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Civil war ravaged Southern Sudan for over twenty years, leaving devastation, death and destruction in its wake. Along with this damage, however, the war has left great hope among those who survived and who look forward to a bright future for their emerging nation. Hearing the stories of what the Sudanese experienced during the war, was one of the most remarkable parts of our visit.

Sudan's political upheaval is largely a result of a nation that is supposed to be shared by two distinct people groups that could not be more different from each other. The Arab muslims have occupied Northern Sudan since the Mohammedan invasions of the 8th century. Southern Sudan has always remained the territory of black Africans. When the colonial powers of Western Europe mapped and divided the lands of Africa into colonies, they paid little attention to the potential problems that their artificial boundaries could create.

In his acclaimed work The State of Africa, Martin Meredith pointed out that "When marking out the boundaries of their new territories, European negotiators frequently resorted to drawing straight lines on the map, taking little or no account of the myriad of traditional monarchies, chiefdoms and other African societies that existed on the ground... In some case, African societies were rent apart... In other cases, Europe's new colonial territories enclosed hundreds of diverse and independent groups, with no common history, culture, language or religion." (pp. 1-2) Meredith quotes Lord Salisbury of telling an audience in London, "We have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where they were." (p. 2) This is evident in Britain's decision to unite two polar opposite people groups into the single nation of Sudan.

Since Sudan gained its independence in 1956, the government has operated from its predominately Arab-run capital in the North, Khartoum. The trouble is that almost all of Sudan's vast natural resources reside in the South. The Southern Sudanese have long complained that the North has exploited their resources and used the resulting wealth only to develop the North. When the Sudanese government declared Islamic Jihad against the South, it began an aggressive and violent campaign to forcefully Islamicize the people of of Southern Sudan. This decision precipitated Sudan's long and bloody civil war. Eventually the South rose up to defend themselves against government forces.

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