The Sudan: Terror Down South

“Allah laughed when he created the Sudan,” goes one Arab proverb. “Allah wept when he created the Sudan,” goes another. Versions differ almost as diametrically about just what is going on today in the three swampy, southernmost provinces of Africa’s largest country. For the past six. months, the region has been the scene of bloody uprisings among its 4,000,000 Negro tribesmen against their Arab rulers from the North. The Sudan’s Prime Minister, moderate Mohammed Ahmed Mahgoub, announced in Khartoum last week that “the situation is much improved. The rebels will be crushed by the end of this year.” From their hideout in neighboring Uganda, rebel leaders proclaimed that “apart from the military and some merchants, we have cleared the Arabs from the South.”

The truth lies somewhere in between. Some 15,000 Arab troops effectively dominate the Upper Nile and Bahr el Ghazal provinces, restraining rebel terrorism there to what amounts to pinpricks. Control of the southernmost province of Equatoria (lat. 5° N.), however, rides a seesaw. A Mau Mauist organization known as Any a Nya (Scorpion), armed with Communist machine guns smuggled in originally for Congolese Simbas and reinforced by fugitive Simbas, ambushes Arab patrols, murders suspected Arab sympathizers, and spreads havoc through most of the countryside. Last week the rebels announced that they had attacked a river steamer at Tawfigia and destroyed a company of government troops.

The Arabs command some towns in Equatoria and take reprisals among Negro tribesmen at large either by shooting them, flogging them, tying them up with bags of red pepper around their eyes, or burning their huts. Some 100,000 refugees have crossed the border into Uganda, and more may move soon. Prime Minister Mahgoub says his government is still committed to “a peaceful solution within the framework of a unified Sudan”; Any a Nya leaders in Kampala interpret this to mean a new government offensive as soon as the rainy season ends.