Wars at home, trouble abroad have marked Islamists’ rule

Sudan, the largest country in Africa in area, is strategically located on the Red Sea, immediately south of Egypt and borders seven other African countries. Relations with its neighbours are characterised by friction and hostility and this has led to a proliferation of arms and armed groups.

For much of the 1990s, Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia formed an ad-hoc alliance called the “Front Line States” with support from the United States to check the influence of the National Islamic Front government. Sudan’s relations with Egypt became strained after General Omar al-Bashir’s 1989 coup installed an Islamist government in Khartoum, and worsened after a 1995 assassination attempt on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Ethiopia that was blamed on Sudan.

Relations with Uganda were severed in the same year amid accusations of Sudanese support for the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda in retaliation for that nation’s arming the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), the rebel movement that fought a 20-year war against the Sudanese government. The two countries have since signed an agreement under which Sudan said it would stop aiding the LRA and Uganda would stop aiding the SPLA.

On December 23, 2005, Chad, Sudan’s neighbour to the west, declared war on Sudan and accused the country of being the “common enemy of the nation.” In 2008, Sudan announced it was cutting diplomatic relations with Chad, claiming that it was helping rebels in Darfur to attack Khartoum. Sudan is also one of the few states to recognise Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara.

Within Sudan itself, a two-decade civil war was ended in 2005 with the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA). However, in the run-up to elections and a Southern referendum on independence, the increased North–South tensions, the Government of Southern Sudan (GoSS) budget crisis, mounting armed group and inter-tribal violence, and the lack of a “peace dividend” in the South are souring the parties’ commitment to the agreement.

In light of the agreement’s possible collapse, both sides are ramping up their arms acquisition. The SPLA, for example, consumed nearly a quarter of the entire GoSS budget in 2009, most of which was used to pay a largely un-demobilised civil war force.