28 - Genocides in the Sudans

Summary

Sudan was the largest country in Africa until 2011, when its South gained independence. (See Map 28.1.) In the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, multiple conflicts became sites of mass violence. The second civil war between the government of Sudan and the southern rebels lasted twenty-two years from 1983 to 2005, with large repercussions for civilians in both the south (future South Sudan) and the Nuba Mountains. Then, during the negotiations between the southern rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and Khartoum, a new conflict erupted in Darfur in 2003. It garnered international attention, and the US government labelled the war in Darfur a ‘genocide’. The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued six arrest warrants, including against then sitting president of Sudan, Omar El-Beshir, for alleged crimes of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. This was a marked escalation in the history of international reactions to mass violence in the Sudan since the 1980s. In 2013, a new war erupted in independent South Sudan. The international community did not escalate its rhetoric to label that mass violence as genocidal, preferring to use the term ‘ethnic cleansing’, while warning that it could become a genocide.