Christianity and Conflict in Africa
R. Drew Smith Wednesday, 9 June 2010
The African continent has been host to more than 30 wars since 1970, most of them intra-state wars. In Sudan, approximately two million southern Sudanese were killed and 4.5 million displaced by warfare between 1983 and 2004. In Darfur, another 400,000 or more have been killed and 2.5 million displaced since 2003 in what the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama have referred to as genocide. The DRC's casualty numbers are high as well, and have mounted more quickly than the casualties in Sudan; between 2001 and 2004, an estimated 3 million were killed. In 2005 the UN Development Program reported that 3.5 million persons may have been displaced by the DRC conflict. Conflicts in Ethiopia during the 1970s and 1980s may have claimed as many as 2.5 million lives. The 1994 genocide in Rwanda resulted in the deaths of a million people, as did the Mozambican civil war between 1976-1993. These are only some of the worst of Africa's civil conflicts in the post-independence era.
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