Omar Al-Bashir and Africa's Longest War

by Paul Moorcraft

  Back in Khartoum, the southern political remnants of the Round Table Conference were still around, despite the intermittent legal harassment. The most important, Clement Mboro’s Southern Front and William Deng’s SANU-Inside, squabbled as much as co-operated. At least they got to talk to northern politicians. This played a role in the compromise deal that was finally reached in 1972. Meanwhile, the armed wing continued to fight on, while pleading with the leaders to get their act together. These same leaders could not even agree on what to call their future independent state. Many thought of ‘South Sudan’ as an imperial legacy and a mere geographical construct. In March 1969 the ‘Nile Provisional Government’ was set up, at least in name. It was led by Gordon Muortat Mayen Muborjok, who had served as a middle-ranking police officer and who later defected to the rebels. He was one of the few early nationalists who actually reached the promised land by serving in the federal post-2005 government.

  It was under Muborjok’s leadership that the Israelis were brought into the fray; a handful of Anya-Nya went to Israel for training and occasionally Israeli advisors entered the deep south. Mossad was always looking for peripheral wars to distract Arab foes. The war in Yemen, for example, had engaged 70,000 of Egypt’s best troops during crucial stages of the Arab-Israeli conflict. A handful of advisers, as in south Sudan, could set up a lot of distractions for real or potential Arab enemies.

  The failure of leadership continued to afflict the north as much as the south. In July 1966 Sadiq al-Mahdi became prime minster and it seemed to many urban secular intellectuals and religious conservatives alike that cometh the hour, cometh the man. He was young (31), the great-grandson of the Mahdi, an author, an imam to the Ansar and an Oxford graduate. Moreover, he was decisive, and appeared to have a national vision which transcended all the debilitating prejudices. He transformed the Umma Party from a religious relic into a modern political machine; encouragingly, he appointed younger ministers based on competence and not merely to balance the party or tribal ticket. Even some southern leaders found grounds for optimism in the al-Mahdi coalition. He wanted to ditch the ramshackle transitional constitution that followed the end of military rule. In trying to balance an Islamic with a secular orientation for a new constitution, the Umma split, however. Despite all the promise, al-Mahdi’s government fell after ten months. A new makeshift coalition, led again by Mohamed Ahmed al-Majub, soon became mired in familiar tribal and sectarian passions. Rumours spread of another military coup.

  Sadiq al-Mahdi had opposed the first round of military intervention in 1958. It was an interesting historical counterpoint that a young officer, Omar al-Bashir, graduated from the Khartoum Military Academy in December 1966, during the apex of al-Mahdi’s brief but meteoric rise to power. In later years I spoke to both leaders at length. Al-Mahdi still impressed with his intellectual debate in almost perfect English; his physical height, demeanour and sculpted beard echoed the age of great Arab conquerors. Yet he became a spent force, the early political promise sullied by his own indecision and the sheer intractability of Sudan’s many problems. The soldier who toppled him, Omar al-Bashir, was obviously the more practical man, a pragmatic officer and populist who could reach out beyond the religious elites to touch the common man – albeit only in the north. Both men were two key antagonists in the 1989 culmination of the yo-yo years of military and civilian rule.

  That tipping point was still to come, however. In May 1967 the ineffectual Mohamed Ahmed al-Majub returned as prime minister, backed by an Umma faction that had deserted Sadiq al-Madhi in favour of an imam who was a relative of the Mahdi’s successor, Khalifa Abdullahi. That original succession battle had been fought over eighty years before, a classic example of Sudanese leaders’ absorption in bygone struggles. Party politics was dominated by the Umma (and its various wings) and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP); both were anachronistic feudal movements. Al-Mahdi’s influence stemmed from his relationship with the original Mahdist Ansar revolt, and much of the party’s power base had been in the west. It had become an exclusive family concern, based on hereditary principles. Likewise, the DUP was based on the Khatmiyyah sect run by the Mirghani family, whose influence was largely in the east. These two political dynasties and their religious allies took centre stage, while the communists and Brotherhood were usually pushed into the wings.

  The prime minister’s arrogance propelled him to ignore domestic politics as almost beneath him. Al-Majub had received previous accolades as a foreign minister. He preferred to indulge his taste for international meddling. Some of it was justified: such as countering the communist Derg government in Addis Ababa that was arming the Anya-Nya. Intercession in Eritrea, Chad, the Central African Republic and the Congo seemed less pressing. In the last case, Khartoum’s arming of rebels in the Congo could have disturbed one of the Anya-Nya’s southern sanctuaries. In later years supporting rebels, such as the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, became a convenient counterweight for Khartoum’s floundering southern strategy. In the longer term, Khartoum’s cross-border stirring undermined its complaints about its neighbours intervening within Sudan’s borders. And al-Majub helped to set this trend.

  If Khartoum was perhaps overactive in foreign intervention, its handling of economic issues was underwhelming. Benign neglect allowed the traditional tribal and family domination of the riverine trade to flourish. But Sudan needed big foreign investment, not least to satisfy the demands of the marginalized peoples in the east and west. Slow economic growth, political instability and a civil war did not encourage much foreign investment. What plans there were depended on nationalizing private cotton schemes that further deterred foreign money. An antiquated and grossly unfair taxation structure plus reckless borrowing increased the national debt by a factor of ten in the four years of ham-fisted civilian governance.

  The events of 25 May 1969 appeared inevitable to all except the members of the Constituent Assembly who were totally engrossed in mutual backstabbing. Colonel Ja’afar Numeiri and his movement of Free Officers ordered the army to seize key installations in the three towns of the capital. The coup was led by a handful of officers and around 500 men, some mere cadets – although two companies of tough paratroopers also took part. Just as in Brigadier Omar al-Bashir’s future coup of 1989, the plotters in 1969 fell out about the timing and so only a few of Numeiri’s dedicated followers pressed ahead. Under cover of darkness one armoured column seized the main bridges and the broadcasting centre. Another column took over army headquarters and arrested senior commanders and later senior politicians. It was done efficiently and without shedding any blood. Numeiri’s peaceful revolution was consciously modelled on the 1952 Egyptian putsch by the Committee of Free Officers, which proclaimed secular Arab socialism. Nobody, not even the religious conservatives, appeared to mourn the abrupt termination of the second round of civilian rule in Sudan.

  Visitors to Sudan always comment on the hospitality and warmth of northerners. Sadiq al-Mahdi, once one of the more promising leaders, was an utterly urbane host as was Hassan al-Turabi, another merging leader. I speak personally as a house guest of both these men (and many other Sudanese politicians). Yet until the late sixties no single leader had been able to climb out of the swamp of selfish nepotistic greed or, when a few did, they did not espouse a vision for the whole country. The Sudanese had looked at the ‘big men’ in Arab politics, such as Nasser, and wondered whether they could do better. Nasser had been humbled by his crushing defeat by the Israelis in the 1967 Six Day War. Ever-optimistic, the elite in Khartoum now hoped that Numeiri, a political soldier unlike the affable and apolitical Abboud, could lead from the front and, above all, end the north-south conflict. Would the so-called May Revolution in 1969 finally deliver on all the aspirations of independence?

  The Numeiri years

  Numeiri had been a political activist his whole life. He had been expelled from school for organizing a strike against British rule, and later kicked out of the army for his left-wing politics, but was myst
eriously accepted back into the officer corps. After a course at the US Army Command and Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, he was appointed to run an army training school, a useful position to groom young cadets in the ideals of his Free Officers’ Movement. The son of a postman, albeit with aristocratic forbears in Dongola, he modelled his revolution closely on that of Nasser.

  Judith Miller, of the New York Times, interviewed him a number of times. She did not appear impressed:

  Flabby, black-skinned and tainted in the eyes of many of his racist northern countrymen by his facial scars – inflicted by tribal healers to protect children against the Nile’s innumerable eye diseases – he was a poor orator.1

  He was clever, energetic and ruthless, however. His small band of military acolytes was determined to reshape the social and economic order in a new socialist state that would be avowedly secular. And, like Nasser, Numeiri believed in pan-Arabism. The Revolutionary Command Council would need its sometimes reluctant allies in the Sudan Communist Party to achieve its goal, not least to wipe out the main religious opponents, the Islamists, especially the Ansar. After the Ansar had staged mass protests in Omdurman, in March 1970 the Free Officers decided to act against the fortified heart of old-fashioned Mahdism. A large flotilla was sent up the White Nile to attack the well-defended Aba Island. Crack army troops killed thousands of Ansar after stiff resistance. The land and properties of all the extended Mahdi’s family were confiscated and the urbane Sadiq al-Mahdi had to smuggle himself out of the country for a lengthy exile.

  Khartoum’s radical socialist army government then proceeded to nationalize nearly all the private commercial sector, including large and successful Sudanese-owned companies and banks. Compensation was meagre. Workers were awarded more rights, however, and debt and rent relief was given to the vast army of tenants in the Gezira cotton scheme. School numbers were boosted. Nevertheless, as with nearly all the economic programmes of state socialism, the five-year plans failed. A radical foreign policy accompanied domestic socialist reforms. Loans were sought from the Soviet bloc and Numeiri toured Eastern Europe, China and North Korea, as well as engaging in pan-Arab affairs. Numeiri shifted from the West, especially Britain and the USA, most notably in arms purchases. New Soviet technicians came into Sudan to assist with the expansion of the army from 18,000 to 50,000 men, with an arsenal of Soviet tanks, artillery and aircraft. Egypt also supplied equipment including armoured personnel carriers.

  Elements of the communist party had long been wary of the military government, not least because they had wanted to create a large popular revolution of peasants and workers, not one based on a putsch by a small band ofpetit-bourgeois officers. They had also disliked Numeiri’s flirtation with Libya and Egypt in the Tripoli Charter, which set up another pan-Arab experiment, the Federation of Arab Republics. Moreover, the ailing Nasser and the erratic Libyan firebrand, Colonel Gaddafi, had eviscerated their communist parties. Numeiri initially purged some of the main procommunist officers in the Revolutionary Command Council. Believing he was popular with the people, the president had by now alienated all the political parties and movements in the country and his military intelligence thwarted at least ten planned or actual attempts to overthrow him in the first two years of his rule. On 19 July 1971 surviving pro-communist officers, to avoid imminent arrest, staged a hasty coup in Khartoum in broad daylight. Sudanese communist party leaders were on a visit to London and many surviving pro-communist officers had been caught unawares.

  So was Numeiri, who was captured. Communist prisoners in the city were freed and encouraged to stage a protest throughout Khartoum, waving red flags and shouting revolutionary slogans. National radio announced even more sweeping agricultural and commercial nationalization. The instinctive conservatism of the Sudanese population, especially in the three towns, was alienated. The Northern Defence Corps based in Shendi remained loyal and moved on the capital, while a tank unit freed Numeiri, after a fierce fire-fight. Egypt’s new president, Anwar Sadat, also intervened. Egyptian army units guarding dam installations were ordered into Khartoum and the Egyptian air force helped to fly in loyal Sudanese troops. The hasty communist coup lasted just three days before it was crushed. The main plotters were tried in secret and promptly hanged, including those who had fled to Libya (and quickly returned). Thousands of communists were arrested and detained in a comprehensive crackdown.

  The rapid slaughter of the Ansar and then the communists may have secured Numeiri’s shaky throne, but his blood-soaked reprisals and secret trials and executions offended the Sudanese belief and pride in the civility of their political life. Everybody might squabble and even tolerate coups, but bloodshed among Muslims was generally viewed as haram. The attempted communist coup shook Numeiri’s confidence and he moved away from his left-wing socialist stance. A few communists were absorbed into Numeiri’s new Sudan Socialist Union, but the power of the communist party was broken for ever, though it survived for a long time as a rump. Numeiri’s movement was the only legal party in the country, and the press was also strictly controlled. Just to make sure he was genuinely popular, in August 1971 a rigged poll allowed Numeiri to be president, for another six years.

  The southern front under Numeiri

  That was a temporary band-aid for northern troubles, but what of the civil war in the south? The communist party had argued for a deal allowing southern autonomy, but the freshly purged and enlarged officer corps wanted even more arms and troops to crush what they still regarded as a ‘mutiny’, albeit a rather long and extensive one. Nevertheless, a political deal was back on the table. Numeiri had to shore up his options.

  In the south, Aggrey Jaden was still trying to achieve the apparently impossible – a political command for the Anya-Nya. The capable Joseph Lagu had been demoted from commander in chief and so refused to operate with the titular commander in chief, the long-serving but illiterate and incompetent Emidio Odongi – that at least was Lagu’s view. The fighting commanders still regarded the political leadership as inefficient and often cowardly fat-cats. After the Six Day War Lagu offered to open a unified southern military front for the Israelis. Lagu even made a secret visit to Israel where a more fully supportive Mossad decided to provide extra money and weapons. Israel also decided to drop the pretence of supporting the Southern Sudan Provisional Government, to focus on Lagu’s determination to unite the southern fighting forces, without pandering to the hapless politicians.

  Lagu certainly appeared brighter and more experienced than Odongi. And coming from the small Madi ethnic group, he had soon mastered the main southern languages as well as Arabic and English. After attending perhaps the best secondary school in the South, at Rumbek, he was one of only two southerners to attend the Sudan Military College, where he was commissioned as a lieutenant in 1960. He defected from the Sudanese army and by 1963 was leading the Anya-Nya, where he developed an equal contempt for southern politicians as well as internecine tribal warfare. The Israeli connection, allied to his military skills, finally enabled Lagu to dominate southern military resistance.

  Israeli military training and regular air drops of weapons were important to the Anya-Nya, but so was Mossad’s adroit diplomacy. Emperor Haile Selassie was easily persuaded to allow a southern training camp to operate on his territory, not least to move forces across the north into the Upper Nile. Khartoum and other Arab capitals had been supporting the Eritrean insurgency in Ethiopia’s far north. Israeli support for the Anya-Nya also came via Uganda. From January 1971 small groups of southerners began training, most notably in military communications, in Israel. At the same time Lagu renamed his (relatively) more united forces as the Southern Sudan Liberation Movement. Lagu also gave up on the original political demands to create an integrated army. Logistically it made sense to allow ethnic armies in the various southern states, with a theoretical command centre. This was later to exacerbate tribal divisions.

  By 1970 better training, organization, weapons and communications moved the civil war into a
more aggressive phase. Major roads were mined leaving the key towns in government hands, but often dangerously isolated. Even Juba, the southern capital, was shelled by artillery. The Sudanese were hard pressed to supply by air, despite the influx of Soviet advisers and new fighter and transport planes and helicopters. Soviet armour was sometimes met by successful use of Israeli anti-tank weapons. In order to regain some control of the Equatorian hinterland of Juba, Egyptian commandos supported the Sudanese army.

  The southern rebels now fought better, but it depended partly on the varying quality of commanders’ leadership as well as the different terrain. The rugged landscape of forest and hills of Equatoria was ideal for guerrilla warfare, especially during the rainy season, but in the dry season along the border with northern Sudan, the grassland, scrub and desert were easier to patrol and harass from the air or along the Nile and other minor rivers. The Nuer Anya-Nya, with supplies from Ethiopia, began to hit armoured columns and seize large amounts of arms from the government. They also hit columns trying to break the on-off siege of Wau, as well as destroying the railway to the town. Military intelligence in the north put full-time southern fighters at around 13,000, more than double five years previously. The insurgents were much better armed and trained, thanks mainly to foreign support. Some senior army officers in Khartoum, who had been conducting the fighting in the south, felt that their COIN had reached a stalemate. Perhaps a political approach might finally work, at least temporarily, to allow the northern army to regroup.