loss of life among the southern people. After a
second brief civilian interlude, another military
coup in 1969 brought Colonel Jaafar al-Nimeiri
to power. His more conciliatory approach en-
abled the fighting in the south to be brought to
an end in 1972. But a renewed attempt in 1983
to force Muslim law and custom on the south
led to a fresh outbreak of fighting. The endem-
ic north–south conflict in the Sudan and its
unstable political conditions have added to the
immense problems of a country whose vagaries
of climate hinder agricultural production, while a
rapidly expanding population requires more not
less food. Devastating floods in August 1988
made 2 million homeless.
In June 1989, after months of turmoil, a
military coup overturned the government and
General Omar Hasan Ahmed al-Bashir became
head of state and commander-in-chief at the head
of a Revolutionary Council of National Salvation.
Political parties were dissolved and many politi-
cians and professional people were detained. The
regime was ruthless in dealing with its opponents
and potential enemies. Attempted coups in 1990
and 1991 led to the execution of the army offi-
cers involved, but protests continued. Behind the
army stood the National Islamic Front of funda-
mentalist Muslims led by Hasgan Turabi. Islamic
criminal law, the sharia, was applied again.
Khartoum became filled with some 1.8 million
refugees, possessing practically nothing, and half
a million more were forcibly settled outside the
city. The civil war between north and south con-
tinued. The non-Muslim south, African, Christian
and Animist (a religion which holds that both
living and inanimate objects have souls) was in a
desperate condition with widespread famine
added to the civil war and preventing relief agen-
cies from reaching the starving. The Sudan was
seen as a hotbed of terrorism. Osama bin Laden
organised from there the devastating simultane-
ous car bombing of the US embassies in 1998.
The frontiers have remained porous for terrorists.
But the expulsion of Osama bin Laden who then
went to Afghanistan was an early indication of
change. As the Sudan entered the new millen-
nium Islamist extremism softened. Turabi fell
from grace and was placed under house arrest.
The Bashir regime was trying to lose its pariah
status. The regime after a decade and a half felt
more secure. Oil was discovered and exported and
provided badly needed funds for new technology.
The European Union now increasingly ‘engaged’
the Sudanese regime but US sanctions imposed
in 1997 still remained in place too. The key to
better relations is to bring to an end the war in
the south with its human-rights violations and
loss of life from fighting and starvation. More
than a million people have perished. The Sudan
has known only eleven years of peace in the five
decades that have passed since independence. In
the south the main rebel group, the Sudan
People’s Liberation Army, is faced with the stark
choice of famine and depopulation or an accom-
modation with the north. Foreign pressure and
mediation secured a ceasefire in February 2003
with hopes for a more durable peace later that
year only for a new conflict to break out in the
Darfur region of western Sudan.Libya is the richest country in Africa. In 1951 it
became the first African state to exchange colonial
status for independence. This was not because it
was advanced in any way. During the Second
World War, the Italian colonial territories of
Tripolitania and Cyrenaica were conquered by the
British Eighth Army. Britain’s main concern was to
ensure that the Russians would not secure a
foothold by claiming a share in the trusteeship of
the Italian colonies. So the provinces were com-
bined on independence with French-administered
Fezzan to form Libya, and the head of the most
powerful Cyrenaican family, Emir Mohammed
Idris, whose conservatism could be trusted, was
elevated to become King Idris. It was not an ideal
solution from a Western point of view. Britain and
Italy would have preferred a long period of trustee-
ship, but at the UN the Arabs and their allies were
able to push independence through. Idris fulfilled
Western expectations and permitted the construc-
tion of a huge NATO airbase on the outskirts of
Tripoli. No one dreamt of the wealth the discovery
of oil would bring to the desert kingdom or the
trouble it would later cause the West.
Libya began exporting oil in 1961. By then
Nasser had changed the politics of the Middle