The Sudan Handbook

296 thE sudan handbook

and nor did the Anglo-Egyptian colonial regime that followed. As the

colonial period drew to its end in 1955, the conflict between southern

Sudan and the Khartoum government began. In the 1960s this developed

into a fully-fledged bush war.

The Addis Ababa Agreement of 1972 gave southern Sudan a consid-

erable degree of regional autonomy, but not self-determination. It

established a regional government run by southerners, and the arrange-

ment was incorporated into the 1973 Permanent Constitution. But the

ten-year peace came to an end in 1983 after President Jaafar Nimeiri

abolished the Southern Regional government. The SPLA was formed

the same year. Khartoum’s repudiation of the peace deal was part of a

reshuffling of domestic alliances in response to a global economic crisis.

One of the beneficiaries was the modern Islamist movement.

In the late 1970s, the Islamists invested in urban commerce, antici-

pating the shift away from national development to globalized trade

before anyone else in Sudan. Good fortune attended them: the Islamists

were able to attract funds from Arabian oil-exporting states, which had

benefited from enormous oil price inflation; they extended private credit

to potential supporters working in trade and services at the centre of

Sudan, building a constituency for a radical change. Islamists sometimes

organized in peripheral areas, but aimed for transformation, beginning

in the capital. After Nimeiri was deposed in 1985, and after a short parlia-

mentary interlude, Islamists took control of the country. Some argue that

the timing of their coup was set to forestall peace between the southern

rebels and the parliamentary regime that succeeded Nimeiri. Once in

power, the Islamists set out to reshape northern culture around their

own version of Islam, and in 1992, in response to continued insurgency

by the SPLA, they declared jihad on the south, a term they interpreted as

meaning religious war.

The Second Civil War

The right of peoples to self-determination has been recognized in inter-

The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors national law since the 1960s. But for thirty years, African states refused

(www.riftvalley.net).