(Sudan) A hopeless undertaking that worked

[bemildred]

I think this fellow is unduly optimistic, but it's an interesting read.

The conflict is widely estimated to have cost, directly and indirectly, four million lives. It has been unusually intense and intractable because it is rooted in sharply-divided identities. It pits southerners, occupying a third of Africa's largest country, and defining themselves as African and Christian animist, against northerners, defining themselves as Islamic and Arab or Afro-Arab.

---

Hence the astonishment with which the Machakos Protocol of July 2002 was received by a disbelieving world.

Machakos laid the foundation - religious neutrality in the south, a federal structure for Sudan, a regional southern Sudan government, and a referendum on southern secession or unity after a six-year interim period.

IOL

[gottaB]

1. Haysom has to be optimistic because if he's wrong

the consequences will be horrible.

[bemildred]

2. This did seem like happy talk. nt