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Comment by tovej | Hacker News Reader

Are you under the impression that Sudan was not under British colonial rule for ~50-60 years? This completely wrecked their economy and political structures, with the British intentionally causing divides between ethnic groups in Sudan and Egypt.

And are you seriously claiming that this was a good thing? Is this some crazy new neo-conservative take about the West being the only block that can be "civilized"?

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I don't think this was the British. (Not to apologize for them - they certainly made things worse, not better.) Sudan sits on a historical chattel slavery route that stretches back to Roman times. It's hallmarked by the Northern population raiding the south, along racial lines.

Scholarly article for reference if you want to learn more: https://www.jstor.org/stable/827888

I'm not arguing saying the British are solely responsible (I'm not sure who is most responsible). But the point is that the parent's claim that colonization would solve political issues in Sudan is ridiculous.

Sudan was under British rule and Cyprus was under British rule at the same time. Outcome is vastly different. The Brits brought civilisation and made Cyprus what it is, enabling its current prosperity (only difference between Cyprus and Greece is that Cyprus was a British colony and Greece wasn't). Somehow it didn't happen in Sudan.

And no it's not because they handled locals differently. They didn't care about locals. Colonialism is about exploiting territory, not population - locals, for colonialists, just "happen to be there" and are usually an obstacle or annoyance rather than a resource to exploit.

Maybe it's because locals were different.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORBBap-m0tY

Cyprus is an island. That changes a lot of the dynamics. Also Cyprus has the support of its big brother Greece, which the Greek majority Cypriots wanted to unite with. Sudan had no such partner, because the Egyptian rulers aligned themselves with the British.

I hope you can see that Greece is the key differentiating factor here. Any other argument is disingenuous. Not to mention the racist attitudes of the British empire, that saw Greek Cypriots as a "civilized" nation compared to Sudan.

"Support" of Greece - that was withdrawn when it was critically needed - resulted in the biggest disaster of our history, 1974 invasion. Greece only brought instability here and it was a much poorer and much more chaotic place to begin with, it couldn't do better even if it wished.

I'm not saying the Greece-Cyprus relationship is totally good in every way, but compare it to Egypt-Sudan. I hope you can see how the differences in geopolitics advantage Cyprus when compared to Sudan.

Let's say that all of the problems in Sudan are the fault of British colonialism. (I don't think that's completely correct but just for the sake of argument.) The British are gone and not coming back in any significant numbers. Now what? What is the solution?

A typical British colonial strategy was to ally with a minority ethnic group. The formerly downtrodden minority group now got to be the leaders, but, being the minority, they would stay dependent on the British, else the majority would rise up and kill them. In the post colonial world unfortunately that is what happened in a number of cases.

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