Sudan: The Next Killing Field?

Perhaps I have a death wish in terms of entertaining an audience, but tonight at the UCLA/Hammer Forum I moderate, we will be discussing the future of a country that is not in the headlines, the largest country on a continent that does not often get our attention. 

Indeed our first president of African descent now finds himself justifying U.S. intervention in Libya in part based on the lingering guilt of our failure to act in Rwanda.  A preventable genocide that still haunts President Clinton’s NSC advisor on Africa, now the U.S. representative to the U.N. Susan Rice, and the former first lady now Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, both of whom played a key role in advocating our intervention in Libya. 

But as many critics on the left and right have pointed out, our outrage over humanitarian atrocities requiring U.S. intervention is selective.  We come to the aid of oil-rich Libya, but not war-ravaged Congo, where hundreds of women are raped every day and thousands of civilians are murdered every week.  And all the while we wring our hands over Darfur, but the killing continues unabated.   

Tonight we will hear about the pending split of Africa’s largest country into two after years if war that has cost one and half million lives.  And with fighting already breaking out in the disputed oil-rich border area of Abyei, war could resume again, amid accusation that the south is training rebels from Darfur to destabilize the north and counteraccusations that the north is backing rebel groups in the south ahead of southern independence in July. 

If you look at a satellite picture of Sudan it is stark.  The north is a parched brown desert, except for the Nile valley, and in contrast, from the dividing line south, a green swath of grasslands gives way to a darker green jungle.

But the south’s verdant land itself is in contention between nomadic herders and settlers, not unlike the range wars in the American west between ranchers and cattle grazers. 

And beneath the land there is oil, that could end up being a resource curse or a blessing, depending on whether it can be shared by both  countries, since the south has the oil and the north the pipelines.

So there is much to dicuss and we have a scholar from the north who has just returned from Sudan, an expert on oil from the South and an anthropolgist from UCLA who has studied Sudan for 50 years joining us tonight.

So I hope you all come the the Hammer Museum in Westwood at 7 PM for this free public forum "Sudan: The Next Killing Field?"