2011 Sudan Civil War will be called "fighting over oil"

War will break out in Sudan by early spring 2011, producing the country’s bloodiest strife yet. Alongside it, Darfur will seem a sideshow. The fuse will be a January 2011 independence referendum, which is certain to lead to secession by the Christian south. The fight will be over oil.

Both sides, the south and the northern Arab government led by Omar al-Bashir, have been arming themselves since standing down from civil war in 2005. Darfur has shown the violence the north can unleash. The south looks ready to stand its ground.

Which ground is hard to tell. The 2005 ceasefire, brokered by the Americans, left the dividing line unmarked and uncertain. Military teams from the two sides now patrol it. What is certain is that the richest oil fields straddle the border area.

The split will rob Sudan of its place as Africa’s largest country. It will also typify the kind of racial-tribal-religious breakup that has plagued the continent since colonial times.

War around the oil fields will be a blow to China and India. Sudan is one of their main petroleum suppliers. China could fall back on its number one African supplier, Angola, but Luanda is a lot farther away from Chinese factories than Port Sudan. Costs will escalate.

So will death and destruction. The civil war that sputtered and flared in Sudan for some 30 years took a million and half lives. This conflict could do worse. Both sides are critically dependent on oil revenues. They make up 98 percent of the south’s income. The north is almost as dependent. Neither the northern government in Khartoum or its counterpart in Juba seem ready to budge on the margins of territory they claim. Instead there are martial speeches and army parades in both capitals.

No larger power is likely to step in this time. While Washington will not wish to see the collapse of the bridges it built five years ago, it has external distractions far bigger than Sudan. In any case, there are conflicting schools of thought in the Obama administration on how Khartoum would best be held to the referendum timetable. The African Union is too feeble and divided. Outside Africa, assorted global crises and the hope that war could bring down President Bashir will keep others from any forceful interference. Recently Bashir’s ruling clique has begun to stall preparations for the vote, blind to the fact that any putting off of the referendum will only stiffen the south’s resolve to fight. (It will be remembered that Bashir, the war crimes arrest warrantee, was invited to Ankara in an unguarded moment a few years ago.)

The war will be a headache not only for China. It will put the country’s southern neighbors, Ethiopia and Uganda, on the spot. Both are predominantly Christian. They will be destabilized and at the same time tempted to send aid to the south, as they’ve done when fighting erupted in the past.

Sudan was destined to come apart from the time the colonial map was drawn. It was a throwing together of opposites. This war may not be the end of the splitting; there are other fracture lines. In the new South Sudan, ancient tribal enmities mixed with visions of oil wealth may cause the fledgling state itself to come apart. The Dinka and the Nuer have raided and massacred each other for generations. Minus the common northern enemy, who’s to say that independence will unite them?

Acquaintance with Omar al-Bashir

This writer’s acquaintance with Bashir had a less than auspicious beginning. It started when the armed guard at the door of my Khartoum hotel room burst in to tell me that my house arrest was over. A jeep was waiting for me downstairs, he said. I picked up my bag and he marched me to the lobby. Already in the jeep outside, between a couple of soldiers, was my boss, the head of UNICEF. In our confinement each of us had picked up signals making it clear that Bashir, a prominent general, had overthrown the government of Prime Minister Sadiq el-Mahdi and proclaimed himself president.

It turned out that the two of us were the first foreigners to meet the new head of state. Bashir was gruff but polite, getting quickly down to business and asking whether all the fuss of our Operation Lifeline Sudan was really worth anything for the country. We knew that he and the most of the northern military had been opposed to our ceasefire and relief efforts from the start. Now he was in a position to shut us down.

But he didn’t. It may have been because we asked him how many children he had. When he answered with the number we said, “No, Mr. President, you have several hundred thousand now; you’ve become the father of all the children in Sudan.” He shifted in his chair as we said that.

Operation Lifeline Sudan managed to bring about a three-month ceasefire in the government’s war with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army in the south. To transport the 110,000 tons of food grains brought in to stave off hunger and disease, the multi-agency operation reopened a derelict north-south railway and cleared the Nile River for barge shipment. I had to stop my negotiation shuttle flights between Khartoum and the SPLA rear base in Ethiopia, but the main job was already done. An estimated 250,000 deaths were averted.

A year later, when heads of state and government from 73 countries gathered at the United Nations in New York for the World Summit for Children, I was asked to escort President Bashir into General Assembly hall. We chatted easily as I took him to his seat.

That was 21 years ago. He has ruled Sudan since then, and was returned to power in an election earlier this year. The bloody record of Darfur, however, means he won’t soon again choose to board a flight to the U.N. in New York, or expect to find Sudan’s seat in the General Assembly waiting for him.