There may be some glossing over of ugly realities here. The Sudanese have long been pittted against one another as well as against the state: Nuer tribesmen fight Dinka in the south; nomads fight pastoralists along the border. But politics matter, and those who have controlled Sudan have always used some variant of divide-and-rule. As historian Edward Thomas notes in a prefatory essay, 19th-century Ottoman rulers used the south as a source of slaves for the Egyptian army. British administrators later separated the country into ethnic zones in order to preclude the rise of nationalism. When Britain granted Sudan independence in 1956, the Christian south agreed to join with the Islamic north only on the condition that the country adopt a decentralized system; instead, Britain handed off its full colonial powers to a mercantile Arab regime in Khartoum. A campaign to forcibly Islamize the south provoked a civil war that lasted until a 1972 peace treaty. A new military ruler dissolved the south's autonomous government, setting off a new round of fighting in 1983. Two million people died before the two sides signed the 2005 agreement that set the stage for this year's referendum and independence. And as one war was winding down, a new one in Darfur, provoked by the same repressive policies and carried out with the same brutality, was starting up.
I cannot help thinking of India when I read this story. There is an obvious analogy between the bloodshed surrounding the hiving off of south from north and India's Partition, which led to the deaths of perhaps a quarter-million people as Muslims fled north to Pakistan and Hindus south to India. Sudan is suffering through a partition of its own. But there was nothing inevitable about the fratricide either at India's birth or at South Sudan's; both are a consequence of political choices. And in fact what actually strikes me is the contrast between the choices made by the two countries' post-colonial leaders. India's prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, horrified by the violent energies unleashed by Partition, went to enormous lengths to calm anti-Muslim feeling in India and to blunt calls to redraw state borders along linguistic lines. And when violence flared over the linguistic issue in 1955, Nehru gave in, recognizing that India could survive as a diverse country only by granting more regional and cultural autonomy.
Multiethnic states like Sudan are not doomed to failure. India is just one example; Indonesia is another. It all depends on political leadership. Of course, the problem is harder in diverse states ruled by a minority tribe, such as Sudan or Syria. Leaders must either bring others into the circle of power or practice endless repression. Bashir has made the latter choice; so, too, has the Assad family in Syria. President Bashar al-Assad is now discovering the corollary to this choice: As repression provokes resistance, the regime must keep ratcheting up the level of brutality in order to survive.
If you're the president of a country as big as Sudan, you can sustain your rule by letting go of a piece of the country you can no longer successfully repress. But you cannot sustain the idea of the country. John Garang, the southern leader who had signed the 2005 agreement with the Bashir regime and died soon thereafter in a plane crash, had fought for the vision of a single Sudan with a mixed leadership. That sounds almost laughably naive today. Jacob J. Akol, a southern journalist, writes in We'll Make Our Homes Here that while the myth of Sudan is "an Islamic and culturally Arab nation in the heart of Africa," the reality is "a people trying to break away from a forced and unfair unity about which they were never consulted." Nothing but force holds Sudan together.
Leafing through the volume, I was struck by a picture of a giant parabola on Khartoum's skyline -- a new oil company headquarters. That hadn't been there when I visited in 2004. Oil revenue has made Sudan one of Africa's fastest-growing states; the fight over the border regions has much to do with access to that oil wealth. But while it will transform Khartoum's skyline, oil wealth will not solve Sudan's problems: By increasing corruption and further concentrating wealth and power in the center, it will only further alienate the millions who live along the periphery. Bashir has a genius for survival, and he may outlast his enemies; but Sudan, as a country, will fail.
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