Salva Kiir's cowboy hat has triumphed over the turban of Sudanese imams, from Sadiq Al-Mahdi to Omar Al-Bashir, through theorist Hassan Al-Turabi. Evangelist movements, especially from the US, have triumphed over the movements of Arabization and Islamization. Tomorrow the world will gain a new country named Southern Sudan (Salva Kiir will choose another name for it), and the United States will score its first international strategic success in many long years, without a war. Evangelist movements, especially those from the US, will also score a victory in this geographical area which had until today been part of an Arab World which has neither known how to preserve it nor how to manage its conflict. The blame for this falls primarily on those with direct interests in it, i.e. Sudan and Egypt. Ever since the start of the rebellion in the South, Khartoum has dealt with it as a mere uprising that would quickly cease by the force of arms. It saw in the movement of the Southerners only a security issue, resolving it most of the time through military force. Meanwhile, the (US) World Council of Churches was founding a state. It began its activities with the start of the rebellion under Gaafar Nimeiry in 1972. This “revolutionary”, heir to the ideology of Arabism, was forced to ratify the Addis Ababa Agreement with the Anya-Nya movement, which later turned into the “Sudan Liberation” movement. Then followed the string of agreements between the central government and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) led by John Garang, which was a unity-oriented movement as its name indicates – that is, until Garang was assassinated or killed in a helicopter crash. Following this event, the evangelists joined their efforts to those of US companies and the US Administration, which starts drooling whenever it detects the smell of oil, producing the Naivasha Agreement in 2005 – an agreement which was aimed, from its first to its last clause, at consecrating the reality of secession. Whenever pressures on Bashir would increase, he would resort to further stringency in applying Sharia law in order to strengthen his rule, thereby providing the pretext for Salva Kiir, the evangelists, the US Congress and the South Sudanese to further cling to secession and to consider the relations between their tribes and the tribes of the North to be merely fleeting ones, as long as they are dominated by enmity, wars and invasions. This is in Sudan. As for Egypt, ever since the Camp David Accords between Cairo and Tel Aviv were ratified, national security has ceased to be one of Egypt's strategic priorities, whether towards the Levant or towards Africa, except on rare occasions, such as that of the complementarity treaty ratified by Anwar Sadat and Nimeiry, which Sadiq Al-Mahdi later rescinded, and that of forming some relations with the SPLM, especially under Garang. Meanwhile, Israel was infiltrating the South by offering the rebels support in terms of armament and training, and by coordinating with the White House and the evangelists to cause further division between Southerners and Northerners. And here it is today, feeling more powerful in this region close to the sources of the Nile. Perhaps Sudan was a model of the confrontation between Arabization and Islamization on the one hand, and the kind of Christian evangelism practiced by American religious, political or industrial groups on the other. Such a reality is not limited to Sudan alone, as in fact indications of it have stricken Egypt itself, after having stricken Iraq, and before it Lebanon.
