World Savvy Monitor

Sudan:  Did You Know?

• Sudan is the 10th largest country in the world, and the largest in Africa.
• Sudan is about 1/3 the size of the US, and borders nine other African countries.
• Sudan has a population of 40 million people, making it the 33rd most populous country on the planet.
• Despite a nearly 10% growth rate in its economy annually, and a 291% growth in its oil revenues over the past six years, average annual income per person is only $2,400 (the United States average income per capita is $46,000).   Because wealth is concentrated in very few hands in Sudan, the actual income for many is much, much lower:  less than $1/day.
• Life expectancy in Sudan is 50 years, compared with 78 in the US and up to 83 in some industrialized nations.
• The number of babies in Sudan who die before their first birthday is 87 out of 1000:  this compares with between two and six babies dying similarly in most Western countries, and is a primary indicator of the health of a country.
• Sudan consistently ranks low on all quality of life indicators, coming in at 144 out of 177 on the UN Development Index.  It has a very high incidence of all tropical and infectious diseases and suffers from an extreme lack of water and frequent droughts.
• In addition to its large size and diverse population, lack of good transportation is a key factor keeping Sudan from becoming a more unified country.  In addition to having underdeveloped rail and aviation resources, only 11,900 km of roads are paved in Sudan.  By comparison, the United States has nearly 6.5 million km of paved roads.
• Sudan has been in near constant civil war since it gained independence from Britain and Egypt in the 1950s.
• For much of the last half century, a brutal war raged between the Northern and Southern areas of the country (separate from Darfur which is in the Western part of Sudan).  In this conflict, which officially ended in 2005 and many fear is about to resume, 2.5 million people were killed and 4.6 million driven from their homes and forced to become refugees within Sudan or in neighboring countries.
• Despite the scarcity of resources such as water and arable land, Sudan has an abundance of a different type of resource:  oil.   Located primarily in Southern Sudan, but controlled by the government of Khartoum, these vast untapped and tapped petroleum reserves are mostly locked up in contracts with China.

Darfur:  Did You Know?

• Darfur is one of the most impoverished and neglected areas of Sudan, sharing in neither the agricultural nor oil wealth of other regions.  Its residents are tribes who are either nomadic herders or small farmers, producing usually only enough to barely feed their families.
• Darfur has faced severe drought conditions over the past few decades, which has led to conflict between nomadic Arab tribes and agriculturist non-Arab Black African tribes over water and decent land, and ultimately led to civil war between the tribes in the region.
• The people of the Darfur region have been oppressed by the Government of Sudan, located in Khartoum since the country gained independence.  Resentment over this marginalization ultimately led to the event that officially brought Khartoum into the current civil war:  an attack on a government airfield by Darfur rebels.  The resulting war is currently in its sixth year.
• As of April 2008, the war in Darfur has affected over 4 million people:  between 200,000 and 400,000 have been killed and 2.7 million have been forced to flee their homes and take refuge in camps run by international humanitarian aid organizations.
• Most of those affected by the conflict in Darfur are innocent civilians, many of them women and children.
• The fact that the violence against these civilians has been largely along ethnic lines (Arab versus non-Arab, Black African) and has been carried out, many believe, systematically with support from the Government of Sudan puts the crisis in the realm of genocide, triggering special moral and legal considerations.
• While tragedies were unfolding in Darfur over the past six years, and while the Government of Sudan has increasingly become an international pariah for its role in waging war in Darfur, Khartoum is awash in cash, largely from oil contracts with China.  Sixty percent of Sudanese oil ends up in China to the tune of nearly five billion dollars a year and this comes with other investments and loans from the Chinese government.
• As the war in Darfur rages on, the Government of Sudan enjoys full privileges at the United Nations and other international bodies.
• An enormous humanitarian effort has been underway to help the victims in Darfur.  One billion dollars has been spent over the last three years (60% of it coming from the US), and there are nearly 15,000 humanitarian aid workers from all over the world on the ground.  Despite this, conditions in Darfur and in the refugee camps in neighboring countries continue to deteriorate.

The World Today:  Did You Know?

• Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are consuming the attention and military energy of some of the nations who have the capacity to address the situation in Darfur.
• The trend toward global recession and the declining US economy amidst soaring fuel and food prices mean less money for the humanitarian, military, and diplomatic endeavors needed to solve the crisis in Darfur.
• Tensions between the West and the Muslim world play out in Sudan as well as in other Muslim countries; the US and other contemplate their options in this Muslim country that has great oil reserves in a global economy where oil demand and prices are at record levels.
• Tensions within the West and between Western countries and China also play out in Sudan over economic and political influence in the world.  Each country brings its own agendas to bear on the resolution of this conflict.
• The world needs the crisis in Darfur to be resolved, yet it also needs the government and economy of Sudan to survive; an oil-rich, militarized, failed state with radical Islamic populations in the middle of Africa is a dangerous possibility. Although there are clearly good and evil actors within the conflict, the overall complexity of the situation contains many shades of gray.
• The international community has yet to completely figure out how to address atrocities occurring in a sovereign state, and any peacekeeping efforts in Darfur bear the mantle of previously failed interventions, from the Holocaust to Bosnia to Rwanda.

Next:  Introduction:  Issue Summary