Sudan’s Independence to Partition With South Sudan
Photo: Children of South Sudan practice their dance routine for the performance at the football match between South Sudan and Kenya during the independence celebrations of South Sudan on July 9, 2011. (UN Photo/Paul Banks)
This historical overview provides a contextual background for understanding the issues Operation Broken Silence works on. It is part of our resource list for students, teachers, and the curious and was last updated November 2023. For more information about what's happening in Sudan and our work, please sign up for our email list.
Map: Sudan and South today. (Operation Broken Silence)
Introduction
While the history of the geographic region now known as Sudan and South Sudan stretches back thousands of years, this overview focuses on the time period after Sudan’s independence in 1956.
A chronological examination of Sudan’s contemporary era can be broken out into four main periods:
Sudan’s Independence: 1956
First Sudanese Civil War: 1955-1972
Second Sudanese Civil War: 1983-2005
Peace Agreement & South Sudan Partition: 2006-2011
Since Operation Broken Silence’s mission is focused on issues in Sudan, this historical overview ends with South Sudan’s independence in 2011.
Sudan’s Independence: 1956
On January 1, 1956, Sudan gained independence from the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, the joint British and Egyptian colonial government that administrated the region. The new country came with a rich diversity of over 600 ethnic groups speaking more than 400 languages in an area roughly one-third the size of the United States.
The region could broadly be broken into two areas: the geographic north, which was home to roughly 65% of the population and is predominately Muslim, with various ethnicities falling into the larger categories of African and Arab. The geographic south is now largely the country of South Sudan, where many individuals consider themselves Christian or animist, with their various ethnicities falling primarily under the broader category of African. While there are evident demographic differences between these two areas, the colonial government only perpetuated division further by governing the north and south separately, with most investment going to Arab-dominated regions of the north.
Sudan’s founding constitution failed to address two crucial issues. First, it was not decided if Sudan should be a secular or Islamist state. Second, the country’s system of national governance failed to include the majority of Sudanese and protect the rights of large minorities. This has been a core driver of conflict in Sudan ever since. As the years went by and national governance became dominated by elite Arab tribal groups in Khartoum, the central government failed to fulfill its promises to create a federal system that was more inclusive.
First Sudanese Civil War: 1955-1972
The consolidation of the two regions following independence caused fear across southern Sudan that centralizing political power in the north would soon rule over them.
In 1955, an unorganized mutiny by southern army officers began. Sudan would never be the same again. The resulting war progressed into three stages over a roughly 17-year period.
Stage 1: Unorganized Guerrilla Warfare (1955-early 1960s)
Southern Sudanese army troops mutinied in the garrison towns of Torit, Yei, Juba, and Maridi. While revolts were quickly suppressed, many survivors fled into the countryside to begin an uncoordinated, poorly armed insurgency.
The newly formed Sudanese government and the outgoing British saw these groups and their insurgency as a mere annoyance. Regardless, the Sudanese government began rebuilding its armed forces in the south.
Map: Towns where South Sudanese troops mutinied against Khartoum. (Operation Broken Silence)
Stage 2: Anyanya Movement Forms (early 1960s-1971)
As guerrilla leaders consolidated control over rural areas, they began to coordinate more closely together. The Anyanya emerged as a secessionist movement composed of the mutineers from 1955 and southern students.
Despite their differences and internal conflict, armed Anyanya units began expanding their control over much of rural southern Sudan. Noticing this, the central government responded by reinforcing garrison towns in the south.
The Sudanese government faced just as many internal divisions as the southern Anyanya. Successive coup attempts hampered the central government during this time. Popular protests kept Khartoum’s security forces tied up in major cities, which allowed the ever-growing southern rebellion to spread further. Marxist and non-Marxist elements in the upper military and political class jockeyed for power, further exacerbating internal crisis. A short-lived coup in 1871 against Sudanese leader Nimeiry Jaafar ended when he jumped from a window while incarcerated and his supporters rescued him.
Photo: President Jaafar Nimeiry, in office from May 25, 1969 – April 6, 1985. (US Defense Department)
Stage 3: South Sudan Liberation Movement (SSLM) Emerges (1971)
By 1969, the Anyanya Movement posed a formidable military threat to the Sudanese government in the north. Despite its own internal divisions, Anyanya fighters now had large swaths of the rural south under control.
After several internal coups and leadership changes in 1971, various Anyanya factions united under a single command structure and vision as the South Sudan Liberation Movement (SSLM).
Southern secession from Sudan and the formation of an independent state was the goal of the SSLM. Increasingly organized and with fewer divisions, SSLM forces fought the northern government’s bloody counter-insurgency campaign to a stalemate.
The war ended with the signing of the 1972 Addis Ababa Agreement between the SSLM and the northern government, granteing significant regional autonomy to southern Sudan. It also promised the Abyei area —located on the north-south geographic, ethnic, and religious fault line— the right to hold a referendum on remaining a part of northern Sudan or joining the semi-autonomous southern region.
Photo: Anyanya soldiers near a frontline area during the First Sudanese Civil War. Small armed groups like this one joined the SSLM as part of the deal to unite South Sudanese armed groups against the Sudanese government.
Aftermath
It is estimated that the First Sudanese Civil War claimed roughly 500,000 lives, with only 20% being war-related civilian deaths or armed combatants. The Sudanese government’s violent counter-insurgency campaign left many southern Sudanese traumatized and deeply mistrustful of northern governments in Khartoum. Hundreds of thousands of southern Sudanese returned to reclaim their land; however, full reconciliation between the north and south never occurred. The seeds for the next war were planted at the end of the first, and the coming conflict would be one of the most destructive in human history.
Second Sudanese Civil War: 1983-2005
While the war and genocide in southern Sudan had racial and religious origins with roots in oppressive marginalization, the primary reason for this conflict was the system of exploitative and extremist governance in Khartoum that began to emerge in the 1970s. The Second Sudanese Civil War progressed in four stages over a 22-year period.
Stage 1: Rise of Islamic Extremism and Sudan People's Liberation Army (1983-1989)
Large quantities of oil were discovered in the south in 1978. Hungry for cash and power, Sudanese government leaders in the north violated the 1972 Addis Ababa Peace Agreement by attempting to seize control of these areas. Meanwhile, a much more terrifying force was gaining power in the shadows in Khartoum: Arab Islamic extremists.
By 1983, Arab Islamic political power had grown so much in the north that Sudanese President Nimeiry —desperate to hold onto power— declared all of Sudan an Islamic state. Under crushing pressure from the Islamists, he made the fateful decision to terminate southern autonomy. Southern leaders had been watching with great apprehension for years as the extremists consolidated power in Khartoum. Now it was clear that the violent ideology building in the north would soon be unleashed against their homeland in the southern Sudan.
The Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), the successor armed rebel movement to the SSLM, began forming almost immediately. Southern soldiers mutinied across Sudanese government ranks and returned to the south to prepare for the inevitable invasion. SPLA forces seized large swaths of rural areas in southern Sudan. The speed at which the southern rebellion grew caught the Sudanese government off guard, so much so that in 1984 President Nimeiry announced the end of sharia (religious Islamic law) in the south. However, this move did little to comfort southern leaders.
A short-lived coup unseated Nimeiry in 1985 and led to open fighting in southern Sudan between government forces and SPLA troops. Protests swept across Sudan in 1988 as the war strained the economy. Under pressure from across Sudan, the northern government attempted to secure peace with the southern SPLA. A fragile agreement was finally reached; however, it proved to be too little too late. The Arab Islamists were nearly prepared to put their twisted vision for Sudan in motion.
Stage 2: Bashir Regime Seizes & Consolidates Power (1989-1991)
In 1989, Colonel Omar al-Bashir and the National Islamic Front seized power in a military coup. Bashir took the titles of president, chief of state, prime minister, and chief of the armed forces. Wielding a Koran and an AK-47 rifle in Khartoum, Bashir declared to soldiers that he was going to reengineer the country into one dominated by an ethnic Arab elite and ruled by oppressive sharia law.
Between 1989-1991, Bashir’s military regime consolidated control over the government by banning trade unions, political parties, and other non-religious institutions. Over 70,000 members of the army, police, and civil administration were purged.
Photo: Omar al-Bashir, pictured here, and his regime enforces Islamic codes and bans trade unions, political parties, and other ‘non-religious’ institutions who could challenge him.
In 1991, the Bashir regime instituted sharia law across all of Sudan. Alarm bells sounded across southern Sudan: the time to prepare for war was running out.
Stage 3: War & Genocide Consumes southern Sudan (1992-2001)
The full-blown war came in the summer of 1992. A massive Sudanese government offensive into southern Sudan drove the SPLA out of their rural strongholds and into the borderlands. Unarmed communities were bombed with conventional and chemical weapons. Tens of thousands of Arab Islamist militias —which the Bashir regime had built up quietly since seizing power— were unleashed on the southern population to murder, pillage, and occupy.
The rapid invasion of southern Sudan nearly crushed the SPLA and divided the rebel army into two factions that would only split further. For the next few years, SPLA factions fought each other as well as a manipulative Bashir regime, who attempted to pit SPLA groups against each other with promises of power, wealth, and ceasefires.
Southern Sudanese began fleeing into the few remaining areas underneath SPLA control. Endless streams of refugees arrived at the Ugandan and Ethiopian borders, bringing with them horrifying stories of widespread massacres and rape. Regional distrust of the Bashir regime skyrocketed. Fearful that the war would soon spill across their own borders, Uganda and Ethiopia began providing the SPLA with direct military assistance and training.
Meanwhile, the SPLA began sending arms and small units throughout southern Sudan, even as far north as the Nuba Mountains region, where war had broken out as well. Sudanese government forces soon found themselves fighting a near-invisible enemy. The guerrilla warfare strategy adapted by the SPLA began to strangle regime supply lines. Government forces regularly carried out reprisal massacres against southern Sudanese following hit and run battles with the SPLA.
Photo: Refugees poured out of southern Sudan as widespread fighting led to famine. An estimated 70,000 people die and 3 million more are negatively affected from poor humanitarian conditions in the first few years of the conflict.
Successive famines from a regime-enforced humanitarian blockade rocked southern Sudan and caused the death toll to accelerate. As horrific images poured out of southern Sudan, international efforts to end the conflict and cripple the Bashir regime increased. Half a world away in Washington D.C., a bipartisan, furious group of American leaders viewed the Bashir regime as a harbinger of international terrorism that was committing genocide in southern Sudan.
Stage 4: International Intervention (2002-2005)
By the late 1990s, the tide of the war was shifting. With arms and training from Uganda and Ethiopia, the SPLA had once again taken control of larger swaths of rural southern Sudan. Regime supply lines between government garrison towns were being strangled by the SPLA. The Bashir regime responded with more scorched-earth tactics and increased bombings on civilian areas.
In October 2002, the US government passed the Sudan Peace Act, comprehensive legislation that dramatically increased American support to the southern Sudanese cause. Underneath the Bush administration, the US government began providing direct humanitarian relief and confronting the Bashir regime on the international stage. The legislation declared that Sudanese government crimes in southern Sudan amounted to genocide.
On top of growing battlefield losses, the Bashir regime found itself fully isolated on the international stage. Crushing American sanctions and diplomatic activity had turned Bashir and other regime leaders into global pariahs. The regime’s genocide in the south had become too costly to continue.
Fighting began to recede in 2003 and 2004. Seizing on the moment, American diplomats mobilized international partners and began brokering a peace agreement that aimed to address the majority of the issues between northern and southern Sudan.
Meanwhile in the western Darfur region of Sudan, an uprising against regime oppression was beginning to be met with another brutal genocide at the hands of the Sudanese government.
Photo: Sudan’s vice president Ali Osman Taha (left) shakes hands with southern Sudanese rebel leader John Garang (right) after signing the peace agreement that ends the war and paves the way for South Sudan to become a new country.
Peace Agreement & South Sudan Partition
On January 9, 2005, the Bashir regime and the SPLA signed the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA). The CPA secured a referendum vote on southern independence after an interim period of autonomy and provided a wide-array of potential solutions for a slew of other issues.
The implementation of the CPA deteriorated leading up to southern Sudan's vote for independence. The vote went ahead despite concerns of a renewed conflict and intense pressure from the international community on the Bashir regime.
After decades of war, the people of southern Sudan voted 99% in favor of independence. On July 9, 2011, mass celebrations swept across South Sudan as it became the world's newest country.
Noticeably left out of the CPA though were any paths forward for the Nuba Mountains, Blue Nile, and Abyei three areas that straddled the north-south fault line. Abyei remains a flashpoint between Sudan and South Sudan today. The Bashir regime launched new genocidal wars in the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile during South Sudan’s independence, and successive military junta’s in Khartoum have refused to seek peace in these two areas ever since.
From Learning To Action
Operation Broken Silence is building a global movement to empower Sudanese heroes in the war-torn periphery regions of Sudan, including Nuba teachers in Yida Refugee Camp. Teachers just like Chana.
The Endure Primary and Renewal Secondary Schools we sponsor in Yida are run entirely by Sudanese teachers. Your gift will help pay educator salaries, deliver school supplies and more.
If you can’t donate right now, we encourage you start a fundraising page and ask friends and family to give!
We are a 501(c)3 tax-exempt organization. Your donation is tax-deductible within the guidelines of U.S. law.
