What is the history of Sudan from 1978 to 2005? What started the Second Sudanese Civil War? What role do Islamist fundamentalism and Sharia law play in the war? What is the SBLM and how did the South fight in the war? How did the North fight in the war? What happened during the conflict in Darfur? Who are the lost boys of Sudan and what did they go through during the war? We will answer these questions and men
in today's episode, Sudan & South Sudan 101 Part 2 of 3 Welcome to Wiser World, a podcast for busy people who need a refresher on all things world. Here we explore different regions of the globe, giving you the facts and context you need to think historically about current events. I truly believe that the more we learn about the world, the more we embrace our shared humanity. I'm your host, Alli Roper, thanks for being here.
Ryan Reynolds here from Midmobile. With the price of just about everything going up during inflation, we thought we'd bring our prices down. So to help us, we brought in a reverse auctioneer which is apparently a thing. Midmobile unlimited, premium wireless, heavy to get 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, 20, 20, 20, 20, 20, 20, 20, 15, 15, 15, 15, just 15 bucks a month. So give it a try at midmobile.com slash switch.
$45 up from payment to equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan only, taxes and fees extra, speeds lower above 40 gigabyte, see detail.
I'm back with Part 2 of 3 on Sudan and South Sudan today and it probably goes without saying, but if you haven't listened to Part 1, do it. It lays important groundwork for this episode, gives some information on different tribes and the difference between the north and the south of Sudan, plus a lot of important things you need in order to follow this episode.
I also talk about the nature of researching the Sudan, such as, you know, due to language and literacy barriers, finding a lot of information on Sudan written by Sudanese in English, it's really not the easiest of tasks. So we did our best on these episodes to find information, but some of the deepest nonfiction was written by or co-authored by people from the United States or the UK or journalists or foreign policy makers.
So you'll see that come through in the history here, just want to be totally transparent. And just a reminder that I designed these episodes so that people who know very little to nothing about Sudan can develop a good, basic foundation, feel that confidence. As always, please do independent research from other sources. And if you need help to find some good options, I'll be sharing many of them on my Patreon, which you can sign up for at patreon.com slash wiserworldpodcast.
I share a lot of pictures and maps and videos and articles and books that you can use to learn more about the Sudan's. And for this episode, I include some fantastic memoirs that honestly, I wish everyone would read. Lastly, the history in this episode is very difficult. I do not want to sanitize the horrible history, which includes heinous war crimes, assault, sexual abuse, child abuse, intense violence, other challenging topics. But I also don't want this to be impossibly painful to listen to.
And so I've tried to thread the needle with details, giving what I feel is enough to show the intensity, including, you know, some detail, but hopefully also being respectful and tactful. I recommend giving this a listen before you give it to teenagers. And I do not recommend it at all for children. It's heavy, but we do need to know it. Education, I believe, is the root of being able to create change. You can't change it if you don't know about it.
So take breaks as you need to while you're listening, but I do hope you give this a good thorough listen. Okay, let's go. Let's do part two. In part one, we ended with Sudan becoming independent in early 1956. And right off the bat, it was in an ugly civil war between the northern part of Sudan and the southern part of Sudan. And it wasn't until 1972 that an agreement was made to give a bit more autonomy, a bit more leech to the southern part of Sudan.
But even then, neither side was fully okay with what was agreed agreed upon. And tragically, Sudan was back in a civil war by 1983. This is called the second Sudanese civil war. And it's probably the most well known war in Sudan because it lasted until 2005. That's what 22 years. It counts as one of the longest lasting civil wars in the history of the world. And that's what we're going to talk about in this episode.
It is believed that well over two million people died during this war and that there are far more who were displaced and lived as refugees. So how did this happen? In the mid 1970s, the southern part of Sudan was functioning more or less as a semi-autonomous region, meaning that it had some governing ability over itself, though under the umbrella of the central government of Cartoum in the north.
It seems as though two major things sent Sudan back into violence into the civil war. And the first was that the US oil giant Chevron discovered oil in Sudan in the late 1970s. This is right where we left off in part one. Many companies had tried to find oil in Sudan since the late 1950s, but with no success.
So finally, the government of Sudan grants Chevron permission to explore further into the south and oil was found in the late 70s, early 80s, right near the border between the north and the south. In largely areas that were settled by Dinka and Newer communities, these are southern Sudanese people who were rivals. Oh boy. Okay. This is not going to go well.
Not only do we have conflicts between the north and the south in terms of religion and politics and business, but now we have oil found in tribal regions of southern Sudan and these tribes don't generally get along. The rich amount of oil was straight up intoxicating for the Sudanese government and international businessmen who wanted in on it, because not only could it lead to individual wealth, but there was also hope that it could lift Sudan out of its economic situation, which was dire.
Here we have a country whose people and economy had been battered by a civil war for 17 years prior. Most people in Sudan both in the north and the south are living off of substance farming or livestock hurting. The vast majority of people are illiterate, meaning they cannot read or write, particularly in the south, and people are living in villages based around community life and traditions that have been in place for hundreds of years.
Living hand-to-mouth basically, battling clean water, malnutrition every day, suddenly oil is found in their country. I like to think of this as a person living on the streets suddenly winning the lottery. It was a massive deal. Suddenly Sudan had a seat at the international table due to oil, and even former US President George H.W. Bush went out to introduce the Sudanese to various American oil companies.
Side note, for some time Sudan had been supported by the Soviet Union, but during this particular time it had switched and had a decent relationship with the United States. Anyway, as Peter Martell writes, quote, the lion's share of oil reserves was in the south, but an emboldened cartoon wanted to make sure it controlled all of the promised petrodollars. So, cartoon re-drew borders of the key oil zones to prize it away from the south semi-autonomous rule.
This was denied, they didn't do it, but it did tip off the southerners to how the north really felt about this all, and obviously they're re-drying borders to try to get more oil into their part. That's going to cause a lot of civil unrest, with groups in the south particularly uniting around principles of wanting less influence from cartoon. The second thing that was happening around the same time was northern Sudanese politics, and it had to do with religion.
You'll remember from part one that the north was primarily Muslim, meaning the majority of people believed in the religion of Islam. And it was a pretty moderate brand of Islam at the time, but then in the early 1980s, a new brand of political Islam had arrived from Egypt in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood. This was a religious, political, and social movement first launched in the late 1920s, and it had kind of a renaissance.
It was a brand of Islam that believed in a more intense interpretation of Islam, some might call it more extreme, and even though President Nimmeri was friendly with the United States at the time, Nimmeri was the President of Sudan. The Brotherhood fundamentalists were pressuring him to create a more strongly Islamic Sudan, and they did not like southern autonomy.
One member of the Brotherhood, Hassan Terabi, was very influential in pressuring President Nimmeri to dissolve the regional southern government, which caused more discontent. Unfortunately, the discovery of oil and this political religious shift from the Muslim Brotherhood came at a time of extreme inequality in Sudan.
The concentration of power and resources in the hands of a small and privileged Arab class in the center came at the expense of the country's diverse and marginalized regional peripheries, most recognizable in the South, but also in the Nuba mountains, Darfur, the East, and beyond. This structural flaw would drive decades of instability, and the Arab and Islamic character of the dominant elite would infuse Sudan's conflicts with complicated notions of power and identity.
Sturrain racism, complex social hierarchies, ethnic and linguistic differences, a diverse and formidable geography, competing livelihoods, and large-scale displacement from the First of a War, and Sudan's post-independence governments were never strong enough to project state authority on a national scale. After all, Sudan was huge, equal to all of the United States territory, East of the Mississippi River, end of quote. That was Zach Burton, by the way.
As the central government in cartoon imposed more of an Arab and Islamic identity on the people, many of those who did not want this, particularly Christian and tribal traditions in the South, who still felt they hadn't received near as much autonomy as they'd hoped, were getting more and more agitated. And in September 1983, President and Mary declared Sudan an Islamic republic. This is the spark of the war, so this is big time important.
He wanted to consolidate his power and get support from various Islamic factions throughout the country. Sharia law was introduced as the law of the land. If you haven't listened to Iran 101, I talk a lot about Sharia law there, but here's a brief overview of how Sharia law affected the people of Sudan. For starters, it made for a complete legal system overhaul to line up with a particular type of Islamic law. So financial transactions, criminal justice, personal status laws all affected.
Now if a person stole, a limb could be amputated. Drinking alcohol meant they could be publicly whipped. Waring specific clothing like head coverings for the women became mandatory. Rules about social interactions between men and women changed, becoming much more restrictive. Additionally, female genital mutilation became much more accepted and even required in some communities under certain clerics. So daily life was absolutely affected for every person in Sudan.
Enforcing Sharia law poured gasoline on the already hot tensions between the north and the south, particularly because the south was largely non-Muslim, practicing primarily Christianity and animist religions. It also caused issues from majority versus minority relations. What if you weren't Muslim? Did these new rules apply to you?
The answer is yes. For example, an Islamic banking system was created that affected the livelihoods of people who worked in what was seen as un-Islamic industries like alcohol sales, alcohol is forbidden in Islam. So it affected not just the north and the south but also a majority versus minority issue and it wrecked political havoc across Sudan. So the situation is chaotic to say the least.
Within the National Sudanese Army, there were southerners and a group of southern commanders decided to defect and crossed the border into Ethiopia which at the time was friends with the Soviet Union. And a 39-year-old officer, so pretty young, named John Gareng, took this group of defectors or rebels and formed the Sudan People's Liberation Movement, or SPLM.
Sudan People's Liberation Movement. And interestingly enough, John Gareng was trained by the Israeli Masad, that's the intelligence community, in the First of a War in Sudan, and was educated in the United States at Iowa State University. So very interesting background. And this SPLM movement was very unique because Gareng was different in his beliefs because he wasn't demanding independence for the south, at least here at the beginning, which was what most of the First of a War had been about.
Instead, he claimed to want a, quote, free, democratic, and inclusive national polity. Most southern dissidents preferred simply to opt out of Sudan, but Gareng was intent on liberating the entire Sudanese state and reforming the structural inequality at its center.
Many believed that he did this to appeal to other African leaders who could give him extra money and resources like Ethiopia or Libya. But either way, this twist, this movement that was much more geared toward marginalized populations, both in the North and the South, was very relatable. And over time, the movement changed to become more focused on southern autonomy, but at first, these were his claims.
And also at the beginning, he had pretty strong Marxist-Leninist leanings in his political ideas. In time, the SPLM, again, that's led by Southerner John Gareng, it turned into the SPLA, which stands for Sudan People's Liberation Army. In other words, the movement made an army. So I think for the purposes of this episode, it's safe to just use one term since they're pretty much interchangeable.
I'm just going to call the Southern Rebel Group, the SPLM. The SPLM engaged in guerrilla warfare, like hit and run tactics on government forces. They sabotaged roads and other infrastructure, also hit battles over key towns and resources. They took advantage of that really inhospitable terrain of the South, which you'll remember from Part 1 floods for much of the year and is the largest wetlands in Africa.
So they took that to, they used that to their advantage. They also received help from neighboring countries, as well as international allies. They received arms, training, and sanctuary. And to be honest, this outside assistance is really the key way that they stayed going for as long as they did. The Sudanese government in the North, again, was run by northern Muslim elites, and they responded to the SPLM guerrilla warfare with large-scale offensives, usually with far superior firepower.
Remember the North was more developed. They also had aircraft, and they would drop heavy artillery on villages and centers where the SPLM, again, SPLM is the Southern Rebel Group, where they were centralized. Most, if not all of these airplanes, were old Soviet planes. And the North also had local militias, called the PDF, the popular defense forces that fought against the SPLA. They also used scorched earth campaigns, which means basically burn everything to the ground.
So quickly, massive groups of southerners began fleeing to neighboring countries for relief. Hundreds and thousands of refugees began pouring into the borders of primarily Ethiopia and Kenya, a few other countries too, but primarily those. The North would often block humanitarian aid to these areas. And because the South wasn't fully unified, remember there was those rival groups.
There was the SPLM, which kind of unified everyone at this time, but there also were divisions and rivalries. And so the North really liked to exploit this to their advantage. This episode is brought to you by Ring. From package deliveries to lonely pets, Ring cameras and doorbells make it easy to check in from anywhere, right from your phone. Either with Ring, learn more at ring.com.
Okay, now that I've explained the tactics of both sides, I'm going to lay a general timeline of the Second Sudanese Civil War out for you and share more of what this looks like for innocent civilians, especially southerners, kind of along the way I'm going to sprinkle it along the way.
To start off the war officially began in 1983 really heated up around 1987 was very lethal into the 1990s and through them and then cooled off in 2005. It wasn't until 2011, however, that the South fully succeeded from the North. So let's go to the beginning. 1983 John Gray and his friends form the SPLM fighting officially begins in the North, political chaos was going on.
In 1985, President Numeri was overthrown in a coup backed by a couple of different Islamist groups. And the new government wanted to backtrack on Sudan becoming an Islamic state. However, Sharia law was not suspended and some attempts were made to kind of reconcile with the South. There were even some peace negotiations with John Gray. But the fighting between the North intensified in the years of 1987 and 1988 largely because the national economy was deteriorating.
And when the price of basic goods is so high that there are riots everywhere, things start to get out of control. So let's stop here and talk about what this all looked like on the ground in the South. What the violence looked like, what the riots looked like, how this affected the southerners, that's what I'm going to focus on. The scorched earth campaigns from Northern Arab militiamen created a massive displacement crisis for southerners.
Most southerners lived in small, mudded huts with thatched grass roofs and worked in cattle driving. Huge cattle by the way. If you haven't looked up cattle of South Sudan, it's definitely worth a Google search. And also they planted some fields usually of sorghum and maize. The girls usually stayed at home only leaving to fetch water or firewood. And the boys had duties like leading cows to good pasture, goats sheep, calves, decrees and small game hunting.
The Dinka and Nuehre and other southern tribes were somewhat used to northern tribes coming into their lands on their fast horses and stealing cattle prior to the war. They've been doing this for many years and mostly used spears. But when the war started up, these groups were now given weaponry by the Northern Army and were encouraged by the Northern Army to ruck havoc on southern communities. As one Dinka man wrote, quote,
Our elders told us that Islam kept spreading southward until it met the largest tribes, the Dinka and the Nuehre, the tallest and the blackest people in Africa. They resisted this new religion because Islam was complicated and as cattle keepers, we didn't have time to be meditating with the Quran five times a day. Later the discussions among the adults grew angry, especially when they talked of the government.
They said the Northern government wanted Islam to spread throughout Sudan because the Northern land was all desert sand and they were jealous of the Dinka and Nuehre territory between the blue and white Nile rivers, which was the most fertile in all of Sudan. Very quickly these scorched earth campaigns of the north began happening in Dinka land and word was spreading of entire villages being burned to the ground.
As one boy wrote, quote, they quickly surrounded the village on horseback and captured many civilians and shot dead those who tried to run away. The captives were separated into two groups. The women and children were locked inside the huts and burned to death. The men were tied up, led to the riverside, killed with a machete and dropped into the river.
The reason for this is that the SPLM troops were living among the people. The government troops were attacking our village because we looked the same as the SPLM and spoke the same language. They were in the same skin as us. Some nights we saw fires on the horizon and in the mornings I smelled smoke. It was true that the SPLM were living among them and often looted and stole things from their own villages. Most of the village people didn't even know what artillery organs were.
They didn't own guns, only spears. It wasn't a fair fight and children certainly didn't know what airplanes were. As one woman told her child, quote, they want to pour fire on us from the sky. Plains began dropping bombs on the cities and schoolhouses and any children who had been lucky enough to go to school. We're not able to go to school after that. In communities that hadn't been hit by the North, families began preparing their children for the inevitable. As one Dinka boy wrote, quote,
The next day my father gathered all of us together. Listen carefully, he said, you must be prepared. The government troops are Arabs and call themselves Muslims. The Arabs wear a long white dress with a large hanker chiff tied on their heads and prey by kneeling and smelling the ground every day. They speak a strange language that we cannot understand, but some speak Dinka. They call us slaves or infidels and want to kill us for not circumcising our girls or becoming Muslims like them.
If our villages attacked, don't panic or make any noise. Just leave the house and hide somewhere safe. Those men's guns shoot fire embers that search far and kill even into hiding places. If there is shooting or unusual roaring noises, remain in hiding and stay quiet there as long as you can hear that sound. Stay away from the house. End of quote.
Most southern villages were in grasslands with some forests and the grass in the bush, as they call it, was long, high elephant grass. When the villages were raided, the women and girls were at home and small children were at home. And were often either raped and then killed or raped and then burned alive in their huts or they were sold into slavery in northern Sudan.
The boys, however, were often tending herds of cattle and goats in the fields like we talked about right. And when they heard the first gunshots or bombs dropped, they would run into this tall elephant grass, this tall bush, and they would hide. And these boys who ranged from as young as four to five years old to about 15 were most often ethnically Dinka or Nguyen.
There were other tribes as well, but these boys became lost. Hence why they are now called the lost boys, capital L, capital B, lost boys. They had no parents and so they began walking in any direction until they could find a group of adults or SPLM soldiers or anyone who could point them in the direction that they should go and they began walking.
Sometimes in groups with others, sometimes alone in groups of boys, it is believed that an estimated 20,000 young boys from southern Sudan crossed thousands of miles of land on foot, usually with no footwear, to refugee camps in either Ethiopia or Kenya. This trek was through lion and crocodile country, they little to no food to eat. Their food was most often boiled grass and some even resorted to eating mud to stave off the thirst and starvation.
Half of them died before ever reaching the refugee camps and many were conscripted against their will to work as laborers for other tribes or from military communities. Some of the older boys were conscripted to be child soldiers. The exploitation of children, it just so difficult to talk about. It is estimated that between 4 to 5 million people were displaced during this war and were seeking refuge in neighboring states and many fellow displaced refugee adults helped these children.
But resources were scarce and they were often mistreated and abused or left behind seen as a burden to slow moving and not to mention there were issues with lions and hyenas taking them in the night while they slept. No access to medicine, no access to new clothing and unsenitary water. Many could not shower or bathe for months had armies of lice all over them. In researching this episode, we read five books written by lost boys. I do share about them on my Patreon, you can also google them.
Honestly, they changed my perspective on life immensely. I don't think I'll ever see the world the same way after reading a memoir where I lost boy. I hope you get to read one. It's very painful but I believe it's so necessary. In the middle of all of this, a catastrophic drought led to an unprecedented famine in parts of the South.
Part of this was because of low average rainy seasons but it also was man-made due to conflict in the area. When people are fling for their lives, they aren't exactly growing their own food. This causes massive food shortages. At the time, it was considered the worst famine in modern African history.
Even worse than Ethiopia, which by that time was a household name in the United States and Europe for its hunger crisis. Pictures of skeletal, emaciated children made their way to news outlets all over the world. The international community eventually established Operation Lifeline Sudan in 1989 and it collaborated with the UN and humanitarian agencies to give assistance and food. It lasted more than 16 years but hundreds of thousands died of hunger and effects of this war.
In June 1989, things went from bad to worse in Sudan as there was another government change and a group of military officers took over the government in another coup. General Omar Hassan Alba Sheer takes over as president, Chief of State, Primary Minister and Chief of the Armed Forces. He would stay in that position until 2019. It was clear that even though he was the head of an offenderist, Islamist leader named Hassan Terabi, was masterminding the whole coup behind the scenes.
Western journalists have given Terabi the name the Pope of Terror, largely due to his Islamist policies that led to recruiting many jihadi military forces to infiltrate South Sudan's culture. He had a relationship with Osama bin Laden and it is likely that bin Laden actually ran some of these training camps in Sudan.
Terabi once said, quote, fighting has become a way of life for the Sudanese is unfortunate but when you have a dictatorship, it means you have a monopoly over power and over wealth. So what do you expect? Terabi is not well loved by the southerners and definitely not loved by the West. The military government installed by the coup was called the RCC, the Revolutionary Command Council and they immediately banned trade unions and political parties and any other non-religious institutions.
There were massive purges of personnel from the army, the police and other civil administration to reshape the government to be a more Islamist. I hope this is ringing bells if you've been listening to the podcast for a while. China, Russia, North Korea, many, many more countries all had major purges of military personnel, army personnel, political personnel.
And that is something to watch out for, right? This is authoritarianism. They started going after the southern rebels even harder breaking down any chance of a ceasefire that any peacemakers had tried to negotiate. And in 1991, they enacted a new legal code called the Criminal Act of 1991. It was again based on Sharia law and included even harsher punishments for all kinds of crimes.
There were dress codes, segregation of sexes, public flogging for jinking alcohol, amputations for thievery, stoning for adultery. These were the mainstream punishments. Armed robbers were also executed by crucifixion and some SPLM prisoners also received crucifixion. As Martell writes, Peter Martell writes, quote, Bashir appeared at rallies with a Quran in one hand and an AK-47 rifle in the other. Islamic law was imposed and there were forced conversions.
End of quote. The goal again was to create an Islamic state and require all people despite a very diverse population to comply through extreme violence. Again, it became a hardliner regime that ruled with an iron fist and the United States and other western nations didn't like that for obvious reasons. This deepened the conflict between the North and the South even more.
And this penal code actually remains intact today, though it has been amended multiple times. The last major amendments were in 2020. Back to the war, the 1990s is marked by intense violence, retaliation upon retaliation from one side to the next. Throughout this time, armed forces, militant groups, backed by the North, spread chaos throughout the South by attacking and raiding villages.
Southern Sudan becomes a lawless place. Meanwhile, the Southern SPLM waged war to the North through guerrilla tactics, again targeting government buildings, oil companies, and hit and run methods. Since cartoon had just had a coup and was in political trouble, this worked for the South in many senses, but waves of Arab militiamen hit back. And over time, the war became more and more inhumane. It didn't start out humane, but it just became worse and worse.
Arab men were encouraged to become martyrs for the Islamic State, and civilians were subjected to all of this and many lost their lives from violence, displacement, disease, or starvation. American diplomat Zach Wurtren wrote, quote,
Though the war had a prevailing North South character, as well as strong religious currents, the off-sighted characterization of Arab Muslim North against African and Christian South didn't quite do it justice. Sothers fought on both sides of the war, as did Muslims and Africans and Arabs. Much of the most intense fighting took place in Borderlands, which were not technically part of the South, but were home nonetheless to huge and influential SPLM constituencies.
Intent on keeping the war far away from cartoon, the government employed Arab proxy militias on the front lines who terrorized killed, abducted, and sold women and children into slavery. The regime exploited local dynamics and resource interests, and pitted southern militias against each other in a campaign of divide and rule. I have that with so well put.
When we are talking about slavery of women and children, it's important to talk about how families were separated, and sometimes their children were forced to convert to Islam. They were required to take on Arabic names, and some even had to go through indoctrination camps. In our research, we actually learned about a woman named the Baroness Caroline Cox of Queen'sbury. I want to tell a little bit about her, because we found her story fascinating and very thought provoking.
Cox was an Anglican Christian woman, so from Great Britain, who learned of the slave trade going on during the war, and decided she was going to do something about it. She believed that there is real evil in the world, and slavery was one of the ways that is shown, and she became an active abolitionist to set the slaves free.
She actually used her wealth and fund raised extensively to buy slaves and set them free, going into some of the worst regions of the war to do her work, naturally doing this created some issues and some criticism because it created slave demand. So she had to pivot and find other ways to do her work. And though the exact number is unknown, she is said to have freed tens of thousands of slaves, mostly women and children, through her work. We thought that was encouraging if complicated.
Let's go back to the history. We are now in the early 1990s. The war is barbaric in nature. The lost boys are either trekking across the country or in refugee camps and mostly Kenya and Ethiopia, displacement rampant. The world at large is changing at this point too. The USSR just fell, which means the global order is shifting. And in 1991, the Ethiopian government, which had been supporting the SPLM, was overthrown by its own guerrilla fighters who did not support the SPLM.
So they forced all of the South Sudanese refugees that were an Ethiopian refugee camps to leave. This was a huge win from the North's perspective because the SPLM lost its crucial bases in Ethiopia because of this regime change. It was a massive blow to the SPLM and it also affected the refugees. For example, there was one refugee camp in Ethiopia called Hilo, GILO, which had thousands of refugees, most of them children, many of them, the lost boys.
And one day the Ethiopians tell them that they have to evacuate the refugee camp within a week. But the refugees don't know where to go. As one boy wrote, quote, leopards were chasing us into the jaws of the lion. End of quote. They trudged back to the border of Sudan and prepared camp on the Ethiopian side of the water, getting eaten by mosquitoes. And some SPLM soldiers came telling them that Ethiopian soldiers were coming, many of them women warriors.
And the SPLM soldiers told them you have to cross the Hilo river right now. So they started off in canoes, taking groups as quickly as they could. But it's a big river and there were thousands of children. And those who were still on the Ethiopian side were attacked. They were shot at.
And then women and children began pouring into the river to cross. And one of the lost boys Benson Dang wrote, quote, thousands of people flowed into the river and disappeared like water poured into the sand of Sahara. Though through managed by the help of God to swim across, dared not run up the bank or they would get a bullet through them.
And to wait in the reeds among the crocodiles that had been awakened by the blood in the water, one woman crossed on the backs of bodies that had accumulated in the water. She walked ashore without touching the water. All of you lie down and crawl ordered our teachers. Without hesitation, we touched the ground with our hands and knees and crawled like that booms down a grass concealed road into the bushes. A deafening noise overhead was followed by an explosion right in front of us.
My heart almost jumped out of my chest. I couldn't breathe. The women and children behind me were crying. I was confused not knowing what to do between crawling and crying. The Ethiopians kept shooting after us even when we were a long distance from the river. We listened for its terrible roar, but thank God they didn't have the Russian warplane Antonov or we would have been killed for sure.
When the people who survived the crossing finally reached us, they said that more than 2,000 people had been shot, drowned or eaten by crocodiles. It was one of the darkest days for southern Sudanese black souls.
End of quote. No one knows exactly how many people died from the violence at the Hila River, but it very much affected the lost boys because those who did survive it eventually ended up getting into the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, where they finally received some international attention. I'll talk about that in a few minutes. But the Ethiopian situation of them switching sides against the SPLM and now supporting Cartoum in the North also exacerbated a problem that was going on within the SPLM.
There was major discontent with John Grain and within his top leadership, the leadership was fracturing. And in 1991 it all came to a head and this plays into part three enormously. So I'm going to explain it very briefly. John Grain was a complicated figure.
He spoke of peace and development and anti-slavery and equality of religion to anyone who would hear him. So he gained significant support from American southern Christian groups actually, as well as international aid groups, Western governments. But over time John Grain grew in power and as a result became quote infamous for his authoritarian leadership style and he ordered the torture and execution of several dissenting SBA commanders end of quote.
Yikes, right. What I gained from many hours of reading about Grain was that he did plenty of terrible things, but he also gained a lot of support from people because Cartoum's attacks were seen as worse. And over time some of the members of the SPLM began to conspire against him, Riaq Machar, who was ethnically a new air and Lamaqol, who was ethnically a shilok, attempted a coup against Grain.
Grain was Dinka. So there were ethnic undertones here, but there also were political undertones as well. They disagreed with Grain's way and also aspired to leadership themselves. However, the coup failed and in 1991 the SPLM split into different factions. So these dissidents kind of formed their own factions and started fighting against each other, especially between the ethnic Dinka and new air.
So no more was there even kind of semi unified group to stand behind, which meant more and more lawlessness. Quote more southerners ultimately died fighting against one another than they did fighting against northern forces. South on South violence was particularly devastating for civilians as fighters prayed on local populations used food as a weapon of war and targeted villages on the basis of ethnicity.
For one example, one of these separate groups carried out something called the Bohr massacre, which killed an estimated 2000 Dinka civilians, some say the number could be as high as 10,000. So Riaq Machar, remember he's one of the men who tried to take Grain out in a coup, but he failed. He recruited new air youth into a militia called the White Army.
Now the White Army had historically been kind of an informal community protection and the new air had used for generations to kind of protect their families and cattle. But Riaq equipped these young new air with weapons and sent them to a town called Bohr. Bohr was a Dinka town that sided with Grain.
So this is southerner against southerner here and they were ruthless in both torture and murder. They kidnapped any fighting age men and women and killed everyone else. They even went back to check for survivors and killed them. It was a brutal massacre and truly played right into cartoons hands because then it created a series of revenge attacks between the Dinka and the new air and tens of thousands of more southerners were displaced from it.
As Peter Martell wrote, quote, journalist wrote that it was a war of medieval brutality. It was not. It was a war of medieval brutality fought with the modern efficiency of machine guns and rocket propelled grenades. End of quote. Let's pause here and go back to the North for a minute and just talk politics briefly. The government of Sudan supported Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War in 1990, which put them on the blacklist in the eyes of the United States.
But then the US wanted to isolate Sudan from any foreign interest and called it a rogue state. It began publicizing Sudan's human rights abuses and encouraged other countries to not support what was going on there. In 1992, the Northern forces took advantage of the SPLM in fighting and they actually captured the headquarters of the SPLM and the USA declared Sudan on the list of state sponsors of terrorism in 1993.
In 1993, some of those southern rebel factions created a coalition together and they tried to work together to create peace agreements with other nearby countries didn't make much headway. And in 1995, China began involved in getting involved in Sudan's oil. China has always wanted to secure oil resources especially in Africa.
The government history was especially important because its economy was growing very, very quickly. Because western countries had been encouraged not to invest in Sudan's oil, China filled in that gap. And this was a significant investment into Sudan's oil sector allowing for development in oil fields and pipelines and refineries, which was pretty much its entire economy. Sudan was not exporting oil yet.
This was very important. Critics argued that China's investment helped to sustain the Sudanese government during the Civil War and that it turned a blind eye to human rights abuses and the conflict's impact on civilians. So China received some major criticism for this. Also, in 1995, those different opposition groups in the North met with parts in the South to create sort of an anti-cartoon group.
And this means that fighting moved further up into the North and also meant that Eritrea and Ethiopia and Uganda also gave military help to the SPLM. But again, the Reborder conflicts in those countries as well and so nothing really took hold in terms of peace. Then in 1997, Rik Machar and other factions that had gone against Gareng signed an agreement with the North calling for Southern autonomy and kind of created an umbrella force that allowed many of these rebel factions to work together.
So some of the leaders actually moved to Cartoon to take on some marginal roles in the central government. Gareng's SPLM saw them as traitors for this, made no such agreements. But Rik Machar's decision to go to Cartoon leaves a lasting impact on his legacy in future years to come, which we talk about in Part 3.
Ultimately, it's all a hot mess in the middle of all of this, an oil pipeline from Southern oil fields through Cartoon to the Red Sea is finally finished, which means that in 1999, Sudan can start exporting oil. Hey there, I'm Dylan Lewis, one of the hosts of Motley Pull Money. Each weekday on Motley Pull Money, we talk through the business news you need to know and the stories moving stocks on Wall Street.
On weekends, we dive into the industry shaping tomorrow and host the experts, authors, and executives that understand them. Tune in for insights, a long-term perspective on investing, and of course stock ideas, plenty of them. To quote a listener, it pays to listen. Check us out and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Wanna learn how you can make smarter decisions with your money? Well, I've got the podcast for you. I'm Sean Piles and I host Nerdwallets Smart Money Podcast.
On our show, we help listeners like you make the most of your finances. I sit down with Nerdwallets' team of nerds, personal finance experts in credit cards, banking, investing, and more. We answer your real-world money questions and break down the latest personal finance news. The nerds will give you the clarity you need by cutting through the clutter and misinformation in today's world of personal finance.
We don't promote get rich quick schemes or hype unrealistic side hustles. Instead, we offer practical knowledge that you can apply in your everyday life. You'll learn about strategies to help you build your wealth, invest wisely, shop for financial products, and plan for major life events. And you'll walk away with the confidence you need to ensure that your money is always working as hard as you are.
So turn to the nerds to answer your real-world money questions and get insights that can help you make the smartest financial decisions for your life. Listen to Nerdwallets Smart Money Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. In 1998, the plight of the lost boys who were now largely in Kenyan refugee camps became more publicized. The war had begun 15 years earlier in 1983. So many had lived in these refugee camps for most of their teenagerhood and were now adults.
Benson Deng wrote about his time in the camp this way. Quote, I had thought people always felt sorry for miserable homeless people, but the Kenyan officers felt proud when they saw us being homeless in their country. In the meantime, they were depending on us, using refugee items and food for themselves. There was a saying in Kenya, quote, if a refugee is in your country and you do not get rich, you will never ever get rich in your lifetime.
The Kenyan officers had to build a social center where they could go to rest. Sometimes they would make some boys clean the place so their people could use it as shelter from the hot sun. When it was ready, all of the officer women and men came and sat in the shade and drank a lot of sodas. The hungry boys who worked on the place all day had only their saliva to swallow.
When you went to the hospital, there was always an inadequate supply of medicine. Very powerful medicines were being donated from all over the world. But when they came to the camp, they disappeared from the hospital. Friends of mine working in the hospital saw the medicine come and then go. When they were sick and went to the hospital, we were told the medicines were not available. And if we went to the market, the medicines were there. And they were very expensive and we couldn't afford them.
We survived in Kakuama because we learned to share. We shared food, chores, and games. If a friend wanted to build his house, we collected other friends and we did it all together. Sometimes there were good men who came to work in Kakuama. One old man at 58 years was kind to us boys. He even sent some boys to boarding school with the money he had made working there in the camp. When he was caught doing that, he was dismissed.
A good priest named Benson came to Kakuama and baptized me. He brought medicine to treat people and he'd visit the sick in the hospital. If someone was seriously ill, he'd even pay to transfer that person to Nairobi. But when it was found out he was doing that, he was transferred to another place. Any visitor who came to the camp could only go around the community accompanied by three officers. When they came to visit our house, one officer would arrive first and instruct us.
There is a visitor, so please keep quiet and we will explain everything to him. They didn't want us to speak. If the visitor asked about something, they were ready with an answer to make themselves look good. A lot of people were trying to get out of Kakuama to go to Uganda, South Africa, anywhere in the world. But the police were very aggressive and you had to pay 1000 shillings to go to another location.
And where could we get the money? I spent weeks growing handfuls of okra to sell for five shillings. A lot of people were stuck in the camp. I did so much thinking when I was in Kenya. At first I was thinking about going to any country that would receive me so I could compete for my own survival. I didn't want rations that people always insulted me for. What they called us was very bad. That's why I hated Kakuama. It convinced me that there was no country where I could be free.
I felt hopeless end of quote. We can see here from this long quote but also really important that the refugee camps and their management of resources were often corrupt. In 1998 the process for lost boys to go to America began the United States of America. It was an incredibly difficult process. There was a lot of corruption with the refugee official camp officials who didn't want the children to go.
Files went missing all the time. If a boy usually a young man or older teenager by now was chosen to come to the United States, the difference in culture was stark for them. Most of these boys are now in their early 40s as I record this. And about 3,800 lost boys of Sudan were eventually resettled in the United States.
In many of the memoirs we read, the lost boys would write about their first flight to the United States. Most had never been on a plane and they did not realize that in flight food was free. And so they'd refuse it because they didn't think they could pay for it. Many talked about how they struggled to comprehend having more food than they could eat or having a large room in their new foster homes in the United States.
Going to the bathroom indoors was particularly strange for most of them. Many struggled to figure out how water temperature worked. They'd never seen that before. Needless to say that the adjustment to the American way of life was better for some than others. Lots of new things to learn. Unfortunately sometimes the ignorance to the culture put them in vulnerable positions. But many did get out of these camps this way.
If we go back to Sudan, we're at 2000, the year 2000 now and we've got Libya and Egypt getting involved trying to establish an interim government for Sudan, new elections and reform. The South objects to all of this because there's no self determination for them and all of that. And so in 2020 it takes till 2002 to provide any framework for peace talks that grant the South any right to self determination.
They spend another three years trying to figure out what that would look like in the middle of all of this in 2003 another conflict arises in the western region of Sudan called Darfur. I'm not going to go into it in this episode because I think a cursory paragraph or two is not going to cut it. So I'm going to make a complete episode on Darfur that I will publish very soon.
What you need to know for now is that a massive conflict was happening in the western part of Sudan that's going to last a very long time. Finally in 2005, this second Sudanese civil war officially ended in what's called the comprehensive peace agreement. It was signed by the SPLM and the government of Sudan and it laid out plans for a ceasefire, sharing oil revenues, demobilizing armed forces, among other things.
It was a huge feat to pull this off and a massive relief to all involved. But the biggest part of the agreement was that it basically said that in six years from then, so that's 2011, southern Sudanese people could vote on whether to become their own nation. In July of 2005, so just a few months after this signing, John Gerang died in a helicopter crash coming back from Sudan to Sudan from Uganda.
People rioted his wife who was very political claimed it was an assassination. The US determined it was an accident and also that the Ugandan helicopter pilots were under trained. We will never know. He never got to see the independence that he fought for and the leadership of the SPLM changed right after this comprehensive peace agreement was signed.
This is a big deal and we will talk about that in part three. A period of six years, often called the interim years, occurred where South Sudan began kind of setting the stage to become their own nation and gain independence from North Sudan. So we're going to stop there. Holy cow, that was a lot. Let's let's refresh. Let's start with oil being discovered late 1970s, largely discovered in borderlands between the north and southern parts of Sudan.
Then in the early 1980s, a more fundamentalist Islamic mindset takes hold in North in 1983. Sudan is declared an Islamic Republic. A complete overhaul of the legal system towards Sharia law results in a lot of tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims, Arabs and non-Arabs in a very diverse country. John Gerang and a group of soldiers create the SPLM, the Sudanese people liberation movement, and the army goes with it becoming the SPLA, A for army.
The conflicts between the two, the north and the southern part, start the second Sudanese civil war in 1983, a last until 2005. During the years, oil begins being exported from Sudan. There's political chaos in cartoonism as there's regime change. Different attempts for peace are made but fail.
The southerners flee for their lives, creating a massive humanitarian crisis leading many to Ethiopia and Kenya for refuge. Among these are the 20,000 lost boys who were told to flee into the fields when the north attacked their villages in those scorched earth campaigns.
It ended up homeless orphans. Obviously, hundreds of thousands of thousands of other refugees were part of this as well, but I mainly focus here on the lost boys. In 2003, violence erupted in the western part of Sudan called Darfur. This would lead to another refugee crisis we'll talk about later.
Because South Sudan was in such bad shape, it made the north look more stable, but it really wasn't. Both sides were not thriving. Finally, in 2005, an agreement was made to end the war and South Sudan started working toward the process of becoming independent for the next six years. As Judy Bernstein writes, quote, 2 million dead, 5 million displaced are at risk, more casualties than Angola, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Liberia, the Persian Gulf, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and Rwanda combined.
It is considered by most historians to be the longest civil war in Africa and it definitely is one of the most painful. There are so many things that we can take into our daily lives from what we just learned, but I'm going to narrow my takeaway down to just one. And Judy Bernstein said, quote, race, religion, and riches, the same things people always kill each other over.
Now this quote is very discouraging, right? But I also think it can be a great litmus test for us to see how we are doing because we can't control what happened in Sudan back then and we unfortunately can't go back and change it, but we can create lives and teach our children to create lives that promote peace and shared humanity.
And none of those things that she mentioned, you know, race, religion, riches, and in and of themselves, none of those things are bad. They all have added enormous value to civilizations and can do so much good. We see from this war that both Muslims and Christians were capable of enormous violence, right? Despite the fact that violence is not taught in the mainstream doctrine of either.
An innocent woman and children and men who wanted nothing to do with politics, or in this case, the politicizing of the Muslim Brotherhoods, particularly intense brand of Islam, right? People who wanted nothing to do with that. You know, they are always caught in the crossfires and sometimes ostracized for conflicts that they wanted no part of and are actually victims of.
And you know, there were victims in the North as well, even though I didn't get to give them as much air time in this episode, but there were many Arabs in the North who were also victims of terrible crimes. And what is tragic to me is that we humans take these good things, race, religion, riches, and more. And these can be used for great good, but we weaponize them against each other.
And then we treat each other in in humane ways. And ultimately, I think that this war and then the wars that we're going to talk about in part three have really caused me to see a major there is a major difference between being human and being humane.
And something that I've started to ask myself is how do I feel about other people, especially those who are different from me, you know, different in race, different in religion, different in riches. How do I treat them not only to their faces, but how do I actually feel about them in my own mind?
Do I treat people mentally and obviously in person and online, but how do I treat people in my mind? Am I benevolent? Am I a peacemaker in my own mind? Am I creating community? Am I taking care of people? And I've started to realize that I can kind of tell how my mental health is, how I'm doing, by the way I feel toward my fellow men.
The driver in the lane next to me or the person on the side of the street or the checkout lady at the market, how I feel in general towards people in my life is a really great litmus test for how I'm doing on the inside. And I want a more humane world. I know you do too, right? I want to show compassion and benevolence to other humans to teach that to my children. And I think this is the work of a lifetime.
But in reading some of these stories about the lost boys, there were so many stories of people who created communities together and they survived these horrific circumstances together as a group. And they took care of their people and they treated them humanely. And the people who didn't made everyone else's lives miserable. And it seems to me that the only people who walked out of these situations with any humanity left in them were the ones who found community and compassion.
And then they gave it and then they received it back. And often this was found in family units. There's lots of stories about people finding each other and refugee camps by their family name. And polygamy is very popular in South Sudan. And so sometimes people, you know, cousins didn't really know each other, but they had the same last names. And so they would find each other and then they would immediately start taking care of each other.
And I thought that was so fascinating how people want to be bonded. We want to be together and regardless of race, religion, and riches, we're all human. We're a part of a human family. And seeing each other as brothers and sisters. Wow, that's such a powerful concept, a really powerful idea. What if we saw the people next to us as like a brother or a sister as a family member.
And again, we can't change the past, but we can change the future. And there are ways that we can help the people of South Sudan and North Sudan, which I'm going to talk about more in part three. But if you are interested in participating in refugee work, I recommend going to the website of the International Refugee Committee. It's rescue.org. I'll link it in my show notes.
But there they have opportunities for average people like you and me to do good to do refugee work. And they also talk about the top 10 crises in the world right now that are going on right now in 2024. And Sudan is number one. And I'll explain why in part three. And South Sudan is number three. Nearly every other country with the exception of Gaza, which is number two.
Every other countries in Africa and most of them are in East Africa. And so gaining our education is step one, which I hope I've helped with here. But now I think each of us can figure out a way we can make a difference. And I'm going to share more ideas in part three, but that's just kind to get the ball rolling. Part three is going to be out in two weeks. Thank you so much for listening. Please consider sharing this episode or others with a friend or family member.
You can join me on Instagram. I met Wiserworld podcast. You also can leave a review on your favorite app. You could sign up for my free email list at wiserworldpodcast.com. And there's always Patreon, which you can support the podcast at patreon.com slash wiserworldpodcast. I share lots of valuable resources there. And in the meantime, let's go out and make the world not only wiser, but hopefully a little more kind too.