Sudan Troops Rout Southern Rebels : Africa: In stunning reversal of fortunes, three-pronged army attack leaves insurgents with only one town.

In their biggest offensive of this nation’s decade-old civil war, government forces have routed southern rebels from several key towns and are driving toward the Ugandan border, Western and Arab diplomats said Friday.

The rebels--made up of Christians and pagans from the black south--broke and ran last week from Kajo Kaji, their main supply center. They now control only one town, Nimule, on the White Nile. It too appears in danger of falling to the Arab-led Sudanese army, diplomats said, and if it does, the army could sweep along the Ugandan border and cut rebel supply lines.

The success of the army’s three-pronged attack, launched from garrisons in the southern towns of Juba, Wau and Malakal, represents a stunning reversal of fortunes for the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, or SPLA, led by John Garang, who holds a doctorate in agriculture from the University of Iowa. Just three years ago the “outlaws,” as the government calls the SPLA, held virtually all of southern Sudan.

Sudan is a land unofficially divided between an Arabized, Islamic north and an impoverished, undeveloped and drought-stricken African south. Not so long ago, Garang, a former Sudanese army officer and member of the Dinka tribe, said his goal was to create a unified Sudan, not a separate state.

But in May, 1991, Garang lost his major patron with the overthrow of the Marxist Ethiopian government, which had offered his 20,000-guerrilla army sanctuary, weapons and a communications base.

Three months later, two of his chief lieutenants, Riak Machar and Lam Akol, criticizing Garang’s dictatorial style, split from the SPLA. They set up a rival faction. And late last year, the Khartoum government--increasingly under the influence of Islamic fundamentalists--took on a dramatically more aggressive posture in the war.

For much of last year, the government sat back and watched rival SPLA groups battle it out among each other. Meanwhile, it began recruiting students and young men, many religious zealots, from the north for a Popular Defense Force.

Eight months ago, the government sent them into battle with the bulk of its 100,000-man army. Although publicly the government of Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir denies wanting to subjugate the south, it has begun referring to the conflict as a jihad (holy war).

The Sudanese civil war, which raged between 1955 and 1972 and restarted in 1983, was traditionally a matter of southerners killing southerners, as 85% of the Sudanese army--including almost all its junior enlisted men--are Africans from the south.

Now, for the first time, Arab northerners are suffering substantial casualties.

Moderates in the government are not displeased at the prospect of keeping young religious fanatics occupied in a war. Better that they be on the southern front, this reasoning goes, than here at home, where they could agitate for the creation of an even more radical Islamic society and could eventually pose a threat to Bashir’s military regime.

In Khartoum, where large numbers of Arab and African Sudanese live together without incident, there has never been a sense of civil conflict. The war is seldom even mentioned in casual conversations, and when the government tried to organize demonstrations last week to celebrate the fall of Kajo Kaji, no more than a handful of supporters showed up.

Despite the loss of towns it controlled, the SPLA does not appear in danger of collapsing, military analysts said. Garang, who now says he is fighting a secessionist war, can still return to the countryside--where the conflict began--and can be effective in hit-and-run attacks, particularly on the government’s overextended supply lines.

The West has kept its distance from both sides in the civil war, neither of which has an enviable record as human rights advocates or effective combatants. When, for example, the SPLA tried to take Juba in May, 1992, numerous bodies turned up with slit throats. Among the dead were four Sudanese employees of AID, the U.S. government agency for international development. They were executed by government soldiers, U.S. diplomats said.

Peace talks, last held in May and scheduled again for July in Nairobi, Kenya, have been fruitless.