When Sudan’s first crude oil for export poured out of the just-completed one thousand five hundred-kilometre pipeline and gushed into a supertanker at Sudan’s new Red Sea port in August 1999, the Islamist-military government was elated. The civil war, in its twentieth year, had until then made the development of oil – located beneath war-torn southern swamps and savannahs – impossible.
The International Monetary Fund, which suspended Sudan in 1990 for failure to pay even interest on its enormous debt, reinstated it just days before this first crude flowed.
