The Sudan Crisis

He who wills the end wills the means thereto. —Immanuel Kant Revulsion has gripped the world over the continuing tragedy in Darfur. Terrible civil wars between Northern and Southern Sudan have been taking place since independence was achieved more than fifty years ago. Nearly 300,000 people have died due to illness, violence, and starvation while…

In 1984, when the Sudan’s civil war was just beginning, I testified before the House Sub-Committee on African Affairs, urging Congress not to see the Sudanese conflict through a Cold War lens. The fighting in the Southern Sudan was a product of internal political grievances, I argued, and not the meddling of Sudan’s enemies-at that…

Darfur is a typical north-east African civil war. Local disputes were exacerbated by the breakdown of local governance and combined with the ambitions of a frustrated provincial elite to fuel an insurgency, which escalated more quickly and bloodily than its proponents ever imagined. The government response was characteristically ham-fisted and ruthless. The result was massacre,…