The Sudan Handbook

262 thE sudan handbook

been linked to periods of civil strife. During the first Congolese civil war

of 1960–65, Nasser’s Egypt, then closely allied to the Soviet Union, gave

support to the left wing pro-Lumumba anti-government rebels in Kisan-

gani, using the Sudan as a conduit. General Abboud, then ruler of Sudan,

rendered this service to Nasser to maintain good relations with Cairo. As

a result, when Marshal Mobutu won the war on the government’s side,

very cold relations ensued between Sudan and the DRC.

Mobutu was unsympathetic towards the SPLA struggle against

Khartoum, which he saw as Communist-inspired during the years when

it was based in Mengistu’s Ethiopia (1983–1991). Therefore neither the

Sudanese government nor the southern rebels had much to do with Zaire

during that time. The SPLA did, however, take advantage of the almost

complete absence of administration in north-eastern Zaire to cross

freely over the borders, both of the CAR and Zaire, in order to sidestep

Sudanese Army operations and move troops between Western Equatoria

and Bahr al-Ghazal.

After the fall of Mengistu’s regime in 1991, the SPLA had to flee

Ethiopia and depend much more heavily on its relationships with

Kenya and Uganda. Mobutu had sustained a low-intensity conflict with

Museveni’s regime since the day he took power in Kampala, and as an

extension of this strategy started to collaborate with Khartoum, creating

links that were briefly interrupted when Museveni’s ally Laurent-Désiré

Kabila came to power in 1997. These were quickly resumed a year later

when Kabila fell out with his former supporters, but by then the rebel

SPLA was locked – if informally – in the general anti-Kabila alliance

through its links with Kampala. This led to Khartoum entering the

war in Congo unofficially by using its air force to help ferry troops and

bomb the northern front along the Sudanese border where Jean-Pierre

Bemba’s rebel Mouvement pour la Libération du Congo (MLC) was

operating. After Kabila’s assassination in 2001, Khartoum’s relationship

with Kinshasa became distinctly distant when the former president’s

son Joseph Kabila entered into peace negotiations with the Rwandese–

Ugandan alliance. Still, Sudan continued to use the DRC against its Great

The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors Lakes enemies in any way possible, and as late as September 2008 it was

(www.riftvalley.net).