow. In Ghana, the continued rule of strong- forth across the countryside, devastating infrastructure
man Jerry Rawlings is greased by comparatively and livelihoods and seemingly incapable of resolution.
strong economic growth, but ethnic issues are forcibly In the southern provinces, too, joint opposition to
submerged. In Chad, seemingly always on the verge Khartoum's rule was not enough to submerge ethnic
of civil war, successive coup attempts and French mil- conflicts. The schism between the Dinka-dominated
itary involvement punctuate'the apparently hopeless faction, led by John Garang, and the mainly Nuer fac-
struggle toward representative government. Indeed, in tion, a breakaway group led by Riek Mashar, has pro-
1994, full-scale ethnic conflict was in progress in sev- duced a three-way struggle. (The Dinka are from the
eral locations. west bank of the Nile, the Nuer, from the east, on the
Ethiopian border). In mid-1992, a further power strug-
Liberia gle produced still another split in the southern ranks.
ECOMOG, the Economic Community of West Afri-
can States (ECOWAS) peacekeeping force, has sup- In June 1992, the warring parties met but without a
pressed but not eliminated the carnage. What began as settlement. In 1994, the North appeared poised to
the ouster of the Americo-Liberian regime in Mon- overcome the divided Southern forces, and promises
rovia (and thus as a reformist conflict) evolved into an of freedom of belief and religious observance, made
ethnic struggle involving supporters of the strongman, by the government in 1992 in Abuja during negotia-
President Samuel Doe, and two rebels, Taylor and tions under Nigerian auspices, were no longer heard.
Johnson. Now a tribal conflict, the struggle has no end The regime that took power in 1989 is intransigent
in sight, and the survival of Liberia as an entity is in and virulently anti-Christian and anti-Western; in the
doubt. wake of the World Trade Center bombing, when the
United States declared Sudan a "terrorist state," it
Sudan expressed fears it shared with the southerners about to
The latest phase of four decades of regional conflict in come under Khartoum's shariaheel. The human cost
the Sudan is more than 10 years old. It is classic reli- of the Sudan conflict is staggering: in 1994 there were
gious-ethnic struggle on the northern perimeter of an estimated 7 million malnourished and 3 million
black Africa, but it is not sirnply a contest between starvation-threatened refugees in Sudan. Both the
north and south. Sudan has a complex ethnolinguistic Khartoum regime and the southern factions have
mosaic. The northern provinces contain about 60 per- impeded the flow of relief to these refugees on the
cent of the total population, and, while the north is grounds that such aid has "strategic" value.
overwhelmingly Muslim, only about two-thirds of the
northerners speak Arabic as their native language. The
Muslim but non-Arab northerners-including the Fur
and Zaghawa in Darfur, the Nuba in South Kordofan,
the Nubians of the far north, and others-have been
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