US, China in Sudan great game

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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/MK15Cb02.html

In 1898, amid the age of imperialist acquisition, Great Britain and France confronted each other at Fashoda in the Sudan. The two powers almost went to war but happily, diplomacy prevailed. Today, amid fierce global competition for commodities and regional influence, the US and China are facing each other in several parts of the world and the oil-rich Sudan may become one of the more complex and portentous sites of this contest. Recent fighting there is drawing greater attention to the region.

The dramatis personae are Sudanese (North and South), Kenyan, Somali, and Ugandan, with the Americans and Chinese trying to remain offstage, whispering urgent cues and offering metal props. The Ugandan group will include the odd guerrilla band known as


the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), against which the US has recently deployed a hundred special forces advisors. This move will shape events in North and South Sudan and tell us much of the relations between the US and China.

Civil war, hydrocarbons, and regional powers
The Sudanese conflict entails religion and ethnicity - a Muslim-Arab north with Khartoum as capital, and a Christian-African south with Juba as capital. However, the difference commanding international interest is, unsurprisingly, the two countries' oil reserves and pipelines. Eighty percent of the Sudan's oil wealth is in the new southern state but the Khartoum government long ago ensured great influence over the wealth by seeing that the pipelines and refineries feeding world markets, chiefly China, were up north.