Omar Al-Bashir and Africa's Longest War

by Paul Moorcraft

  Relations were as fraught in the east as they were in the west, although Sudanese politicians, north and south, used to meet in Addis Ababa; often under the umbrella of the OAU. The Mengistu regime regarded al-Mahdi’s government as weak as well as hostile. Al-Mahdi often castigated the Ethiopians for arming and hosting the SPLA, in their ambition to spread a communist government to the south, and even to the whole of Sudan. When southern forces crossed from Ethiopia to capture Kurmuk, all-out war between the two states loomed. Khartoum was aiding its allies, the Eritreans and Tigrayans, in their war with Mengistu’s regime, while Mengistu’s sinister Derg apparatus succoured its ally, the SPLM. The secessionist wars in Ethiopia were reaching a peak, which complicated calculations in the whole region. The SPLM was officially committed to Sudanese unity at this stage and opposed Eritrean war aims. Khartoum provided political support and asylum for the exiles of the anti-Mengistu wars, but they could not match the supply of weapons and instructors that the SPLA received from Addis. The SPLA had other sources of supply and many of their operations were far removed from their Ethiopian sanctuaries, but the Mengistu connection was still very valuable.

  So where was al-Mahdi to turn? Saudi Arabia had been open-handed with oil credits and loans. The Gulf states were generous too after the fall of Numeiri. The Americans were lukewarm. Washington had been annoyed by Khartoum’s disclosures of CIA entanglements in Operation MOSES during the long-running al-Tayib trial. Moreover, US embassy officials in Khartoum had recently been attacked by Palestinian radicals; in 1973 the US ambassador had been assassinated in Khartoum by Yasser Arafat’s men. The American embassy was drastically reduced in size and, although al-Mahdi visited Washington during his premiership, the US remained distant. The Saudis were still helpful, but Khartoum needed US and World Bank money to save the economy. Adnan Khashoggi’s dodgy deals had been cancelled and Khartoum also backtracked on a West German industrialist who was going to pay to dump nuclear waste in the northern desert. The war in the south was costing perhaps as much as $2 million per day and the debts on massive new loans from the Saudis and the Gulf, as well as longstanding loans to Moscow for weapons, could not be serviced. Soap and bread were often in short supply as was electricity. Inflation was around 80 per cent per annum. Strikes and protests were almost daily crises. Food shortages were becoming critical especially in the south. In April 1989 Operation LIFELINE SUDAN was set up. This was an agreement between Khartoum, the SPLA, UN and NGOs to co-ordinate (sometimes) to supply food and medical aid to the separate areas controlled by the government and rebels. This was possibly the world’s first humanitarian programme to assist civilians on both sides of a civil war in a sovereign state. It caused a shift from the tactic of using starvation for military purposes, although most of the southern aid was purloined by the SPLA. The OLS saved many tens of thousands of lives, but such extensive foreign feeding programmes for north as well as the south also indicated the extent of the administrative collapse of the country.

  What of the oldest ally, Egypt? Cairo adamantly refused to extradite Numeiri when the new government requested it in 1986. Field Marshal Hosni Mubarak would not consider giving up Field Marshal Numeiri, least of all to a man who was the living embodiment of the old Mahdist threat to Egypt. Then al-Mahdi compounded Sudan-Egyptian tensions by promoting al-Turabi to be deputy prime minister and, worse, foreign minister to deal with Cairo. Mubarak hated the Brotherhood and al-Turabi was its leading light in Khartoum. The government also had poor relations with the Gulf states, where al-Mahdi’s rival sect, the Khatmiyya, had entrenched religious ties. Except for the Saudis and Iraq, Sadiq al-Mahdi had managed to fall out with all his neighbours and to antagonize nearly all domestic power-brokers in the north, while waging a full-scale, and losing, war in the south. Some record, not least for a man who entered power as a purported peacemaker to inspire national salvation. The disaster was partly of his own making, but he had a devil on his shoulder, his own brother-in-law. It was al-Turabi’s plan to reap the revolutionary whirlwind and to use it to blow away what he perceived as the chaff in Khartoum.

  Egypt would not save Sadiq. On the contrary, it was rumoured in spring 1989 that the Egyptian army would restore Numeiri. The head of Egyptian military intelligence confessed: ‘One day we will have to go back and reconquer that country because these people are such a mess and they are incapable of governing themselves.’3

  Things were so bad that the parliamentarians in the Constituent Assembly finally took notice. They demanded the prime minister’s resignation; before he did resign he should end the state of emergency and freeze the September Laws he had promised to repeal right at the start of his premiership, but somehow never got around to doing. In June al-Mahdi called for a permanent ceasefire in the south and he initialled the suspension of the September Laws, to be endorsed by the assembly later. Desperate for a political breakthrough, al-Mahdi had reluctantly agreed, some months before, to a peace conference with the southern rebels. It was due to take place at the end of June 1989. It didn’t happen. In some interpretations, the army and the NIF decided on a bold pre-emptive move to prevent what they saw as a possible surrender to the south.

  History repeated itself once more. On the night of 30 June 1989, the army – led by Brigadier Omar al-Bashir – swept away the house of cards that Sadiq al-Mahdi had erected. The Brotherhood and the National Islamic Front were hovering in the wings. How was the latest round of the military versus the now-dominant Islamists going to play out? Would it be a repeat of the Egyptian experience? It all depended on the new military leader, the one who had led the revolt. He seemed to have come from nowhere.

  Chapter 4

  The Makings of a President

  Who was this man who suddenly burst on to the national and international stage in the 1989 coup? Where did he come from? What made him tick?

  Omar Hassan Ahmed al-Bashir was born on 1 January 1944 into humble farming stock in Hosh Bannaga, 100 miles north of Khartoum. The village is located on the outskirts of Shendi, on the east bank of the Nile, in the River Nile state. Shendi was once the main marketplace of the country before Khartoum existed, and it was also the centre of the slave trade. The town is about thirty miles south-west of Meroë, the capital of the ancient Kushite kingdom. Here you can walk alone, untroubled by Sudan’s rare foreign tourists, and feel you are discovering, almost for the first time, the ancient pyramids. The hundred pyramids may be much smaller than their Egyptian counterparts and many of the summits were lopped off by a nineteenth-century Italian tomb robber, but it is still today an atmospheric and compelling location.

  In 1944 Hosh Bannaga was a quiet backwater. Omar’s father was a smalltime dairy farmer. Omar belonged to the Al-Bedairyya al-Dahmashyaa Bedouin group, part of the larger Ja’yyalin coalition of tribes which dominated the middle northern section of Sudan. Many of the future politicians of Sudan would come from this tribal coalition, based in the town of Shendi.

  Omar’s birth appeared then as an inauspicious event. True, on the same day, another future Muslim politician was born: Zafarullah Khan Jamali, later to become the thirteenth prime minister of Pakistan. Yet, in 1944, neither Sudan nor Pakistan existed as independent states. Of perhaps more relevance to Islamic historians is that, on 1 January in AD 630, the Prophet Mohammed set out towards Mecca, which he would seize without bloodshed. The boy, ‘Omeira’ as he was nicknamed – Little Omar, would seize the Sudanese capital, also without bloodshed, forty-five years later.

  If January 1944 was insignificant in local Sudanese affairs, it was a pivotal month in the world war outside Omar al-Bashir’s village. In Europe, the Red Army was massing to smash its way into Nazi-occupied Poland and to occupy the Baltic states. The Americans were fighting hard in southern Italy; on 1 January General Mark Clark replaced the famous General George Patton as commander of the Seventh Army. Patton had been sidelined because of his infamous slapping and berating of two of his men suffering from what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder, though Patton w
as also deployed in a deception operation, FORTITUDE, to mislead Hitler as to the location of the D-Day landings in France. The British on that day were planning experiments with the first use of helicopters in naval warfare. From the broader imperial perspective, the Sudanese Defence Force, founded in 1925, had recruited members of the al-Bashir family. Four of the future president’s uncles had fought alongside British forces in the North African and Abyssinian campaigns, including one who had distinguished himself at El Alamein. The Sudanese volunteers were initially assured by the British, ‘The Italians are bad – they are going to rape your wives.’1

  Omar went to the local primary school, but had to move in 1953 when his father Hassan took his whole family of four boys and four girls to a new village, Sarasir, 100 miles south of Khartoum, to seek work in the booming cotton industry. Decades before, the British had set up an extensive, well-organized and well-irrigated scheme. Despite his pronounced northern accent, Hassan settled in well in the village of about 2,000 souls. The houses were made of mud bricks. The residents were not indulged with electricity or running water. The only radios were to be found playing loudly in the shops. Some of the mud-brick houses had survived when I visited the village to talk to the president’s cousins who still live there, albeit now in modest, but brick and breeze-block, houses with outside loos.

  Treated with great hospitality I listened to endless stories of the country’s ruler as a young boy. Some elderly relatives started jumping around on one leg, like demented Long John Silvers, because I struggled with the Arabic translation of the game of hopscotch. As youngsters they also played tiwa, a ball game, and marbles. Of course, the young Omar was described as a paragon. ‘Very obedient to his father,’ one cousin said proudly. Well, he would say that to a writer accompanied by the president’s men, wouldn’t he? Eventually, I got to a bit of minor sinning. Omar was described as feisty and pugnacious, active in organizing the local boys to take on the next village’s youths with catapults and sticks. Some evenings they would swim in the irrigation canals built by the British, even though they were not supposed to.

  The young Omar was a keen footballer. ‘Always in defence,’ a cousin said. ‘That’s why he went into the army.’ The pun seemed to work in both English and Arabic. A love of football stayed with Omar al-Bashir. When he later moved to Khartoum North, he was an avid supporter of Al-Hilal, one of Sudan’s most successful clubs, though in his later political life he had to be seen to support the national team.

  President al-Bashir’s stepson, Mohamed, told me an instructive story when I visited the compact but very well-tended presidential farm in North Khartoum in early 2014. A few years before, when the president was more agile, the national team had finished playing, and the president went on to the pitch and took a penalty shot against the professional goalkeeper, who saved the ball from the net. The referee gave the goalie a yellow card. The president took another penalty. The goalkeeper rather obviously jumped the wrong way, and the ball went in. The whole stadium erupted with applause and laughter.

  The president has a reputation, in the West, for being very authoritarian and very anti-Western. Normally, his advisers encourage him to do interviews in Arabic only, though Omar al-Bashir speaks good English. I was interested in his attitude to his early British colonial roots. On a number of occasions he spoke very fondly of one of the three British teachers, a Mr Collier, a Scot who taught maths at the boys-only school in Sarasir. Despite the large classes of forty boys, they received a sound education. Omar’s ebullient brother, Mohamed Hassan, two years junior, also spoke with warmth of the same Mr Collier. Indeed, Hassan kept singing a rather tuneless version of Auld Lang Syne to entertain me.

  Another brother, Sidiq, has lived quietly in England for over thirty years, working as a medical practitioner. Many of the president’s relatives and political cronies lived, studied and worked in the UK. When I was arrested for the first time in Sudan, in 1996, coincidentally by the Minister of Justice himself, the first question that came to my mind was not ‘Why am I being arrested?’ but what Oxbridge college the pukka minister had attended. I often scratched under the apparently rabidly Islamist and xenophobic exterior and soon discovered a genuine anglophilia. And it was more than mere politeness to a British guest (or arrested journalist). The English (language) colonial heritage ran deep, in the ruling party, and in their children, who rushed to study in the UK or USA.

  * * * *

  The president’s mother, Hadiya, frail in her eighty-eighth year when I visited her in the presidential compound, was more frank about British influence. She recalled how the district commissioners used to speak harshly sometimes to workers in the cotton estate. ‘They used to boss the local farmers about,’ she said. She added that the British provided no medical care. ‘We used traditional ways and herbs.’

  In his teens, she said, her son’s ambition was to be a ‘military fighter pilot’. ‘But I didn’t want him to fight. I used to lose sleep when he was fighting in the south. I begged him not to serve in the south.’ She added: ‘I didn’t want him to be president. I was scared for his life.’ She confessed that she now wanted her son to retire. ‘He has done enough for the country.’ And she complained about living in a goldfish bowl; she dearly wanted to return to the traditional family home in Khartoum North. ‘He is tired, but the people won’t let him retire. They believe if he goes, it will be a big mess. But I think he has done enough.’

  Hadiya obviously preferred to talk about her son when he was very young. Clearly, he was a right little tearaway. ‘He was quick – as a child he was hard to catch. And he used to quarrel with his older brother, Ahmed. Ahmed used to bully him or at least try to.’ She told me that she used to get Omar to learn poetry nearly every day, and then quoted one of her favourite poems. She also recalled that when Omar was six or seven, he refused to accept a beating from his mother. He grabbed the stick she was using, and starting hitting his mother instead. Infuriated, Hadiya retrieved the stick and resumed the beating, only to be physically restrained by her own mother, who berated her loudly for punishing young Omar.

  She returned to her theme that she wanted her son to give up the presidency. ‘Then I can go back and live in the family home [in Khartoum North]. Here in the presidential compound we live like strangers.’ Though she did concede that her son visited her nearly every day, when he was in the country. ‘That is his best quality,’ she said. ‘He is very kind to me and the whole family.’

  There is no doubt that the tough military and political leader has a real soft spot: his family. He married his cousin, Fatima Khalid, but – like Numeiri – produced no children. The president’s PR people tend to spin this with clichés about his being married to the whole country. ‘I am content with my destiny given by God,’ the president would say to friends. But the desire for children may have been a partial motivation, in 2003, when the president took a younger second wife, a widow called Widad Babiker Omer. She had four children, one boy and three girls. The youngest girl, Amna, was obviously doted on by the president. He clearly loved her and indulged her, even embarrassing her by attending her parent-teacher events. Widad was the widow of one of al-Bashir’s closest military friends, Ibrahim Shams al-Din, a fellow plotter in 1989, who had been killed in an aircraft crash while on duty. Marrying some of the many military widows was made fashionable by the president’s choice. I spent some time, alone, with the stepchildren and, although they disliked the isolation of being in the first family, they clearly adored their stepfather whom they had called ‘Dad’ from the start. The president would often reminisce about his friend to the children so that they could get a full understanding of their birth father.

  I spoke to Madame Widad, as the president’s second wife is addressed, on a number of occasions. She was bright and charming. Our official interview was in Arabic, but she spoke good English when we chatted informally together. I could not help but ask the obvious Western question about competition with the first wife. And she said, honestly. ‘Yes t
here is competition, it’s quite natural.’

  She confided that she and her husband talked politics.

  ‘Does he listen to you?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ she said. ‘He can be a good listener.’

  Working habits?