(Republic of Sudan)
Sudan, sometimes referred to as North Sudan, is an Arab state in North Africa and the Middle East bordered by Egypt to the north, the Red Sea to the northeast, Eritrea and Ethiopia to the east, South Sudan to the south, the Central African Republic to the southwest, Chad to the west and Libya to the northwest. Internally, the Nile divides the country into eastern and western halves. The population of Sudan is a combination of indigenous inhabitants of the Nile Valley and descendants of migrants from the Arabian Peninsula.
During the 16th century, a people called the Funj appeared in southern Nubia and supplanted the remnants of the old Christian kingdom of Alwa, establishing the Blue Sultanate, also called the Sultanate of Sennar. The Blue Sultanate eventually became the keystone of the Funj Empire.
By the mid-16th century, Sennar controlled Al Jazirah and commanded the allegiance of vassal states and tribal districts north to the Third Cataract and south to the rainforests. But in 1820, Muhammad Ali of Egypt sent 4,000 troops to invade Sudan. His forces accepted Sennar's surrender from the last Funj sultan, Badi VII.
Eventually, a revolt broke out in Sudan, led by Muhammad Ahmad ibn Abd Allah, the Mahdi (Guided One), who sought to end foreign presence in Sudan. Later that year, the Mahdi's forces attacked and entered Khartoum, which had been defended by the British Governor-General, Charles George Gordon, who was killed. Egypt and Britain subsequently withdrew their forces from Sudan leaving the Mahdi and his successor to form a 14 year rule of Sudan.
In the 1890s, the British sought to re-establish their control over Sudan, once more officially in the name of the Egyptian Khedive. By the early 1890s, British, French and Belgian claims had converged at the Nile headwaters.
Lord Kitchener led military campaigns against the Mahdists from 1896 to 1898. Kitchener's campaigns culminated in a decisive victory in the Battle of Omdurman on 2 September 1898. Following this, in 1899, Britain and Egypt reached an agreement under which Sudan was run by a governor-general appointed by Egypt with British consent.
The Egyptian Revolution of 1952 finally heralded the beginning of the march towards Sudanese independence. Having abolished the monarchy in 1953, Egypt's new leaders believed the only way to end British domination in Sudan was for Egypt to officially abandon its claims of sovereignty over Sudan.
A polling process was carried out resulting in composition of a democratic parliament and Ismail al-Azhari was elected first Prime Minister and led the first modern Sudanese government.
In 1955 a civil war began between Northern and Southern Sudan. The southerners, anticipating independence, feared the new nation would be dominated by the north. Historically, the north of Sudan had closer ties with Egypt and was predominantly Arab or Arabized and Muslim while the south was predominantly non-Arabized and animist or Christian.
The resulting conflict lasted from 1955 to 1972. The 1955 war began when Southern army officers mutinied and then formed the Anya-Nya guerilla movement. A few years later the first Sudanese military regime took power under Major-General Abboud. Military regimes continued into 1969 when General Gaafar Nimeiry led a successful coup.
In 1972, a cessation of the north-south conflict was agreed upon under the terms of the Addis Ababa Agreement. This led to a ten-year hiatus in the national conflict with the south enjoying self-government through the formation of the Southern Sudan Autonomous Region.
In 1983, the civil war was reignited following President Nimeiry's decision to circumvent the Addis Ababa Agreement. Nimeiry attempted to create a federated Sudan including states in southern Sudan, which violated the Addis Ababa Agreement that had granted the south considerable autonomy.
On 30 June 1989, Colonel Omar al-Bashir led a group of army officers in ousting the unstable coalition government of Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi in a bloodless military coup. Under al-Bashir's leadership, the new mil