Sudan fought two of Africa's longest civil wars between the Arab, Muslim-dominated north and the largely Christian and traditional-religion south: the First Sudanese Civil War (1955-1972) and, after an eleven-year peace, the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983-2005), fought principally between Khartoum's government and the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA). The second war, driven by disputes over political power, oil resources, and the imposition of sharia law, is estimated to have killed around 2 million people, mostly through famine and disease, and displaced roughly 4 million, including large numbers who fled to Khartoum's periphery and to neighboring Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia and elsewhere. The 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement ended the war and set the stage for South Sudan's 2011 independence referendum.
Sudan's government in Khartoum fought southern Sudanese rebel movements (Anyanya, then the SPLA) in two prolonged civil wars over political power, religion, resources and autonomy
The 1983 Sudanese census counted about 5.3 million in the three southern regions. At the start of the first war in 1955 the south held roughly 3 million; the 2008 census, disputed by the southern government, counted 8.26 million.
The figure of 'more than 2,000,000 lives' and 'more than 4,000,000 people' displaced is stated in the findings of the US Sudan Peace Act (Public Law 107-245, 2002), tracking the widely cited estimate originating with the US Committee for Refugees. It is an estimate of war-related mortality overwhelmingly from induced famine and disease — including the 1988 and 1998 Bahr el Ghazal famines — not a count of people killed in violence, and is frequently misquoted as the latter; event-based battle-death datasets record far fewer direct combat deaths. Roughly 500,000 are conventionally estimated to have died in the first war (1955–72). Successive governments in Khartoum have disputed the higher figures.
The findings of the US Sudan Peace Act, together with reporting by the UN Special Rapporteur on Sudan, UNICEF and Human Rights Watch, documented aerial bombardment and the burning of villages, the obstruction of relief that produced mass starvation in Bahr el Ghazal, and the abduction and enslavement of Dinka and Nuer women and children by government-aligned militias, alongside forced recruitment of children by both sides.
S. Sudan, Sudan, Kenya, Uganda