Following the declaration of
independence by South Sudan – which is dependent on financial and
military aid from American imperialism – tensions between Khartoum and
Juba have been steadily ramped up over the past year and have brought
death and destruction both sides of the border.
Following the declaration of
independence by South Sudan – which is dependent on financial and
military aid from American imperialism – tensions between Khartoum and
Juba have been steadily ramped up over the past year and have brought
death and destruction both sides of the border. Into the high-octane mix
of mass land grabs by foreign capital, which in turn places an even
greater strain on the land available for both settled farmers and
nomadic herders, are thrown heavily armed militias on both sides of the
border and a brutal struggle for control over the oil of Sudan amidst
the wider regional struggle of American and Chinese capital.
This more than decade long struggle is intensifying – sped up by both
the crisis of capitalism and the objective situation the world over –
with the possibility of Beijing being cut off almost entirely from the
supply of oil from the Sudan. The regime in Khartoum is in crisis, the
military pushing for an armed solution to the struggle with Juba – the
impoverished masses of the south suffering from the economic blockade
imposed by the north. Both North and South held large rallies in April
in their respective capitals and pouring into this a toxic mixture of
ethnic, religious and nationalist sentiment to whip up the population
into a war fever.
The tit-for-tat struggle in Sudan has stepped up from frequent raids
by Antonov’s and Army patrols in the Nuba mountains to full blown
incursions – the clashes have claimed many casualties, some maimed,
others killed and many thousands have been driven from their homes over
the past twelve months. The overwhelming majority of the population in
both Sudan’s live by subsistence farming, long exploited by the tiny
clique in Khartoum – and London before that – and have not benefited
from the oil boom of the late 1990’s and early 21st century,
during the twenty year civil war which began in 1983 they were the first
to suffer and last to receive relief, if at all.
warfare can only deepen this suffering of the masses in Sudan, throwing
the two states into a brutal war whose aims are driven by the narrow
interests of the two regimes either side of the border. This conflict
also cannot be understood outside of the general, world situation and
the strategic interests of the imperialist powers. Little more than a
year since South Sudan was unilaterally torn from the north a social and
political crisis threatens to spill over into open war between the
American backed Juba regime and Chinese backed Khartoum in the north –
as opposed to the hidden campaign of murder, rape and torture which has
been taking place both sides of the newly erected frontier for many
years. The struggle between Juba and Khartoum is in no small part a
continuation by proxy of this imperialist struggle between the economic
interests of Washington and Beijing, one which has continued for almost
two decades, the Americans believing they had won through, having
delivered a heavy blow to the French imperialists who preceded the
Chinese in Sudan.
At stake for Washington is denying Beijing the source of
approximately 5% of its total oil supply, as well as seizing hold of the
oil fields now in South Sudan which are currently owned by
Chinese-Malaysian oil monopoly Petrodar, as well the oil-fields
straddling southern Darfur and the western regions of Kordofan –
currently controlled for the most by China National Petroleum Company
(CNPC) and Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company, in which CNPC has
the largest share at 40%. Having accused the north of stealing $815
million of oil during transit to Port Sudan Juba expelled the head of
Petrodar’s operations in the region, Liu Yingcai, in February this year
and stated its intentions to review all oil contracts signed before
independence. What this means to say is that they intend to seize the
oil fields from Petrodar and will most likely hand them straight over to
a ’suitable bidder’ – it goes without saying that this will most likely
be one of the American oil giants. In addition to this seizure is the
linking of the Sudanese oil supply to a pipeline to a port under
construction on the Kenyan coast at Lamu, which will also transport oil
from Uganda, Ethiopia and potentially Somalia. At a time when the price
per barrel has been hitting record highs securing every last drop is
crucial – and the heavy stench of oil in the East African region,
particularly the finds in Sudan, Uganda and Somalia is one that the
imperialists cannot bring themselves to resist. Khartoum – as Beijing’s
proxy – will of course not sit idly by as Juba effectively signs the
regime’s death sentence. As ever, though, it will be the masses who
suffer the bloody excesses of capitalism in its most advanced form,
imperialism, which in the words of Lenin is “horror without end.”
Independence?
Since independence from the reactionary Bashir regime in early 2011
Juba and Khartoum have been engaged in a tit-for-tat game, jockeying for
position against one another for control of the large oilfields which
straddle the border between north and south, primarily in and between
the South Kordofan and Nuba Mountains regions.
The granting of independence did not in fact end the fighting which
has been waged for decades in this region, if anything it has laid the
basis for an ever more bitter struggle – the militias of the Sudan
People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) previously engaged with the
Sudanese military have now been split between the militias absorbed into
the regular units of South Sudan and the SPLM/A-North. These militiamen
operate in amongst the civilian population north of the border,
particularly in the Nuba Mountains region, which the Sudanese military
has bombarded from air and land without mercy.
Amongst Khartoum‘s favoured weapons for its daily air raids are 15
Sukhoi Su-25‘s purchased from Belarus in 2008, a highly effective,
Soviet designed close air-support aircraft intended for use against NATO
armour and infantry in Central Europe – against unarmed civilians it is
a terrifying weapon.
Alongside these air raids the Sudanese army is enforcing a scorched
earth policy under the orders of the Governor of South Kordofan Ahmed
Haroun (the man shown in footage acquired by Al-Jazeera ordering
Sudanese soldiers to ‘leave no-one alive’[i]),
particularly in the Nuba Mountains area. This as part of Khartoum’s
‘counter-insurgency’ policy – driving the civilian population deeper
into the mountains to seek shelter in caves and behind boulders,
separated from the fields they would normally work and without access to
water or sanitation. The threat of starvation looms large. Every bomb
that falls drives ever more of the Nuba peasants, men and women alike,
into the ranks of the SPLM-N – who are in turn hurled at the ranks of
the Sudanese armed forces.
The very manner in which South Sudan was sliced away for Khartoum has
precipitated a situation approaching crisis point in Khartoum and this
has been expressing itself in fault lines emerging in the regime. The
global crisis has already pressed Khartoum into carrying out austerity
measures, this piled on top of inflation (which went up from 22.4% to
28.6% in April) has provoked protests in the capital – including a
militant struggle for union recognition by students at the University in
Khartoum.
The primary source of revenue for the regime is now controlled by an
entirely separate – and hostile – state; even worse the economic
sanctions against the regime have continued and Sudan remains on
Washington‘s list of supporters of terrorism. Although something like
98% (this is probably an underestimate) of South Sudan’s revenue comes
from the 350,000 barrels of oil produced daily, Salva Kiir’s government
can fall back for a period on the financial support of American
imperialism while this is shut down. There are limits to the extent to
which this can be overcome, especially given the dependence of South
Sudan on capital, goods and services from the north – though the
imperialists are happy to run up colossal debts in ‘normal’ periods if
they can make an equally colossal profit, then find someone else to
force that debt onto.
This said, however, the South Sudanese state is highly unstable and
does not exercise any genuine control over vast tracts of the country,
perhaps even not beyond the limits of Juba – especially given the
tendency for units of the South Sudanese military to mount operations
without any reference to Juba or any other part of the command and
control structure. Exercising such control is rendered next to
impossible by the lack of infrastructure – there is little more than 60
kilometres of paved road in a region almost the size of France (the
principality of Monaco has more paved road than the entirety of South
Sudan, the Falklands Islands twice as much). As if this were not enough
the armed forces of the South are abnormally large and the state budget
is not the largest even on this impoverished continent, not by far – and
where soldiers go unpaid heavily armed riots often follow, and South
Sudan would be no exception.
Like Afghanistan of a decade ago South Sudan is little more than an
empty space carved out in between bordering nations, the area dominated
by a patchwork of rival militias recruited from the different ethnic and
tribal groups fighting each other for control of valuable tracts of
land under which sits Oil, Zinc and Uranium as well as highly fertile
farmland – particularly in the White Nile Valley which currently
supports in the region of 10-20 million head of cattle.
Khartoum on the other hand draws 80% of its’ revenue from oil, which
is extracted from the oilfields straddling the disputed border north of
Bentiu – centred on Abyei and Heglig – and transported through Chinese
built pipelines and refineries in the north ready for export at Port
Sudan. The recent seizure of Heglig by the armed forces of the South,
claiming to have pursued raiding parties from the north back across the
border, means Khartoum’s oil output was halved again – a situation the
north will not be able to tolerate for long, and efforts have been made
to restore the Heglig fields to normal operations. Before this seizure
about 40-45% of Sudan’s oil revenue was spent on arms and mercenaries to
bear them – primarily in the period after the Comprehensive Peace
Agreement which was signed in 2005. That is to say Sudan used the period
of ‘peace’ to tool up for the next episode of the war.
Though their attempts to retake the town by force over the weekend of
15-16 April were repulsed Heglig eventually fell – accusation and
counter-accusation of sabotage of the oil extraction facilities were
followed by an exchange of claims of a planned withdrawal by Juba, and a
solid victory for Khartoum in forcing them out. The UN Security Council
resolution – based on an agreement drawn up by the African Union – that
was passed, despite the apparent calm of the moment, will likely go the
way of the other 16 resolutions passed against Khartoum. In the same
breath the Sudanese Foreign Ministry has both declared its intention to
hold to the agreement and denounced Juba for breaking their promise, by
keeping troops stationed in the border region in Darfur, threatening
armed retaliation if they were not removed. As if the situation were not
already volatile enough Uganda’s Chief of Defence Forces, General
Aronda Nyakairima, threatened armed intervention against Khartoum after
Juba seized Heglig in the event it attempted to invade the south.
An unstable regime
Along with the deepening economic and in turn social crisis, the
military is partially tied up in counter-insurgency campaigns in the
Darfur and the East. Now the tearing off of South Sudan along with
control of the oilfields has presented a situation which is potentially
fatal to the Bashir regime. The regime in Khartoum is an already
unstable amalgamation of sections of the Arabic Muslim elite – some
clergy but primarily business and military interests organised largely
in and around the National Congress Party (NCP), which is reliant on the
state on the one hand and the weakness of the leadership of the
Sudanese working class and peasantry, which as well as having been
beaten, tortured, murdered and subject to brutal amputations is still
hamstrung by the current leadership of the Sudanese Communist Party.
This can only last so long, however. The deeply impoverished masses
of the north are being squeezed even further as inflation gallops ahead,
the government running up a deficit which it will have to address
through either war for the oil fields abroad or austerity at home. Such a
situation is a recipe for brutal class struggle – Ben Ali, Mubarak and
Ali Abdullah Saleh will each testify to the effect of such a struggle on
their own regimes, a lesson surely not lost on the Bashir clique.
Washington and London, advancing empirically, appear to have
calculated that they can force the regime to capitulate without a
struggle with Khartoum tied up in the west and east, preventing it from
bringing its full force to bear against Juba, then effectively cutting
the throat of Khartoum after years of sanctions. It is entirely
possible, however, that these efforts to cripple Khartoum will turn (and
perhaps have turned) into their opposite, provoking an energetic and
extremely brutal military response pushed by the hardliners within the
regime to resolve a contradiction which has given them no other route
out.
There is another section within the imperialist ranks, however, which
may well have based its calculations on precisely this response by the
Bashir regime and aim to use it as a pretext to tear down the crippled
Bashir clique using SPLA troops. Given the support of China and Russia
for Khartoum and their position on the UN Security Council it may be
more likely that in such an event African Union troops – from Ethiopia,
Uganda and possibly Kenya – are sent in to prop up an interim regime
than under a UN mandate. Either way US imperialism will have achieved
its dual goal of control over Sudan’s oil reserves and of dealing a blow
at the Chinese – completing a struggle the Marxists explained almost a
decade ago (Imperialist rivalry behind the Darfur crisis, by
Greg Oxley and Layla Al Koureychi, October 3, 2004). That many
thousands of Sudanese and other Africans will be butchered in this
struggle is not something that has ever restrained the imperialist
powers, nor will it do so in the future.
Representing the hardliners of the Khartoum regime, Minister of
Defence Abdel Rahim Muhammed Hussein is taking an openly militarist line
in addressing the crisis presented by the secession. To this end huge
numbers of troops, both Arab Sudanese and mercenaries from central and
western Africa, have been poured into the South Kordofan and Blue Nile
region in the years since the 2008 Comprehensive Peace Agreement. Along
with this the campaigns of terror in the Darfur region have been
periodically restarted and intensified, particularly in recent months.
In lockstep with this, Sudan’s spending on arms has boomed.
The UN and its endless resolutions are not simply dismissed by the
regime; UN staff are murdered in broad daylight. The Sudanese military
has shelled, intimidated, assaulted, kidnapped, tortured and summarily
executed members of the UN Mission in Sudan. In contradiction to the
peace agreements and regardless of any UN troops stationed at the border
the Sudanese military seized Abyei in May 2011 – Abyei being a town
which occupies a central strategic position amongst the oilfields of
Unity State, one that is an important jumping of point for further
incursions deeper into Unity State.
Initially Abyei was to have a referendum on secession to Juba in
2011, however, Khartoum objected to the manner in which the referendum
was being held, arguing that a nomadic tribe, the Misseriya, were being
denied their right to vote in the referendum and it could not go ahead.
Crocodile tears from Khartoum should fool nobody. The Misseriya are a
branch of the Baggara Arabs who formed the backbone of the Mahdist
revolt in the 1880’s and is today aligned to Khartoum – it is from the
ranks of the Baggara that the Janjaweed are drawn. The Misseriya
normally are cattle herders, their path of migration crosses through
Abyei though they have never settled in the region, certainly not in the
last 300 years – prior to the civil war in the 1980’s they shared
grazing and farmland with the Dinka Ngok chiefdoms for centuries largely
without serious incident – primarily because the land was largely held
as communal property. As a whole the Baggara inhabit a region which
crosses the borders of three different countries – encompassing central
and south Sudan, through Chad and reaching the eastern and northern most
corners of Nigeria and Cameroon. That this has been done largely
peacefully in the past demonstrates the fallacious nature of the claims
over this land which originate not with the Misseriya, but with
Khartoum.
The Misseriya were armed by Khartoum in the 1980’s during the civil
war as a proxy militia and encouraged to carry out raids against the
Dinka and Nuer for cattle and slaves, especially children – all
combustible material which some elements in the South will gladly use to
encourage a pogromist campaign if and when it serves their interests.
That such a move will more than likely be met with a pogromist agitation
in the north, directed against the 500,000 South Sudanese who still
live there, is unlikely to hold back these deeply reactionary elements
in the south.
Along with the drawing up the border between north and south, the
control of Abyei was to be decided by a European court of arbitration.
Like all things in politics, however, such a negotiation is not
concluded by well reasoned arguments in a courtroom but by the
continuation of politics by other means – war, that is the use of
violence, of force – through a now open, now hidden test of strength.
The European court, unable to truly account for the actual balance of
forces between South and North decided to resolve the ownership of Abyei
– control of which gives control of the oil fields – by giving control
to a joint administration of the north and south, which is to say it
could not resolve the question at all.
A month later President Bashir’s close ally and reputed hardliner,
Nafie Ali Nafie, signed an agreement with the SPLM-N on June 28th
2011 in Addis Ababa to settle the disputed Blue Nile and South Kordofan
regions – an agreement which provoked outrage in the military. From the
pages of al-Guwat al-Musalaha, the official newspaper of the
Sudan Armed Forces, the editor Brigadier-General Mohamed Ajeeb Mohamed
thundered against the agreement made by Ali Nafie describing it as a
“betrayal of the nation and the faith” continuing by blasting the NCP as
follows:
“We do not understand a lot of what you say, and among us we
perceive you as weak. And was it not for a remaining hope we would stone
you since dear to us you are not”[ii]
President Bashir was quick to pick up on the not so hidden body
language of the military men – in an address to a Khartoum mosque on 1st
July [2011], without referring to the deal signed by Nafie Ali Nafie,
he told those attending that he had ordered the military to continue its
operations in South Kordofan until the SPLA-N forces had been crushed
and their leader Abdel Aziz el-Hilu had been captured.
While Khartoum has been combating Juba backed militias in the north,
Juba has been tackling those backed by Khartoum in the South – including
Peter Gadet, the now jailed Gabriel Tang and the self named ‘Lieutenant
General’ George Athor. Before being killed in December Athor was able
to mobilise up to a battalion of 750 men from the unemployed and lumpen
elements of the Lou-Nuer and Gaweir-Nuer areas, carrying out attacks in
Jonglei State. In one incident in the first week of February 2011,
20,000 people were driven out of their homes by Athor’s men and hundreds
killed, either murdered by the Athor militia or drowned attempting to
cross the river out of Jonglei state. More than once the South Sudanese
military has captured or killed members of these militias and found
brand new Chinese built rifles and side arms, something that could only
have been obtained via Khartoum. As always, regardless of which side of
the new artificial border erected last year, it is the mass of peasants
from the Dinka, Nuer and other ethnic groups who suffer at the hands of
these bastard offspring of capitalism.
As if the Khartoum militias were not enough, most of the Juba aligned
groups have taken to squabbling amongst each other for the spoils
following secession – the best land to sell to foreign agri-business,
mining and drilling concessions, as well as training contracts with
foreign mercenaries and weapons deals with the Israeli arms industry
amongst others.
Despite the chronic poverty of the South Sudanese, who are almost
entirely illiterate and live on subsistence agriculture or as nomadic
cattle herders, some reports give that Juba has already obtained highly
sophisticated anti-aircraft systems and armour. These weapons have been
used by the militias and regular SPLA both against the air and ground
raids carried out by Khartoum but also, as can be expected, against each
other.
The major driving force behind this is the competition for deals with
the foreign capitalists who have circled South Sudan for months before
actual independence – swallowing up colossal tracts of land for farming
or mining, particularly in the highly fertile Jonglei region between the
White and Blue Nile. These vultures have only the profit they can
squeeze out of mining concessions or from massive farms employing
peasants driven off their land on starvation wages – in return the
militia leaders are made into very rich men.
Most striking of all, perhaps, is the sheer scale on which the land grabs are taking place; Rolling Stones[iii]
carried a report on the activity of former AIG trader Philip Heilberg
who, working with Paulino Matip, has snapped up colossal tracts of
farmland – his first acquisition being a tract in Unity state the size
of Delaware and has further plans for even larger land acquisitions in
Jonglei state. Doing this, however, means driving the nomadic and
settled population off the land, something which Matip is an expert at.
The capitalists will be indifferent as ever to the fact that their new
‘investments’, formerly land held and used in common, will be watered
with the blood and tears of the people whose land they have stolen.
National question
If ever it was needed to be stated, South Sudan is a clear
demonstration that the right of nations to self-determination is not an
absolute principle standing above and outside of the class struggle in
general and the perspective for revolution in particular, but must be
considered as secondary to this and to the perspective for the overthrow
of capitalist society. While as Marxists we recognise the right of a
nationality to decide its relations with another, democratically, what
has been done in Sudan will only further deepen the suffering of the
people of the Sudan region. National independence on a capitalist basis,
in a country which, furthermore, can barely be registered as possessing
capitalist property relations, is a bloody dead-end for South Sudan –
one in which the mass of South Sudanese, many of whom, if not the large
majority, still have tribal and semi-tribal ties, are being used as
pawns in a broader struggle between the worlds two foremost capitalist
powers.
The combination of a history of slave raids carried out by Arab
merchants, the prolonged and complete underdevelopment in relation to
the region around Khartoum under British rule and after, the deliberate
policy carried out by the British of dividing northerner from
southerner, combined with the pre-national and ethnic divisions which
expressed themselves with even greater ferocity after the withdrawal of
the British, and most importantly the general impoverishment of the mass
of the population, has created conditions in which the smallest spark
can lead to a terrifying explosion of violence between the neighbouring
Dinka, Nuer, Murle and Arab communities.
It is these precise conditions which lead to the emergence of the separatist Anya-nya and
the SPLM/A who followed them – they in turn were supplied and used by
the Israeli and American bourgeois in order to attack and undermine the
Arab regimes in Sudan. These elements have proven themselves nothing if
not reactionary. As has been demonstrated over the last year and a half,
the strength of their love of fatherland and brotherly feeling can be
measured in dollars and cents. The fact that these upstanding patriots –
many of whom have become petty warlords – have turned not simply on
each other but have slaughtered, raped and pillaged the local population
in South Sudan is well known to those supplying the dollars and cents.
This, of course, does not get in the way of a good business deal, or in
the way of their profits – in fact it is the precondition of these
profits, that is to say capitalism is reliant on these barbaric methods
in the ex-colonial countries.
The Sudanese Communist Party
Under the leadership of the ex-SPLM the absolute best that South
Sudan can hope for is a continuation of their misery and exploitation.
In the event of yet another episode of warfare, only after the war is over,
they will suffer the fate which has fallen to Zimbabwe, which is ruled
by a similar petit-bourgeois liberation movement in ZANU-PF, that is to
say absolute poverty, with so many workers unemployed that the
government has simply stopped counting. Just as in Zimbabwe they will be
subject to the predatory whims and merciless hunting of profit of
American, British, French and Chinese capital whether through the medium
of the World Bank, IMF or more directly. Remaining within the confines
of capitalism, which for Africa means the continuation of imperialist
exploitation, the masses in South Sudan will continue to suffer the
endless blows of this rotten and degenerate system of exploitation.
Clearly this is not the answer.
Whereas the Russian, Cuban and Chinese revolutions demonstrated the
truth of Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution in the positive, the experience
of ‘liberated’ Africa provides proof in the negative. Millions have paid
the price both in absolute misery and with their lives for the
‘two-stage’ theory of the Stalinists who had a mass base in Sudan,
capable of organising demonstrations of two million people in Khartoum –
it was in fact second in size only to the South African Communist
Party, itself a serious force on the continent and world stage. As with
Iran, Iraq and elsewhere the Communist Party in Sudan insisted on
supporting the ‘progressive’ bourgeois – inventing it if it couldn’t
find a suitable candidate – who having seized power with the support of
the Stalinists would set about butchering the Communist Party ranks.
This happened not just once in Sudan, not twice, but three
times. Many honest and self-sacrificing revolutionaries in Sudan paid
with their lives for this criminally false theory. In 1964 a general
strike toppled the regime of Ibrahim Abboud – rather than giving the
lead to the Sudanese workers and peasants to liquidate the Abboud regime
in its entirety… it took up ministerial posts in the bourgeois
government which followed! Having allowed the Sudanese rulers to
recover, the Sudanese CP were in turn expelled from parliament and
banned the next year.
If one such blow to the head were not enough to drive the lesson
through the thick skull of these Stalinist leaders there were more to
follow. In 1969 the Sudanese CP supported Colonel Nimeiri’s coup –
Nimeiri repaid the CP by putting the party leaders in chains. A failed
coup attempt by the CP in 1971 lead to the execution of the leading
cadres and imprisonment of thousands of others.
However, even this did not destroy the Sudanese CP entirely – a
significant underground movement remained and played a leading role in
the general strike and insurrection which ended Nimeiri’s rule in 1985…
only to hand power back again! The corpses of the CP cadres – and wider
Sudanese labouring masses – form the foundations of Bashir’s absolutely
reactionary Islamic fundamentalist regime.
But for the criminal two-stage theory, a powerful Communist Party
might still have existed in Sudan. While this has largely been destroyed
by the vicious Sudanese ruling class, the workers of Sudan have
revolutionary traditions well within living memory – this especially for
Sudanese women, who are known across the Arabic speaking world for
their militancy.
There are those who look at the situation in Sudan and throw up their
hands in despair – “there is no hope” they say, “the class is too
small, too weak, the Bashir regime to strong.” These people have nothing
in common with the Marxists. In 1917 the Russian proletariat, made up
of 10 million factory workers, railwaymen and miners amongst others lead
behind it an almost 150 million strong peasantry to crush the regime of
the Russian Tsar. This was followed by victory against intervention by
21 countries, on 14 different fronts in the Russian Civil War. This is
the heritage of the world proletariat, not the hand wringing and
cowardice of the reformists.
In Sudanese society today, including the South, the working class is
stronger as a proportion of society than was the Russian proletariat of
1917. Of a population of 34 million Sudan has a ‘labour force’ of 12-15
million – 2.5 to 3 million of whom are wage labourers, that is clerks,
factory workers, oil, mining, construction or transport workers,
teachers or service sector employees. This makes the working class
approximately 20% of Sudanese society across north and south – compare
this to the less than 10% in revolutionary Russia! Not only is there
this greater relative strength of the working class, but Sudan borders
the most important nation in the Arab world, one with a powerful working
class and a proud revolutionary heritage which has burst onto the stage
of history again – Egypt.
In May the recruiting sergeants of both north and south were touring
the deeply impoverished villages, asking for contributions and
volunteers to the war effort. The peasantry of the south have little to
offer other than the odd bundle of tobacco, some grain or perhaps even a
$2 dollar bill – the life savings of a small family for many. In the
north a levy has been taken from the wages of civil servants to pay for
the war preparations. On both sides of the border thousands have
volunteered to receive a few weeks basic training before being hurled
into the carnage. Whether a ‘small’ war or a slow grinding descent into
an even deeper misery, the masses will pay the price for this conflict –
though a war may temporarily cut across this, the Sudanese workers and
peasants will not tolerate such misery forever.
