In LRA's case, its main support came from the Sudanese government in Khartoum and many suspect it still maintains the patronage of Omar el-Bashir, the country's president, himself indicted for war crimes by the ICC.
Johnson's career spanned 60 years, and he featured in many films, including the 2008 movie Boy In The Striped Pyjamas, and Khartoum in 1966 alongside Charlton Heston and Laurence Olivier.
Ibrahim added a note of thanks to Amnesty and others who demanded her release – from the European Union to the American ambassador in Khartoum – "and all those who were praying for me".
They arrived in Khartoum days later.
I was four days in Khartoum.
This is not because the suffering is over almost half a million people fled their homes in 2013 but because the conflict has become muddled.When it erupted in 2003, rebels in the Justice and Equality Movement and the Sudan Liberation Army, both composed mainly of black Africans, took up arms against the government in Khartoum, run mainly by Arabs.
For the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), the southerners' main party, led by Salva Kiir, it is the culmination of half a century of often bloody struggle for recognition against successive Islamist regimes in Khartoum.
As one Khartoum commentator dryly observed: "They don't care who rules them, they care that they cannot afford to eat".The student-led protests are also expected to continue.
The current round has lasted 16 years, killed 2m people, reduced income per person to $270 and turned the country into a pariah.A bleak picture, but somehow the northern two-thirds of Sudan, which is to say the part of the country actually run from Khartoum, has managed to maintain some semblance of normality.
It has given up its ambitious idea of promoting a genuinely national electoral strategy, which could have seen the southern movement leading a broad alliance of all of Sudan's oppressed ethnic groups in Darfur, in the south and in the east against the ruling NCP in Khartoum.
Southern Sudan's famine, instigated by the government in Khartoum and made worse by the indifference and incompetence of the rebel movement, is growing more severe.
