From the Nation:

The Wars of Sudan
Alex de Waal

When history repeats itself for a third time, it is beyond tragedy. Since its independence fifty-one years ago, Sudan has suffered two civil wars between North and South, each of them as bloody as–and much longer than–today’s crisis in the western region of Darfur. Quietly, Sudanese military planners are preparing for a third round of that war. Just two weeks before violent clashes erupted in the Southern city of Malakal at the end of November, Salva Kiir, the president of Southern Sudan–who is also first vice president in Sudan’s Government of National Unity–issued a stark warning: “The war will return to the South if peace is not achieved in Darfur, and that is really our fear.” He repeated the warnings in a speech January 9, the second anniversary of the agreement that brought peace to Southern Sudan. Kiir’s alarm is good reason to intensify international efforts over Darfur–but he is also putting us on notice to pay attention to a looming nationwide crisis.

There’s no doubt that President Omar al-Bashir and his cabal of security chiefs bear the major responsibility for bringing Sudan to its current state of despair. Certainly urgent action is needed to stop the killing in Darfur, which first aroused the conscience of the Western world in 2003, spurring a well-organized mass movement and student campaign to “save” the region. The impulse among Western activists and policymakers to entertain regime change, and to pressure and punish those whose misdeeds have inflicted so much death and destruction, is understandable. But punitive and interventionist measures carry a high risk of sparking intensified conflict or bringing about government collapse–either of which would have calamitous humanitarian consequences. American leadership to avert such disasters is needed now.

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