Africa’s Last, Next War

Arab horsemen toting Kalashnikovs provided by the Sudanese government thunder into a town. Women are raped in their huts. Men are gunned down as they flee for the bush, and children are packed off on the back of the raiders' horses while stolen cattle are herded away to be sold.

It's a scene that's become all too familiar for those who've followed the crisis in the western Sudanese region of Darfur over the past five years. But this isn't Darfur circa 2005. It's any one of hundreds of villages in southern Sudan in the 1980s. Or 1992, or 1997, or 2003, and quite possibly 2010.

Before there were Save Darfur panties or George Clooney-led Darfur peace missions, Sudan was engulfed in a much longer and more destructive civil war between Khartoum's Islamist government and the country's animist and Christian south. The most recent phase of that war, from 1983 until 2005, killed an estimated 2 million civilians—more than six times the number thought to have been killed in Darfur over the past six years. Now, as U.S. attention wanders, it's coming back, and it will be worse than ever.

The north-south war is threatening to reignite in a conflict that could spill over into a half-dozen countries in eastern and central Africa and bring misery to millions of people in one of the world's poorest corners. Already more than 2,000 people have been killed in ethnic fighting in southern Sudan this year—with the rate of violent deaths now exceeding that in Darfur, according to the U.N. A 2005 peace agreement that stopped the fighting is on the brink of collapse, and both sides are rearming in advance of an independence referendum in southern Sudan scheduled for January 2011. But the north has used a range of stalling tactics in an attempt to thwart the poll—a situation that would lead the south unilaterally to declare independence. If it does, the war will almost certainly begin again.

"All the signs now are pointing towards a cancellation of the referendum and a return to war," says John Prendergast, a National Security Council official in the Clinton administration who now leads the anti-genocide group the Enough Project. "The war in Darfur was a picnic compared with what happened in the south."

Peace between northern and southern Sudan has been fleeting. Save for an 11-year lull from 1972 to 1983, the two sides were at war almost continuously from 1955 to 2005. At its root, the conflict is about the south's efforts to break free of economic and political domination by Khartoum—from slave raids by Arab and northern Sudanese groups, to control of Sudan's vast oil resources, much of which lie in the south.