Omar Al-Bashir and Africa's Longest War

by Paul Moorcraft

  The Military Council ruled in conjunction with a toothless provisional council of ministers, which included some southerners, but not John Garang who refused to travel to Khartoum. He correctly assessed the situation as ‘Numeirism without Numeiri’. The civilians and military occasionally met together to discuss the possibility of a new constitution, sharia law and southern autonomy. Unsurprisingly, no resolution was achieved, not least because the interim leaders knew that a new election was to be held. It was easier for any politician to pass the buck and postpone such troublesome decisions.

  Getting the balance right between keeping the men in uniform well paid and well-fed but apolitical has often been tricky in African and Middle Eastern armies. Numeiri had managed to demoralize his entire army and starve them of resources in the last years of his regime. With the onset of the renewed southern offensive by the SPLA, the regular army of around 60,000 had been reduced to a defensive strategy of trying to hold and resupply garrisons in the main southern towns. The SPLA boasted perhaps as many as 10,000 trained full-time insurgents, with perhaps double that number either in training or in part-time militia roles. The collapse of the hated Numeiri regime had been a big boost to the SPLM. Although some southerners took part in the transitional government in Khartoum, the fact that Garang remained aloof burnished his credentials in the south. It also made him more important for Khartoum to court him, as the shift in the military balance of power in the south suggested that a political deal was required. Secret meetings were held in Ethiopia at the start of 1986. But talk of a government of national unity inevitably foundered on hard-line attitudes among the political parties, especially the Brotherhood. And some senior army officers were not inclined to rescind Numeiri’s policy on sharia law. The war still had a long time to run before attrition encouraged northern compromise.

  Return to civilian rule, once again

  One positive sign was a promise kept by Major General al-Dahab, the transitional supremo. He agreed to put the clock back to the electoral system of the 1960s. And the same disunited coalition resulted, although the Brotherhood’s front party, the NIF, did unexpectedly well. Their underground planning had paid off, although they were still biding their time before trying to seize power. Despite the security situation in the south, some electioneering took place there, often in the urban areas, but the southern parties had little influence in the revived assembly in Khartoum. The new government was headed by Sadiq al-Mahdi, the long-term leader of the Umma party, which had taken ninety-nine seats.

  Al-Mahdi returned as prime minister in May 1986. He faced the same hoary problems – except most of them had got much worse, especially the war. He headed another coalition, but desperate optimists believed that he was the civilian leader who could finally lead Sudan to the promised land. After all, he was a highly educated Oxbridge man who also had spiritual clout as the descendant of the Mahdi, and the religious head of the Ansar, as well as boss of the Umma party. Therefore, as a politician and imam, he had the religious authority and intellect to curb the excesses of the Islamic fundamentalists, led by Hassan al-Turabi, who did not join al-Mahdi’s coalition. Moreover, since al-Turabi was his brother-in-law, perhaps the family connection might ease relations with the Brotherhood. Yet much of the political infighting in Sudan’s elite had long been within family relationships, so kinship was probably the least persuasive element in the optimism. Al-Madhi’s previous tenure as premier, twenty years before, had been brief. Now, matured by exile, a death sentence (in absentia) and numerous political battles, he had the chance to prove his worth. He started well with visionary speeches about ending the hated September Laws that would be a precursor to a southern peace deal. He would be a peacemaker, but as reinsurance he promised also to reform and re-equip an army that was taking a real pasting from the SPLA. Of the economic collapse, he said little, though many hoped that peace would bring its own financial dividends.

  Except for refurbishing al-Mahdi family properties and lands seized under Numeiri, the premier showed little energy after his first bout of speechifying. He seemed incapable of acting on his declared vision. His three years in power were marked above all by indecision. As the war worsened, northerners became embroiled in the everlasting crisis of Arab identity versus pan-Sudan unity. The influx of foreign Islamists added to this renewed sense of Arabism, as did increased support from Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, and even Libya; Gaddafi was always keen to promote his version of Pan-Arabism, especially now that his former protégé, al-Mahdi, was in power.

  The kaleidoscope of changing political alliances – most of them based on pettiness not principles – defies concise description. Perhaps the most perplexing was al-Madhi’s decision to appoint his brother-in-law as attorney general once more, to reform the September Laws that al-Turabi had originally devised for Numeiri. Since the Brothers had made it clear that there could be ‘no replacement for Allah’s laws’, little reform could be expected. More promising were the sporadic talks in Addis with the SPLM and, in November 1988, a temporary ceasefire was agreed – one of many in the north-south saga. Divisions over a deal with the SPLM helped to split the al-Mahdi-led coalition. In February 1989 al-Mahdi managed to patch together another coalition, this time with his brother-in-law, finally bringing in the National Islamic Front. Senior officers in the army, including the minister of defence, resigned, partly because the NIF was hostile to a peace deal. Al-Turabi was promoted to deputy prime minister and minister of foreign affairs. Other Brothers in the NIF took over key security portfolios such as the ministry of the interior. Behind the scenes they also built up their financial interests in the Islamic banking system. In 1983 the Al-Shamal Islamic bank had been set up in Khartoum; this had close links with the Saudi investments in the Faisal Islamic Bank of Sudan. The Brotherhood was inching towards supreme power. The work was not yet complete, however, not least in the number and strength of Muslim Brotherhood cells in the army. The commander of the army and 150 senior officers sent a written ultimatum to the prime minister that he should form a national government to deal with the SPLM and reverse the plummeting economic decline. Nearly all the political parties (except the NIF) and many professional bodies and unions signed a ‘National Declaration of Peace’. They wanted a national unity government, but – as ever – unity was the elusive Sudanese ingredient.

  Sadiq’s war

  Sadiq al-Mahdi was failing on all fronts. Since the start of his administration he had been committed to resolving the southern crisis. He spent a whole day talking to John Garang at the OAU summit in Addis in July 1986, although their long discussion was not fruitful. Nevertheless, a bigger north-south dialogue took place in the following month, based on the Koka Dam Agreement of the previous March. This seemed to be producing results, but then in August 1986 a Shilluk SPLA unit deployed a shoulder-launched SAM-7 to shoot down a Sudan Airways Fokker Friendship on a scheduled domestic flight from Khartoum to Malakal, killing all the sixty passengers and crew on board. Al-Madhi was given intercepted SPLA signals information that the Shilluk commander had gloated about the shooting. The prime minister publicly decried the SPLA as terrorists and sent militias in the pay of the north to destroy a wide swathe of Shilluk villages. This was almost a replay of what happened in Rhodesia in 1978. A SAM-7 was fired at a civilian Viscount aircraft flying on a scheduled flight from the holiday resort of Kariba to the capital, Salisbury. The leader of the insurgents responsible, Joshua Nkomo, was perceived to have laughed in a radio interview about the incident. The Rhodesian prime minister, Ian Smith, broke off promising secret peace talks with Nkomo, calling him a terrorist. Instead Smith ordered a series of reprisal raids on Nkomo’s bases around Lusaka, Zambia. In both cases a shoulder-launched Russian Strela missile ended possible peace talks in the two African states.

  When al-Mahdi came to power his influence in the professional army was weak. The rival Khatmiyya sect was stronger among the officer corps and the Muslim Brotherhood had already made many inroads; hence his tendency to rel
y on surrogate forces, especially the pro-Ansar militias. The militia strategy was not new, though it was accelerated under al-Mahdi. Over three years the alternative strategy not only failed, but caused numerous human rights’ abuses and it alienated the regular army.

  More immediately, Garang’s advance was partially thwarted by Khartoum’s use of southern tribal militias and Anya-Nya 2 holdouts who had been fighting the SPLA, partially because of lingering feuds or intrinsic ethnic differences. A new guerrilla ‘hearts and mind’ campaign began to have some success, especially as the SPLA’s more disciplined units looted from the villages far less. More and more peasants could see that the insurgents were confining the northern army to the towns and thus the peasantry were less harassed by the army. And, then in a virtuous cycle, the army’s reprisal raids on villages accused of supporting guerrillas played into SPLA hands. Meanwhile, Khartoum had to try to administer the south. A Council of the South failed to organize aid for the mass of refugees, often sick and starving, in the garrison towns held by the army.

  Although Khartoum’s propaganda described the SPLA as mere pawns of their Ethiopian hosts and Cuban instructors, a new patriotism began to infuse the southern rebellion. More and more volunteers poured into the insurgent training camps, including youngsters. The ‘child-soldiers’, who were plentiful, played into northern propaganda, while disturbing genteel supporters in the liberal salons in Europe and America. Training, weaponry and discipline improved as did morale as the guerrillas scored more and more victories against a zombie-like administration in Khartoum. In November 1987 the guerrillas captured the small town of Kurmuk, near the Ethiopian border. It was over 450 miles from the capital, but the nearby dam provided most of Khartoum’s electricity. For its own short-term ends the government encouraged a panic in the three towns and urged the citizenry to arm themselves against a barbarian invasion. The army soon recaptured Kurmuk, but Sadiq al-Mahdi had shot himself in the foot in propaganda terms. Khartoum was not threatened by a minor temporary tactical guerrilla success on the Ethiopian border, adjacent to their sanctuaries, but the panic had brought home to northerners how nervous the government was about containing the southern advance.

  Khartoum faced more serious reverses when the SPLA captured and held towns such as Pibor and Jokau. Assaults were also made against crucial economic targets, such as Bentiu’s oil installations, and then the oil depot at Malakal airport was blown up. The northern army was on its knees and the prime minster resorted to a large-scale deployment of the murahiliin, for example the deployment of Arab militias in the Bahr al-Ghazal region. The breakdown of civilian administration and the spread of famine and drought had created a restless, and reckless, army of young unemployed and leaderless men. For generations, the Baqqara coalition of Arab tribes (including the Rezeigat and the Missiriya) had fought the southern Dinka tribes, including the Twic, Malwal and Ngok, over grazing rights and water. The contest was often vicious and usually equally balanced; periods of ‘blooding’ of tribal youths were often interrupted by agreements between headmen and chiefs. Sometimes the central government had interceded via the army and police. The ancient disputes had often been settled by elders who knew the customary law and rights. Then the economic collapse of the Numeiri years was accompanied by the spread of drought from Darfur and Kordofan down into the Bahr al-Ghazal by the mid-1980s. With the traditional cattle wealth often devastated by drought, the government now handed out automatic weapons to angry and desperate Baqqara militias. Many Dinka had been driven north by the southern war and famine. It was not just a case of pushing south over the unmarked border, militias started to drive out settled Dinka communities in the north. In March 1987 thousands of Dinka were massacred in Darfur after Rezeigat militia attacked a Dinka church at Ed Daein, in east Darfur, where the militia had wrongly been informed that solar panels on the church were ‘secret SPLA communication devices’. Hundreds of Dinka were then put by police on a train bound for Nyala, but it was intercepted and burned by Arab militiamen. Khartoum denied any such massacres had taken place, the first of many such denials about tragedies in Darfur.

  Massive cattle rustling raids then ensued in Bahr al-Ghazal. Thousands of Dinka sought SPLA protection, as guerrilla units moved north into Kordofan to retrieve some of the cattle and punish joint army and militia units. Khartoum’s answer was to release bigger arsenals of weapons to the Baqqara to repel SPLA advances in early 1987. The SPLA pushed deeper into the north, nonetheless. The so-called Volcano battalion occupied parts of the Nuba Mountains. In Wau, the capital of western Bahr al-Ghazal, the government forces struggled on to hold their besieged garrison. Some of the government-supplied militia units came over to the SPLA. Khartoum rushed in extra money, supplies and weapons to keep them loyal. The Bul Nuer militia’s loyalty was crucial, for example, in the defence of the Bentiu oilfields.

  The SPLA’s successes were partly the result of disciplined command and control, which came at a price. Garang was criticized for a Stalinist style of leadership. Even his old comrade, now a major general, Kerubino Kuanyin Bol, with whom Garang had plotted the Bor mutiny which began the second war, was arrested and imprisoned. The SPLA did not have it all its own way. It was caught off-balance by an unusually successful spring 1988 offensive by the army. Several large SPLA units were destroyed in the Upper Nile and, then farther south, the army recaptured the symbolic town of Torit. To augment its unexpectedly successful counter-offensive in the deep south, Sadiq al-Mahdi decided to again unleash his Arab militias in the border areas against the Dinka. No quarter was given – the men were killed and women raped and sometimes the children were enslaved as servants or labourers for the Missiriya nomadic Arab tribes. Schools and clinics were put to the torch and wells polluted with the dead bodies. This form of tribal blitzkrieg set the pattern for the future so-called Janjaweed raids in Darfur after 2003. The militias’ rapacity of the late 1980s across the southern border was often so shocking that the regular army on occasion took action against them, to protect the Dinka and in the Nuba Mountains, even though the militias were acting under the (very loose) direction of Khartoum.

  War, famine, drought and now rinderpest were laying waste the south. Tens of thousands starved, even in the besieged army garrison towns; the SPLA mined roads and blew up bridges to use food as a weapon of war. Two million southerners took refuge in the north, many around Khartoum. Apologists for Khartoum tried to argue that the government did not practise ‘genocide’ against the southerners (although that definition might have applied to militia raids on the Dinka) because southerners fled towards the capital, unlike the German Jews who ran away from the Nazi capital of Berlin. It was not an entirely convincing argument, not least for the tens of thousands who sought refuge in Ethiopia or in the camps in Uganda and Kenya. In late 1988 the drought was broken by unusually heavy rains. Around the three towns, over 100,000 homes were inundated and that meant that the insufficient aid for the south was redirected for reconstruction in the north. November 1988 also brought another, temporary, ceasefire.

  In the beginning of 1989 a fresh SPLA offensive took the important Upper Nile town of Nasir, after heavy fighting. In February the politically significant town of Torit was recaptured by the rebels. More and more southern towns fell in March and April. Over the border in the Nuba Mountains, the SPLA overwhelmed combined army and militia units. The SPLA now controlled large swathes of the south, waiting for the remaining government garrisons to fall like ripe plums. Juba was under siege, relieved only by air. But the carcasses of cargo planes that littered the end of the runway suggested that the capital too could fall. The northern militia raids dwindled as they now were more inclined to hug army bases for protection. By the summer of 1989 the Sudanese army was on its knees. The SPLA, under the tyrannical but highly effective leadership of John Garang, was clearly in the ascendancy. Garang now toured Washington and London as a conquering hero, while Sadiq al-Mahdi appeared to be cowering in Khartoum. He was clearly losing on the battlefield. Would his Arab
allies come to his rescue?

  At the start of his period in power, al-Mahdi had to pay back his IOUs to Gaddafi. Libyan dissidents in Khartoum were rounded up and sent to Tripoli to an unpleasant welcome home. Gaddafi had the oil money and manic propensity of backing nearly every horse in every race – he financed, for example, nearly all the different sides in Chad’s endless civil war, often at same time. At one stage, under Numeiri’s rule, Gaddafi had been sending money and arms to John Garang. That stopped, but in return Gaddafi wanted a free hand in Darfur, which he planned to absorb into his domain. Sadiq al-Mahdi could never publicly agree to that and also remain in power, so typically he prevaricated and turned a blind eye to Libyan meddling in Darfur. The Islamic Legion and Baqqara militias, armed and funded by Gaddafi, swaggered around Darfur’s few urban areas. Gaddafi was more concerned with operations across the border into Chad. When some of Gaddafi’s proxy forces were defeated in Chad, they flooded into Darfur. In the Kufra oasis, Gaddafi trained his legion and various bands of pan-Arabic mercenaries. The indigenous Fur peoples formed their own army to fight back against the Arab nomadic militias and their Libyan allies. The Fur across the border in Chad supplied their tribal brethren with arms to defend themselves. The Rezeigat militias soon entered the fray in what became known as ‘the war of tribes’. Sadiq al-Mahdi supported his old tribal allies from the days of the Mahdi; in fact some of the tribal conflicts went back as far as a century before the Mahdi. The Fur insurgents were crushed. Khartoum was too distracted to think about another region that was embroiled in internal war, stirred up by Libya and Chad. The chaos was to cause an even bigger war – internationalized by the media and US film stars – after 2003.