Left: Chester Crocker, Francis Deng, and John Steinbruner
After decades of debilitating war, the Sudanese are ready and eager for a solution to their conflict, says Francis Deng, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a 1987- 88 fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace. He is the author of War Of Visions: Conflict Of Identities In The Sudan, published recently by Brookings, and researched in part while a fellow at the Institute of Peace. Deng was a panelist at a current issues briefing on the policy implications for the crisis in Sudan held at the Institute April 30. The event was sponsored jointly by the Institute and Brookings. Other panelists included John Steinbruner, director of Brookings' Foreign Policy Studies program, and Abdullahi An-Na'im, professor of law at Emory University in Atlanta. Institute of Peace board chairman Chester A. Crocker, a specialist in African affairs, moderated the discussion. Sudan has been wracked by conflict between the largely Arab- Islamic people of the north and the Christians and animists of the south. Deng discussed three alternative policy approaches to ending the long-standing conflict of identities in Sudan: establish a new basis for creating a common identity, create a framework of diversified coexistence within a loose federal or confederal arrangement, or partition the country along justified borders.
© 1996 United States Insitute of Peace
