Sudan may no longer be the biggest country in Africa, but it’s certainly one of the poorest . Due, in no small part, to decades of civil wars stemming from centuries -old divisions between the largely Islamic Arabic North and the predominately traditional and Christian African South. That’s part of it.
But there’s another plausible reason for the endless bloody conflicts that have raged in that country over the past seventy years ...
IT BEGAN (LIKE MANY TIMES BEFORE) WITH THE OIL Like many countries before it, Sudan’s post-colonial troubles and “modern wars ” began in 1956 when the West first started excavating for oil in that country and discovered it in the ’70s. Something else happened in 1956 – on 1 January: Sudan gained their “ independence “. THE FIRST CIVIL WAR (1955 – 1972) Strangely.
.. in 1955, merely months before attaining independence, civil war broke out in Sudan – and continued for a decade and a half.
Curious, don’t you think? That civil war should break out just before independence day and the hunt for oil began – and persisted until just after oil was discovered. You would think that gaining independence would be reason enough to pause the civil war and negotiate a political solution? Yeah, you would think..
. After 16 years of fighting and over a million dead, the first civil war ended in 1972. For a while, around 10 years, Sudan enjoyed relative peace.
Then, in 1981, the Chevron Corporation discovered the Adar Yale oilfield in Sou.
