Bahr al-Ghazal (region)
Bahr al-Ghazāl ( Arabic بحر الغزال Bahr al-Ghazāl , DMG Baḥr al-ġazāl 'Gazelle River') is a region and former province in Sudan (in today's South Sudan ), named after the river Bahr al-Ghazal .
It consists of marshland and stony plains and is mainly inhabited by the Dinkas people, who make a living from livestock and subsistence farming .
history
For many years the region was subject to raids from the neighboring region of Darfur by Arab and Fur slave traders. The slave trade was banned by the Khedives of Egypt in 1864 , but was able to prevail again thanks to the influence of powerful local traders. They used themselves as princes with their own armies in the region. The most powerful of the princes, al-Zubayr , successfully fought the common Turkish - EgyptianArmed forces sent to Bahr al-Ghazal in 1873. The Khedive then admitted his defeat and made the region an official Egyptian province, with al-Zubayr as governor. Egyptian rule collapsed after 1881 in the Mahdi uprising , but was restored with British help after the defeat of the Mahdists in 1898. During the Faschoda crisis , France raised claims to the area and a narrow access to the Nile, but abandoned them in the British-French Sudan Treaty in 1899.
The region was later united with the British-Egyptian Sudan and belonged to the province of Equatoria until 1948 . In 1948 the region was split off as an independent province and remained a province in the independent Republic of Sudan after 1956. In 1976, the province of al-Buhairat was split off, which included the area of the present-day states of al-Buhairat and Warab . From 1991 to 1994, Bahr al-Ghazal became a federal state that resembled the province of Bahr al-Ghazal from 1948 to 1976. On February 14, 1994, Bahr al-Ghazal was split up again, but this time into four states: al-Buhairat, Gharb Bahr al-Ghazal , Shamal Bahr al-Ghazal and Warab.
The region is marked by longstanding civil wars. In 1982 the Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA) was formed to fight the government in the capital Khartoum . The conflict lasted until 2003 and killed more than 2 million people.
