Word: mahdi
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...three times the size of Texas) has been paralyzed by a bloody civil war against secessionist guerrillas in the south. Since 1986, Sudan has been ineligible for loans from the International Monetary Fund because of an inability to service its $12 billion debt. In April, Prime Minister Sadiq el Mahdi's failure to deal with the country's accumulating crises brought down his second government in two years. As if all those woes were not enough, a plague of locusts is threatening to wipe out the country's meager crops of millet and sorghum...
...Although Mahdi has relaxed enforcement of the laws, he has yet to void or replace them because they are supported by the fundamentalist National Islamic Front, an increasingly powerful member of his fragile ruling coalition. Early this month, the Sudanese Cabinet approved a new and stricter code of Islamic law, or Shari'a, but it has yet to be passed in parliament. In the meantime, the fighting has forced at least 500,000 southerners to flee to Khartoum. Each side in the civil war has accused the other of manipulating food shipments to famine victims as a weapon to gain...
...comprise Ali, Hussein and certain of their direct descendants. The Shi'ites consider the Twelve to be mediators between God and man. Though the Twelfth and last Imam went into hiding in A.D. 940, Shi'ites believe that he will re-emerge to rule the world as the messianic Mahdi. Until that time, the Shi'ite clergy are responsible for interpreting Islam. The Ayatullah Khomeini, however, has gone one step further by establishing his government as a regency for the Mahdi. Khomeini, who claims descent from Muhammad through the Seventh Imam, has never claimed to be the Twelfth Imam...
...Haile Mariam, which is battling guerrillas in the country's northern provinces, promptly turned aid into a political tool. Government troops seized a food-laden ship to keep supplies from reaching the rebel-held north, where the famine was most severe. In Sudan, guerrillas battling Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi's regime shot down a passenger plane last August, killing 60 people, and threatened to shoot any relief aircraft that tried to land in the south, where some 2 million Sudanese needed food...
Garang, a Christian member of the Dinka tribe, vows that in spite of the human cost, they will continue fighting until the government of recently elected Prime Minister Sadiq el Mahdi stops trying to impose Islamic customs upon the Christians and pagans of the south. "Religion must no longer be used for political aims," Garang, 41, told TIME last week in his first interview with a major U.S. publication inside southern Sudan. "Anyone can see that Sudan is disintegrating. There is no government by the people, for the people. A new Sudan must be born...