Southern Sudan - a desciption

With one million square miles of territory, Sudan always was more like a vast continent than an individual country, and of all its remote regions – western Darfur included – none seemed as remote as the jungles and savannas of the equatorial south. Even by African standards, the south was in the middle of nowhere, cut off from the rest of Sudan by the Sudd, the world’s most formidable swamp, and bordering such dangerous, disease-ridden, and underdeveloped places as the Central African Republic, Zaire, war-racked northern Uganda, and Kenya’s Turkana desert. A netherworld of violence and chaos, roamed by armed bandits and disaffected Ugandan soldiers, the south was a heartland of unreported atrocities as well as a breeding ground of leprosy, elephantiasis, and Green Monkey disease. Just the lost and vacant ring of the towns in the region (Yei, Tarakaka, Pibor Post) evoked distant planets and gave one the feeling that the south really was in deep space. It had no roads to speak of, and because of the civil war, planes flying into the region always were shot at and occasionally were shot down. On every trip to the south, Western relief workers literally took their lives in their hands. When I asked a U.S. diplomat how to get to a certain area of the south near the Ethiopian border, he gave me a mad look and said, “Parachute, I guess.” Admitted an official of Sudan’s Ministry of Information, “Nobody ever really knows what’s happening down there.” Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea – R.D. Kaplan (1988)

The situation has vastly improved since then. There are now a few roads, planes aren’t falling out of the sky and the civil war is over. Altho given the rising tensions re the coming referendum on January 9th when the south will decide to secede from the north, all that could change. I will be watching with interest, from afar.