Not on Our Watch by Don Cheadle, John Prendergast Page A

into full-blown civil war between the government’s forces and the rebels.
    In October 1964, a popular uprising in the north toppled the military regime, but new civilian leadership failed to reach a political settlement with the south and the war intensified. Throughout the mid to late 1960s, numerous foreign powers began to funnel money and weapons to the government, to the Anya-Nya, or to both. As in many African countries, the Cold War was not ‘cold’ at all. The government maintained its close ties to the Middle East, but the Soviet Union would become Khartoum’s main patron. Even in 1969, when the military again took power by force, General Jaafar al-Nimeiri’s new government increased Sudan’s trade with the Soviet Union and other communist states. Khartoum relied on Moscow for weapons, and Moscow asserted its strategic influence in the region. Meanwhile, the Anya-Nya rebels drew support mainly from Israel and from neighbouring countries such as Congo, Uganda, and Ethiopia.
    When communists failed in a July 1971 coup attempt, Khartoum’s ties with the Soviets deteriorated and its relationship with the United States and Western Europe improved. Without Soviet military support, Nimeiri recalculated the attractiveness of war with the south and conditions for peace improved. Just months after the failed coup, Nimeiri’s government entered direct negotiations with the Anya-Nya in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. In March 1972, the two sides ratified the Addis Ababa peace agreement which provided substantial power and wealth sharing between the two sides. Darfur at this time was neglected by Khartoum and desperately impoverished, and the Addis Ababa agreement was not the first peace deal in Sudan that failed to resolve the root causes of conflict in all of Sudan, namely the hoarding of wealth and power in Khartoum.

    A War Interrupted
    Unfortunately, peace in Sudan did not hold for long. Though a military strongman, Nimeiri had very little popular support in the north. A group of powerful Islamists, supported by Libya among other governments, formed a strong and organised northern opposition. Sadiq al-Mahdi, a former prime minister, led another failed coup attempt in 1976. Nimeiri’s subsequent attempts to appease the Islamists and generate political support among northerners led him to appoint al-Mahdi and several leading Islamist opposition leaders to important government posts (usually at the expense of southerners who had achieved their positions under the Addis Ababa agreement). Nimeiri allowed opposition leaders living in exile to return to Sudan, including members of the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical religious fundamentalist organisation. The extremist Islamist scholar Hassan al-Turabi became attorney general, and an Islamist influence spread within the government.
    The pressure from the Islamists to renege on the peace agreement was compounded by the discovery of oil in southern Sudan. Driven by greed, northern elites sought to monopolise and maximise oil profits: they resented the provisions in the Addis Ababa agreement that gave the south a degree of financial autonomy as well as the right to collect the central government’s taxes on commercial activity there. Nimeiri’s increasingly uncompromising cabinet demanded that he replace southern troops with northerners in areas with significant oil deposits. Then he stole southern proceeds from an oil licensing deal and set in motion plans for a pipeline to take oil from the south to Port Sudan, for export or for processing in northern refineries. [1] These attempts to cut southerners out of the oil profits exacerbated underlying tensions.
    Southerners began to express their frustration with the Nimeiri government, and northerners became increasingly anxious about the power of southerners in the military. In January 1983, Nimeiri ordered a southern-based battalion to abandon their weapons and redeploy to the north. The troops refused their orders, negotiations to