Sudan Essay, Research Paper

“There’s no security in this area, people are always fighting, and that’s why they do this. This war has turned everyone into an outlaw – Agawai Akot, a former slave, commenting on the revival of the trade in southern Sudan in 1995″

“If there is no general and massive distribution of food, we are going to have a major crisis in the Sudan in the coming weeks, months, and it is going to last for years – Marc Hermant, head of mission for the humanitarian group Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF) in southern Sudan, April 1998″

Khartoum is the capital of Sudan, now a sprawling city home to over five million people. Sudan’s politics since independence in 1956 have been controlled by a series of coups and counter coups in the capital that had little influence in the country as a whole which very sensibly got on with life as normal.

But that has now changed with the ruinous civil war being fought in the south and an ideologically driven government of Islamic fundamentalists, which sees it as its God given duty to turn the whole country into a model of Islamic purity.

It is now about 90 million people and growing. Sudan’s agriculture depends on irrigation water from the Nile, but the civil war has destroyed many of these. As a result, there are millions of acres of once fertile farmland which now lie barren. In particular, the Jonglei Canal Project was designed to use the water more efficiently and prevent the massive evaporation that occurs during the rainy season. It was one of the first casualties of the war when it broke out again in 1984.

“There’s no security in this area, people are always fighting, and that’s why they do this. This war has turned everyone into an outlaw – Agawai Akot, a former slave, commenting on the revival of the trade in southern Sudan in 1995″

“If there is no general and massive distribution of food, we are going to have a major crisis in the Sudan in the coming weeks, months, and it is going to last for years – Marc Hermant, head of mission for the humanitarian group Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF) in southern Sudan, April 1998″

Khartoum is the capital of Sudan, now a sprawling city home to over five million people. Sudan’s politics since independence in 1956 have been controlled by a series of coups and counter coups in the capital that had little influence in the country as a whole which very sensibly got on with life as normal.

But that has now changed with the ruinous civil war being fought in the south and an ideologically driven government of Islamic fundamentalists, which sees it as its God given duty to turn the whole country into a model of Islamic purity.

It is now about 90 million people and growing. Sudan’s agriculture depends on irrigation water from the Nile, but the civil war has destroyed many of these. As a result, there are millions of acres of once fertile farmland which now lie barren. In particular, the Jonglei Canal Project was designed to use the water more efficiently and prevent the massive evaporation that occurs during the rainy season. It was one of the first casualties of the war when it broke out again in 1984.