Sudan is becoming a flashpoint

But first a quick mention of the US missile attack on Dhoobley, Somalia on the Kenya-Somalia border in an attempt to kill an Al Qaeda operative there. The target, Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, is suspected of coordinating Al Qaeda operations in East Africa and planning the suicide bombing on the Israeli-owned Paradise Hotel in Mombasa, Kenya and the simultaneous attempt to down an Arkia Israel airplane leaving Mombasa on November 28, 2002. The missile was launched from a US Navy submarine off the coast. I don't know if the sub was operating under AFRICOM but it nevertheless shows that the US is ready, willing, and able to take military action on the continent, in this instance against Islamic terrorists.

And now to Sudan.

In the past few days, Sudan has been in the news regarding ostensibly unconnected events within the country. First, attacks on civilians in Darfur by the Sudanese military and Janjaweed militiamen have continued. Second, fighting has begun to break out in Abyei on the border between North and South Sudan. Over the weekend, Nicholas Kristof wrote an opinion piece about 'Africa's next slaughter' if war were to break out there and posted a video of his trip to the region. Today, a skirmish was reported between the French-led EUFOR mission based in Chad and Sudanese troops on the border, after EUFOR troops accidentally drove into Sudan.

From the outside, these events may seem unrelated or at least the events in Darfur and in Abyei. The fact of the matter is that they are very much connected. The link is the Arab led central government in Khartoum. The Arabs who are muslim have been fighting the christian and animist black Africans in the South for 30 years. The fighting ended with a peace treaty in January 2005. The terms of that agreement, however, have not been fulfilled and now, as Kristof describes, the two sides are poised to resume hostilities. At issue, particularly, is control over the oil in the region. The government wants access to the oil in former rebel controlled areas. As I discussed in a previous post, there does not seem to be a peaceable way out of this potential conflict as long as the Sudanese government maintains its intransigence and unwillingness to compromise with the southerners. A second aspect is the hatred the Arab Sudanese maintain for the Southern blacks. The fighting has always had ethnic overtones and its resumption will be no different.

Does that sound familiar to any other ongoing fighting in Sudan? Of course. The same hatred of ethnic non-Arabs that is present in the South, is driving the ethnic cleansing in Darfur. I don't think it is necessary to go into the whole Darfur history but I wanted to draw the connection between fighting black Africans in the South and in Darfur.

Now to bring it all together. Sudan wants freedom of action within its own territory and therefore, the government has consistently opposed international pressure to stop the killing as well as blocked the deployment of large-scale UN and AU peacekeeping missions in Sudan. As such, it is clearly unhappy with the deployment of the EUFOR mission on the Chad-Sudan border and today's skirmish sets the tone for Sudan's attitude and future reactions toward EUFOR. How can the government survive the international pressure? Through the protection of China which is the number one customer of Sudanese oil.

So to recap. Sudan's Arab government is continuing attacks on non-Arabs in Darfur and is potentially restarting fighting in the Abyei region of the South. Attacks against international peacekeepers operating out of Chad are a reflection of Sudanese animosity towards international efforts to intervene in Sudan. Sudan can afford to do so because of the oil it sells to China, some of which is at stake in the fighting in the South.