Omar Al-Bashir and Africa's Longest War

by Paul Moorcraft

  The first peace deal

  With Haile Selassie’s blessing, northern and southern leaders as well as church intermediaries met in early February at the Hilton Hotel in Addis Ababa. Preliminary meetings had taken place discreetly for months beforehand. The north ordered a unilateral ceasefire, while the SSLM still wanted outright secession. In later years southern mythology portrayed the Addis talks as a sell-out, but this failed to understand African circumstances at the time. The Ethiopian government was fighting secessionist movements, not least in Eritrea, and the founding shibboleth of the OAU, after the terrible civil wars in the Congo and Nigeria, was to maintain unity – the traditional colonial boundaries – at all costs. Numeiri carefully selected military officers who were prepared to compromise, while Major General Lagu was also determined to reach a deal. Before tackling the main constitutional issues, they agreed on English as the principal language of the south. The borders were to be maintained as of 1 January 1956, the line inherited from the imperial power, and the south would keep its administrative unity. A southern regional assembly would administer, inter alia, education, public health and the police, but the national government in Khartoum would control defence, foreign affairs and the currency. Juba would be the site of the regional government.

  But the sticking point remained the army. The southern delegation wanted a separate army run by southern officers; the north believed this was the first step to independence. After days of deadlock, the emperor, as host, suggested a compromise. A Southern Command of 12,000 officers and men – half of whom would be southerners – would be set up. The deal was finally signed on 27 February 1972.

  Numeiri declared a great victory, made the temporary ceasefire permanent and toured the south, where he was warmly received. So great was the relief at the end of seventeen years of fighting, with hundreds of thousands displaced and thousands killed, that Lagu’s concerns that the 6,000 southern troops would all be Anya-Nya were glossed over. The deal could work, but it all relied on goodwill and trust. Despite the lack of trust, some goodwill persisted and the agreement held for eleven years.

  Northerners proclaimed Numeiri as the great peacemaker, and rumours spread that he would soon earn the Nobel Peace Prize. Lagu went north and was made a major general in the Sudanese army, but not vice president as he had expected (a mistake which was carefully avoided in the 2005 agreement). The new government in Juba was dominated by mission-educated local Equatorians, while a number of returning educated exiles were generally disappointed, as were the far more populous Nuer and Dinka of Bahr al-Ghazal and Upper Nile. Tens of thousands of refugees had to be repatriated from across the southern borders, while an even larger number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) from north and south had to be rehomed. Led by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), a host of religious and humanitarian NGOs set about the task of repatriation and resettlement. Many of them would be still be there more than four decades later, as the NGOs emerged as a kind of imperial rearguard, covering the Western retreat from Africa.

  Progress was soon made with the formation of a more representative police force, but Khartoum could not shake off the legacy of the northern-centric army as the most – perhaps only – effective national instrument. As the maker, breaker and broker of power in Khartoum, how could it be diluted by southerners who might use it to undermine the country’s fragile unity? This was the perennial question in the north. And the traditional divisions remained: most of the rank and file of the northern-dominated army were from peripheral areas, mainly the west, while the officer class came from the traditionally powerful riverine elite. Ironically, many officers were prepared to accept secession rather than dilute their beloved national army. The army’s power could be destroyed in the north as well as the south, or so some officers feared. After seventeen years of fighting and propaganda, some officers just could not tolerate ‘slaves’ and ‘terrorists’ in their army and so resigned. Southerners feared that the Southern Command would soon push out experienced insurgents or otherwise suffer discrimination from the larger and more sophisticated northern army. Perhaps a few southern idealists saw the new dispensation as the chance to create a proper non-tribal southern force. And an even smaller group might even have hoped that a unified democratic Sudan could emerge – eventually.

  If the police and prisons were indigenized quite quickly, the army integration was scheduled to last five years. Just over 6,000 insurgents, proportionately from each province, were integrated and retrained. A few were sent abroad, for example, the promising Captain John Garang de Mabior, destined to command the whole southern army, was sent to the USA for advanced instruction. Over half the former fighters were deployed in public works on farms, road and forestry, although the job-creation schemes soon petered out because of lack of funds. Inevitably some frustrated warriors grew unhappy. In late 1974 and early 1975 mutinies erupted primarily in Juba and Wau in attempts to restart the war. But the new regional president, Abel Alier, intervened. Alier was a respected human rights lawyer and judge, a Dinka Bor Christian whom Numeiri made vice president of Sudan. More often the local crises required the authority of Major General Lagu to bring the dissidents into line.

  Temporary peace

  Surprisingly, the north-south peace deal held for eleven years. After elections in 1973, the regional assembly in Juba stumbled along, despite the ethnic and personal fissures, and the fact that Khartoum still made unwelcome top-down decisions. They also argued about the controversial Jonglei Canal project. At least it proved the northerners wrong – that southerners could make a reasonable stab at a functioning democracy, one far removed from the northern dictatorship. There, the Numeiri government still struggled to resolve the place of religion in the constitution. On the economic front, following the massive oil-price hikes after the 1973 Yom Kippur/Ramadan war, vast amounts of Arab petro-dollars flowed into Sudan. It was designed to be the breadbasket of the Middle East. The Kuwaitis poured in money for vast agricultural schemes, especially in the sugar industry. And British entrepreneur Tiny Rowland’s Lonrho company invested over $25 million to develop, with the Sudanese government, the world’s largest sugar plantation near Kosti.

  The most important development in this period was the discovery of black gold. In 1978-79 oil deposits were confirmed by the US Chevron company. The oil was mainly to be found in the south. So was this ‘southern oil’? The politicians in Juba certainly thought so, and also wanted the refineries to be built in the south. More crucially, southerners demanded the future oil pipelines be built through the south to the Kenyan coast, not via the more accessible northern route to Port Sudan. As in many African countries, oil was to spawn conflict as much as prosperity.

  Economic liberalization and Western investments as well as oil development marked a shift in foreign policy, as well as economic advance. As with most military regimes, weapons supplies were a weathervane of such changes. Khartoum’s anti-communist crackdowns had helped to sour relations with Moscow, but the Russians still sold their weapons. These supplies dried up when Moscow backed Sudan’s Marxist enemies in Ethiopia. China replaced Russian supplies, while Egypt continued to be an important military and diplomatic partner. With the warming of Western economic relations, so too Washington started to sell more weapons, not least to counter Soviet support of Ethiopia and Libya. US arms sales increased until renewed conflict in the south changed the equation.

  Some Sudanese historians depict this period of peace in the south, economic growth and (relative) diplomatic success as a golden age. Better relations with Washington were matched by a flurry of economic deals with western European states. In July 1978 Numeiri was elected as chairman of the OAU. Sudan appeared at last to be fulfilling its continental ambitions. Relations with the Arab world were complicated by Numeiri’s lonely support for Anwar Sadat’s signing of the Camp David accord with Israel in 1978. This pleased Washington, but angered the Arab League.

  Numeiri had waged peace with the south and indirect
ly with Israel and stabilized the economy. Although his military regime was apparently in control, discontent still simmered in the army and Numeiri’s long feud with opposition political leaders, especially Sadiq al-Mahdi, had not been ended. Any accommodation would need a decision on the role of Islam in the state. The earlier compromises of ‘freedom of religion’ could not be enough for the Islamists. Ultimately, a political settlement in the Muslim north would mean tearing up the deal in the south.

  It is a recurring pattern in military interventions worldwide that coup leaders often fail to understand that what they did, others could do to them. In Africa, military dictators often pampered their officer corps and indulged their rank and file, while beefing up military intelligence to ensure that the bribes are working. Often they don’t, and history is repeated, again and again, until a charismatic and able civilian politician could sometimes break out of the vicious circle. Numeiri was a long-term army professional, but he failed to concentrate on his army’s concerns, despite all the shiny new weapons. Gradually, he became over-confident, boosted by a manic sense of divine mission, a common psychotic trait of leaders after a lengthy term in power.

  Numeiri had paid careful attention to the security requirements in the south, but failed to appreciate that this perceived favouritism would fire up the ancient sense of grievance in the west. On 5 September 1975, elite paratrooper units, mostly disgruntled westerners, mounted a coup. They did the usual – arrested some senior loyal officers, and seized the broadcast facilities in Omdurman. They made the mistake of prematurely announcing the capture of Numeiri. But the president had, by chance – or divine providence, as he later put it – shifted his overnight location. Numeiri did not rally his loyal troops, but fled from Khartoum and hid in a friend’s house in the capital’s outer suburbs. Loyal troops, led by the tough chief of staff, General Muhammad al-Baghir, managed to crush the mutiny in a few hours. It was a small event in the crowded history of Sudanese coups, but it was significant because it helped to persuade an increasingly deranged Numeiri that he had a divine right to rule Sudan. It was then a short step to believing that he alone was destined to carry on the Prophet’s mission on earth.

  Another coup attempt against Numeiri

  At 05.00 on 2 July 1976 a more concerted coup de main was planned. It was long customary in Sudan to greet incoming visitors at the airport, no matter what the hour. This was even more elaborately organized when a president returned. General Baghir and a whole posse of ministers were scheduled to greet Numeiri on his flight back from Europe. Numeiri, in another one of his imagined divine intercessions, arrived early and the entourage was dispersing when a wall of fire raked the runway outside the main airport reception. The president was bundled into a car into a hideaway and General Baghir swung into his coup-crushing operation again. But he had few forces in the capital. He needed to summon units from around the country, with the nearest being Shendi. Communications were down and he used the Sudan News Agency wire services. Troops poured into the three cities on the Friday and allowed loyalist troops to win the day. Surviving rebel soldiers were pursued into the desert and shot out of hand.

  Despite its prompt destruction, this coup had been well planned. It might well have worked if Numeiri had arrived on time and been conveniently assassinated at the airport. The man behind the coup was Numeiri’s old enemy, Sadiq al-Mahdi. He had formed the National Front in exile in Libya. Under its banner, al-Mahdi had assembled representatives of the traditional parties, all banned under Numeiri’s rule. Colonel Gaddafi was a man with a small power base and big ideas, and he had lots of oil money to nourish his dreams of creating a regional empire, which included Sudan, with the first chunk being the occupation of Darfur. The highly volatile Libyan leader later planned to create a pan-African empire. But in the mid-1970s he was focusing on toppling Numeiri. The Sudanese president diagnosed Gaddafi as ‘a split personality – both evil’. The Ethiopians connived in Libya’s coup plans because Addis Ababa believed that the Eritrean insurgency would collapse without Khartoum’s support. The Soviet Union was also in on the plot, disturbed by Numeiri’s crackdown on communists, ejection of Soviet advisors and Khartoum’s recent tilt to the West. Gaddafi had formed an Islamic Legion to implement his plans, but in his training camps in the southern Libyan desert he had also arranged the training of Sudanese, many of them traditional Ansar loyal to al-Mahdi. Some of the Ansar had already infiltrated the three cities and had stashed arms ready for the military component whose action at the airport would spark the coup. Some estimates suggest that 3,000 were killed in the brief but bitter putsch. Almost 100 rebels were subjected to show trials and promptly executed. Sadiq al-Mahdi was tried in absentia and sentenced to death.

  The extent of popular support for the exiled politicians prompted Numeri to offer what was then called ‘national reconciliation’. The president was a master manipulator and hoped to entice some exiles to return under a general amnesty, thus weakening the exiled forces. Some communists and Ansar returned, as did Sadiq al-Mahdi, who soon left the country, unconvinced of Numeiri’s sincerity. Exiled leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood also came back. The most prominent was Hassan al-Turabi, whom Numeiri elevated to the position of attorney general. Al-Turabi set about re-forging the power base of the Brotherhood and revived the issue of sharia law being enforced throughout the country. Southerners believed this concept had been buried at the 1972 peace talks. Numeiri also preached national reconciliation to the disaffected regions in northern Sudan, including Darfur and the Nuba Mountains. He promised a degree of regional self-government comparable with the south, although the centrifugal pull of Khartoum – and especially the national economic plans – were to prove too strong for much regional assertion in the north.

  Despite the apparent national reconciliation and vaunted northern regionalization, power was held not in the single ruling party, the Sudan Socialist Union, but increasingly in a palace cabal, headed by a certain Dr Bahauddin Muhammad Idris. Sacked from the University of Khartoum for allegedly leaking examination questions to a favoured female student, Dr Idris had somehow ingratiated himself into Numeiri’s court. Idris became in effect the president’s PA, and introduced him to some dubious characters, the most infamous being Adnan Khashoggi. The flamboyant arms dealer was born in Mecca in 1935 and educated in the US. Said to be the richest man in the world, he certainly owned the world’s then largest yacht, which was featured in the James Bond movie Never Say Never Again. Khashoggi enjoyed extensive influence and contacts in the Middle East and America, despite his involvement in numerous scandals, most notably the Iran-Contra affair. Equally at home in austere Bedouin tents or in wild champagne-and starlet-fuelled parties in London, Washington and Monaco, his sophistication charmed Numeiri. The shrewd Saudi made millions, if not billions, out of schemes in Sudan that sounded grand, but didn’t quite work or were not built. Many of the able technocrats whom Numeiri had originally set up to run petro-dollar projects were sidelined by the corrupt cabal inside the Palace.

  The south: going backwards

  The south was generally peaceful, although Juba was inevitably a hothouse of political infighting and even plans to return to war. Some military plotters were amnestied by Numeiri under the terms of the national reconciliation deals. The exiled opposition in Libya, and some who had returned to Khartoum, had also reached out to the southerners, in a pattern which was to repeat itself over the next three decades. Major General Lagu had kept some of his options open by talks with, and cash from, Sadiq al-Mahdi. In response Numeiri manoeuvred Lagu out of the army and into parliamentary life, as the southern president, thus removing his powerbase. A good soldier and a bad politician – as with nearly all the prominent soldier-statesmen in southern history – Lagu overpaid his favourites and helped to widen the Equatorian v Dinka rift, thus empowering Numeiri’s game of divide and rule. In February 1980 Numeiri engineered the sacking of Lagu and the dissolution of the assembly. Abel Alier, much better at working with Khartoum, or a stooge
to some southern radicals, returned as president. His mandate was to use some of the Arab petro-dollars to develop southern agriculture and oil projects. Despite his diplomacy, the returned southern president had a short tenure. A report by Alier condemning plans to re-divide the south was treated as a personal insult by Numeiri because it implied that he had been saved from his own cowardice when southern troops rescued him during the 1976 failed coup. Furious, the president simply dissolved the southern assembly and set up a transitional government led by a Muslim southern officer, General Gismallah Abdullah Rasas.

  Numeiri’s plans for re-dividing the south into powerful regions did appeal to many tribal groups who feared the domination of the populous, statuesque and warlike Dinka. Others saw it as an obvious divide-and-rule tactic by which Khartoum could re-impose Arabization. In December 1982 Numeiri toured the south and was met by unresponsive crowds, unlike his previous tours where he was hailed as a peacemaker. In particular, he was jeered at by hostile students at the well-known Rumbek secondary school. The famously thin-skinned president lost his temper, closed the school and later arrested politicians who opposed the plan to divide the south into three provinces. In June 1983 Numeiri suddenly announced on television that the south would be divided into three provinces: Bahr al-Ghazal, Equatoria and the Upper Nile, with three separate capitals at Wau, Juba and Malakal. This removed Juba as the central hotbed of dissident views and potential southern unity. He also set about Arabizing and Islamizing the south to unify Sudan. Numeiri had in effect torn up the Addis agreement.