Paying for the wrong lines on the map

SUDAN IS APPROACHING the 50th anniversary of its independence from Britain, with little to celebrate. For more than 30 of its past 50 years, it has been embroiled in civil war. Although a negotiated settlement between the Muslim north and the non-Muslim south is in place, there is scant optimism that it will lead to a durable peace.

Since independence in 1956, Sudan has been run by northern leaders in Khartoum -- mainly army dictators -- determined to enforce their rule on southerners. Its current dictator, Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, came to power in an Islamist coup in 1989. Clutching a copy of the Koran in one hand and a Kalashnikov rifle in the other, he declared: “Anyone who betrays the nation does not deserve the honor of living.” In his jihad against infidel black tribes in the south that followed, he ordered ethnic cleansing, costing hundreds of thousands of lives. Only as a result of Western pressure -- notably from the Bush administration -- did a settlement emerge this year.

But more lies behind Sudan’s dismal record as an independent state than the murderous activities of a succession of repressive regimes. Like almost all modern African nations, Sudan is an artificial state constructed during the scramble for Africa by European powers at the end of the 19th century. It straddles a fault line across Africa between the deserts of the north and the tropical forests to the south -- dividing the Muslim north from the non-Muslim south and Arab from African -- that has spawned conflicts since independence in which millions have died. Nigeria and Chad, built across the same fault line, also have endured years of civil war.

In part, the violence and instability that have afflicted so many African states since independence have similar origins. When marking out the boundaries of their new colonies, European negotiators, having scant knowledge of the vast African interior, often resorted to drawing straight lines on the map, taking little or no account of the myriad traditional monarchies, chiefdoms and other African societies that existed.

In some cases, African societies were rent apart: The Bakongo were partitioned among French Congo, Belgian Congo and Portuguese Angola. In other cases, Europe’s new colonial territories enclosed hundreds of diverse and independent groups, with no common history, culture, language or religion. In all, about 10,000 African polities were amalgamated into 40 European colonies and protectorates.

The new states of Africa were thus not nations. They possessed no ethnic, class or ideological cement to hold them together, no strong historical and social identities upon which to build. And once the nationalist momentum began to subside, older loyalties and ambitions came thrusting to the fore.

Indeed, after a honeymoon period, African leaders exploited -- even provoked -- ethnic loyalties to keep themselves in power, ensuring that state resources were distributed to benefit ethnic groups that supported them, setting off an endless cycle of ethnic rivalry and tribal strife.

In the case of Sudan, there was not even a honeymoon period. While northerners relished the prospect of independence from Britain, southerners feared the consequences. In the 19th century, northern traders had plundered the south in search of slaves and ivory. Northerners still tended to treat southerners with contempt, referring to them as abid -- slaves.

So great were the differences between the relatively advanced north and the backward provinces of the south that for most of the colonial era, Britain treated Sudan as a country of two halves. The south was ill-prepared for independence and was not represented in the negotiations. As independence day approached, the southern corps of the army, commanded by northern officers but consisting almost entirely of southern troops, mutinied, initiating a conflict that has still not run its course.

Although southern leaders have signed the negotiated settlement giving the south a measure of autonomy, southerners by a large majority are said to favor independence from Khartoum. Rich oil fields in the south have opened the possibility that the south might prosper as a viable state on its own. But they have also made the north even more determined to maintain its hold over the south.

The tragedy of Sudan is that it is not so much a failed state as a flawed state. The flaw was built into it by European powers more than a century ago, and despite Western efforts now, it is likely to remain a source of conflict.

MARTIN MEREDITH is the author of, most recently, “The Fate of Africa: From the Hopes of Freedom to the Heart of Despair” (PublicAffairs, 2005).