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GENEINA, Sudan — It is sometimes hard to figure out what Sudan's current status is in the war on terror. The Bush administration would love to enlist its Arab-led government as an ally in a critical part of Africa. But the more the dictatorship wages wars on its own citizens, the more impossible such an alliance becomes.
Though they once harbored Osama bin Laden, the country's Islamic leaders rooted out the Al Qaeda leadership in the late 1990's and reached out to the United States after Sept. 11. The administration then encouraged Sudan to negotiate an end to decades of civil war with black Christians in the south whose suffering had captured the sympathies of American churchgoers.
Peace talks drew close to an agreement last winter, raising hopes in Washington - to the point where administration officials began planning to invite some Sudanese officials to the White House and to the president's State of the Union address in January. But those plans were quietly dropped when it became clear that the Islamic dictatorship in Khartoum was stepping up a new war - this one in western Sudan, on rebellious black Muslims.
Over the past year, even as the talks to end the siege against the Christians in the south have proceeded, perhaps a million Muslims have been uprooted in the west, amid massacres that are drawing comparisons to the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans a decade ago.
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