CHAD/SUDAN - Quick Facts

Sudan is Africa's largest country, approximately one quarter of the size of the United States. Of the country's 39 million people, 52 percent are black and 39 percent are Arab. Islam is the official religion of Sudan, and Arabic is its official language. The population is 70 percent Sunni Muslim and 5 percent Christian. Twenty-five percent adhere to indigenous religious beliefs.

Sudan has been wracked by civil war since achieving independence in 1956, with only a period of peace between 1972 and 1983. Fighting began when the Arab-dominated government, which is in the north, based in the capital, Khartoum, tried to impose sharia, Islamic holy law, throughout all of Sudan, even in southern areas where Muslims are not the majority. Christians in the south rebelled, and the conflict escalated to a full-blown civil war by 1983. Since then, 2 million people have been killed and 4 million displaced. But in May 2004, the Sudanese government and the Christian rebels, with support from the United States, finally signed a peace accord.

However, as the long civil war approaches a peaceful resolution, another crisis is erupting in the western region of Darfur, an area roughly the size of Texas. Last year, black rebels seeking autonomy from Arab rule attacked government installations. In retaliation, government-backed Arab militia, the Janjaweed, unleashed a campaign of ethnic violence against black farmers and their families, killing even small children and women and burning down whole villages. The crisis, which has left 50,000 people dead and more than 1 million homeless, has been labeled "genocide" by the U.S. Congress. International bodies, including the United Nations and the European Union, say there is not enough evidence to justify the use of this term. Many commentators agree, however, that the violence in Sudan is the world's worst humanitarian crisis, with catastrophic consequences potentially equal to the violence in Rwanda a decade earlier.

A U.S. State Department report recently determined that the government of Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, who was brought to power during a coup in 1989, has promoted the violence in Darfur, providing both political leadership and military backing. Al-Bashir has been a cause of concern for the United States since he hosted Osama bin Laden back in the 1990s, an action that resulted in the United States' imposing sanctions on Sudan. Now, however, al-Bashir's government is considered a key ally in the war on terror, even though top officials are said to be among the primary architects of the Darfur violence.

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