Going over the key milestones of modern Sudanese history, one finds an abundance of insights into its present tragedy. Unique layers of fragmentation combine with an exceptionally limited capacity to narrow this fragmentation through a state that would turn Sudanese society, however gradually, into a national political community.
Beginning chronologically, British rule played a foundational role in two respects. Having defeated the Mahdists, it unified that colossal geographic expanse administratively in 1898-99, taking unification too far and breaking with colonialism's reputation as divisive through and through. At the same time, Britain's unification of Sudan came laced with measures that pulled the country apart, feeding an already enormous unevenness. Its "Southern Policy" sought to contain the influence of the Arab and Muslim north on the south, where it encouraged Christian missionary activity. After the Second World War, as the British prepared to withdraw from their colonies, there remained no "Southern Policy" to speak of, and wholesale integration with the north was adopted. The southerners gave their response in 1955- through their first armed rebellion, which introduced the country's first civil war.
Bigger roles in the tragedy were played by Sudanese leaders who could, over decades of independence, have narrowed this disparity, whether its initial manifestations or its British additions. What happened was the exact opposite, and the most prominent offenses were committed by army generals- whose patience with fumbling political processes quickly ran out, and who equated an attainable salvation with an ever-swelling ego.
The first among them was Ibrahim Abboud. In 1956, the country gained independence with its Muslim north, which had been more advanced in terms of education and public administration, and its south, which had traditionally lagged behind and was home to Christians and communities of a handful of local religions. Sudan's independence, however, implicitly reflected a settlement between two northern currents that had divided the independence effort between them: the Mahdist, representing local patriotism and expressed in the Umma Party, and the Khatmi, which called for union with Egypt and was represented by the National Unionist Party.
Between North and South, and between Mahdiyya and Khatmiyya, politics seemed a difficult task in Sudan. And so, two years after independence, Abboud devised the illusory solution of a military coup, which kept him in power until 1964.
The second was Jaafar Nimeiri, who carried out his coup in 1969, taking advantage of the confusion and disarray of political life. The "October Revolution" that toppled Abboud had established civilian rule marked by a succession of short-lived, unstable coalition governments, as a result of limited consensus on the south, the constitution, and questions of religion and state. In 1972, however, Nimeiri reached the Addis Ababa agreement with the southerners, which some were quick to believe had ended the civil war. In 1977 came his "national reconciliation" with the united opposition, which Nimeiri intended as the complete and absolute absorption of his opponents into his regime.
His authoritarian leanings then gathered pace: in 1983 he abrogated the Addis Ababa agreement and imposed sharia law, and the second civil war broke out in the south. The ground for implementing sharia had been prepared by several measures; the most prominent of them was the appointment of the Islamist leader Hassan al-Turabi as attorney general in 1979, which signaled tolerance of the Islamists' penetration of the state apparatus and its bureaucracy.
As for those who thought firm intellectual and political loyalties were at play, they were dismayed to find that the officer who had begun his career as a Nasserist and an ally of the communists turned against Nasserism after Nasser's death, crushing the largest of the Arab communist parties in the wake of Hashem al-Atta's coup in 1971.
The third, who ruled the longest and did the most damage to the country, was Omar al-Bashir. Backed by the "Islamic Front" and its leader Turabi, he made use of the fumbles of a civilian government that lasted no more than three years, the country's last parliamentary experience. Bashir staged his coup in 1989 and went on to remain in power for thirty years, during which bin Laden resided in Sudan. Instead of the problem of the south being solved, the problem of the west worsened, and in 2003, the Darfur war broke out. And while Bashir acknowledged the south's right to self-determination, which led to its independence in 2011, he devoted himself to the war in the west, widening its scope and its abuses to the point that the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against him in 2009.
Like Nimeiri before him, Bashir rebelled against his mentor, Turabi, in the late 1990s, dismissing him from his post and then arresting him, declaring that the Islamists' sky was not wide enough for two stars.
In 2019 the "Military Council" ousted Bashir after popular protests triggered by the collapse of the economy. Since then, there have been several attempts at a "democratic transition" that never was. Instead, there was the eruption, in 2023, of bloody conflict within the "Military Council"- specifically between its two leading figures, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo- which then engulfed the entire country. As with the war against the south, the assault on the west was tinged with racist impulses. It was led by the "Rapid Support Forces"- an offshoot of the notorious Janjaweed militias, and one that, ironically, Bashir's regime had itself created in 2013.
As for the great war that broke out in 2023 and rages on, it has displaced some 9 million Sudanese inside their country and created 4 million refugees. The number of those killed in that war, together with the deaths it has caused, ranges between 60,000 and 150,000. Many deaths, moreover, have gone unrecorded because their remote areas cannot be reached.
