LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Sudan: Western Sudan
built 655 days ago
At a joint press conference later in the day, it seemed as if Zoellick had taken to heart Taha’s perspicuous lesson on Western entanglement in Sudan. When asked by a BBC reporter how many people the United States thinks have died due to fighting in Darfur, Zoellick gave an astonishingly low estimate of 60,000 to 160,000 people. That number defies even the most conservative claims of the number killed; the lower reaches fall far short of any previous estimate and the upper range is less than half the number reached by an April 22 mortality study compiled by the Coalition for International Justice, which calculated that nearly 400,000 people had died since the conflict began two years ago.
Source:
In November 2006 Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi "accused the West of trying to grab Sudan's oil wealth with its plan to send U.N. troops to Darfur and urged Khartoum to reject them. "Western countries and America are not busying themselves out of sympathy for the Sudanese people or for Africa but for oil and for the return of colonialism to the African continent," he said." [1]
Source:
This crisis was precipitated by the outbreak of civil war in Darfur, hostilities entirely separate from Khartoum’s 21-year assault against the African peoples of southern Sudan. The long-marginalized and abused African peoples in Darfur rose up in a rebellion early in 2003 and militarily caught Khartoum off guard. But this only made the eventual military response more brutal and violent. The government of Sudan, dominated by the National Islamic Front, is relentlessly, deliberately destroying the African tribal peoples of the region. Indeed, all evidence suggests that what U.N. and Western diplomats are diffidently calling “ethnic cleansing” in Darfur, an area the size of France, is actually genocide.
Source:
[T]he period of the 1990s saw a growing sense of alienation in the western and eastern regions of Sudan from the Arab center. The rulers in Khartoum were seen as less and less responsive to the concerns and grievances of both Muslim and non-Muslim populations across the country. Alienation from the "Arab" center caused various groups to grow sympathetic to the southern rebels led by the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), and in some cases, prompted them to flight alongside it.
Source:
Some marauding, government-backed militias, who are mainly from the Baggara tribe in western Sudan, attack primarily villages of the Dinka tribe in southern Sudan. These raids are one manifestation of a long-standing religious/racial/language conflict in that country that has been fueling a civil war for the past 40 years. More lives have allegedly been lost in Sudan's civil war than in Bosnia, Rwanda and Kosovo combined. 3
Source:
As the UN and Western governments toy with intervention in Darfur, they ignore tense North-South relations in Sudan. The 1983- 2005 North-South war, which killed over 2 million and displaced over 4 million, ended with the January 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA). But the agreement has yet to be fully implemented as its parties, including Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and Sudanese Vice President and South Sudan’s Regional President Salca Kiir, continue to argue over issues such as the status of the oil-blessed Abyei region.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Western Sudan