Omar Al-Bashir and Africa's Longest War

by Paul Moorcraft

  World Revolution

  As with the Bolshevik revolution, al-Turabi’s variant split those who advocated revolution in one country and those who believed in the world revolutionary mission. Once out of prison and officially under house arrest in the first months of the coup, al-Turabi worked with his wife on founding the International Organization of Muslim Women, which was set up in late 1989. The occasion for the acceleration of his world mission was the perceived humiliation of Arab states in the First Gulf War, and above all the positioning of US infidel troops in the same country as the holy places of Mecca and Medina. Khartoum’s clunky diplomats incensed the Americans by appearing to back Saddam Hussein, though they later glossed their gross faux-pas by saying that they opposed the Western intervention to remove the Iraqis from Kuwait, while not endorsing the original occupation by Baghdad. Their explanation was usually lost in translation.

  Partly for economic reasons, but also ideological ones, Sudan now allowed all Muslim brothers to visit the country without a visa. This enveloped brothers of all stripes, including battle-hardened Afghans. Al-Turabi started to travel extensively, including a return trip to the US for a Palestinian conference in Chicago. (He had first visited the USA for six months on a US government student scholarship in the 1960s.) In spring 1991 al-Turabi set up the Popular Arab and Islamic Congress (PAIC) as a sort of alternative but more radical Arab League. The first meeting in April 1991 was dubbed the ‘most significant event since the collapse of the Caliphate’1 by the subservient Khartoum media. Islamists from the Middle East were there in strength, but small groups also came from the USA and Britain. They secretly agreed to form the ‘Armed Islamist International’, an umbrella group for radical Sunnis. Al-Turabi toured and lectured in Islamist hotspots such as Afghanistan and Pakistan. Although he disagreed with much of what the Ayatollah Khomeini said and did, for example the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, the Sudanese visionary emulated some of the Ayatollah’s techniques of circulating CDs and videos of his lectures, which were popular in many parts of the Islamic world. Al-Turabi’s world mission soon led to a wide variety of radicals coming from Kashmir, Afghanistan, Pakistan and North Africa. Provocatively, Khartoum also welcomed mujahedeen from Egypt. The most controversial guest by far, however, was Osama bin Laden, who moved to a large house in a plush suburb of the capital in late 1991. His personal executive jet had its own secluded and well-guarded area at Khartoum airport. The presence of bin Laden was a major factor in the later US imposition of sanctions on Sudan.

  Al-Turabi concentrated on his international objectives, confirming his relationship with bin Laden by allowing the Saudi millionaire to marry his niece, as bin Laden’s third wife. Just coincidently, bin Laden also invested $50 million in al-Turabi’s favoured Al-Shamal Islamic Bank in Khartoum. Meanwhile, al-Bashir quietly consolidated his own position domestically, especially in the military. In October 1993 the RCC was dissolved and al-Bashir became president of the republic. The new low-key president did not air his views in public about al-Turabi’s comments on world Islamic renaissance, or the increasing American concern at the influx of jihadists into Sudan. Al-Turabi did not involve himself with any formal government role, appearing to believe that his internationalist mission was far more important.

  While on a lecture tour of Canada, on 26 May 1992, al-Turabi, now 60, was attacked by an exiled Sudanese karate champion. Apparently, the disgruntled Sudanese, Hashim Mohammed, had not planned the assault. He said he just saw red when he happened to spot al-Turabi at Ottowa airport and hit the Imam twice with two hard jabs of the edge of his hand. Al-Turabi was severely hurt and spent weeks in hospital, recovering from a coma. He suffered for a long time with slurred speech and had difficulty in walking, but gradually recovered. Thereafter, whenever al-Turabi did or said something controversial, many Sudanese would give a knowing look and mutter something about ‘that bump to the head, you know’. When I interviewed al-Turabi in August 1996 he seemed extremely articulate and incisive. I saw no evidence of brain damage in his speech or walking. The urbane intellectual still continued to be at home, whether in a tie or turban, and to charm his many visitors and lecture audiences. The army and al-Bashir, however, grew less enamoured of their formal patron.

  The US State Department was increasingly agitated about alleged terrorist camps in Sudan, for the foreign legion of mujahedeen who had been invited or sought exile in Sudan. Khartoum consistently denied the charges of terrorist enterprises. The Sudanese were also accused of supporting attacks on US troops who took part in the UN RESTORE HOPE operation in Somalia in 1992. On 26 February 1993 a bomb exploded in the World Trade Center in New York. Six Americans were killed. Although blamed mainly on an Egyptian Islamic group, Washington accused Khartoum of complicity. The US government listed in detail the foreign Islamic groups in Sudan, noting especially the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Hamas as well as Lebanon’s Hezbollah, prime enemies of Washington’s ally, Israel. Sudan was officially placed on the US list of states sponsoring terrorism. One writer described the Sudanese in-gathering ‘as a Davos in the desert for terrorists’.2

  Al-Turabi seemed oblivious of the decline of Sudan’s position in the diplomatic world, especially in the West. Revelling in his new fame in the Islamic world, perhaps he didn’t care. He appeared convinced that the collapse of the USSR heralded a new Islamic dawn. In December 1993 he held another bigger congress of prominent Islamists from around the world, including those from the Caucasus fighting the Russian army. Former senior intelligence chiefs from supportive countries such as Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence agency (ISI) were also there. The poor treatment of Muslim minorities in the West and Russia were highlighted and al-Turabi predicted that a united Islamic nation was on the horizon.

  Southern Jihad

  Khartoum’s military had their focus on a much more proximate jihad: in the south. After a failed peace initiative by the former US president, Jimmy Carter, John Garang worked on securing the active support of African states, especially the more radical southern African countries that had secured victory in Zimbabwe and were now pushing to topple the apartheid regime in South Africa. The Namibian insurgents also helped in practical terms, by donating surplus arms to the SPLA. Garang worked hard to assuage suspicions that his unified democratic Sudan policy could still work, despite the new hard-line government in Khartoum. Garang had to mend fences because his main support base in Ethiopia collapsed with the fall of the Mengistu administration in 1991. Garang had helped Mengistu fight the separatists in Ethiopia that had been backed by Khartoum, especially the Oromo Liberation Front. When the Khartoum-allied insurgencies in Eritrea and Tigray provinces merged into the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) and conquered Addis, the new regime paid back its dues to Khartoum. The EPRDF ejected the SPLA from its camps inside the Ethiopian border and closed its offices and radio station in the capital. Hundreds of thousands of southern Sudanese refugees were also kicked out. Uganda took up the slack in military support for the SPLA, one reason why Khartoum later aided Ugandan rebels such as the Lord’s Resistance Army. If Uganda became the military pillar for the SPLA, then Kenya grew into the main base for diplomatic and humanitarian succour for the southern rebellion. The SPLA had forged a coherent fighting machine, but it lacked a coherent political sensitivity to the social conditions in the south, exacerbated by the new refugee influx. Garang was regularly criticized for his domineering authoritarianism, not least for killing or imprisoning rival commanders, most famously his former close ally, Kerubino Kuanyin Bol. The Dinka commander was held in harsh confinement for six years in one of the archipelago of prison camps run by Garang. He managed to escape in 1993.

  The big SPLA schism

  Coming on top of ejection from the Ethiopian sanctuaries, the big split in the SPLA in 1991 was to undermine the military resistance for years and leave a political legacy that festered for decades. A number of commanders, including the usual suspects, Lam Akol and Riek Machar, p
lanned to displace Garang. Khartoum assiduously courted these dissident commanders, but the majority of the SPLA top brass supported Garang, not least because unity was paramount at a time of weakness following the crucial loss of Ethiopia. Many Nuer, however, were prepared to follow their traditional general, Machar, and the Nuer units around Nasir openly backed him. Instead of toppling the SPLA, Machar and Akol, a Shilluk, responded by founding a rival organization, SPLA-Nasir. This hardened the ethnic divisions that plagued the southern resistance movement and also helped prompt the civil war after independence.

  Nasir was a war-ruined shell of a town, but it had an airstrip that was used for relief flights by NGOs. It was also the venue for an unusual and tragic story. Riek Machar and Emma McClune, a tall, beautiful and idealistic English aid worker, met and fell in love. They married (although Machar had a wife by a traditional marriage). After making love, Emma said, she would get up and help her warlord to write his manifestoes. Highly irritated by the young Englishwoman’s intervention in southern politics, Garang once sarcastically described the schism as ‘Emma’s War’. The name stuck, and it became the title of a powerful and lyrical book by Deborah Scroggins.

  Even more irritating for Garang, Khartoum sent weapons and cash support to the SPLA-Nasir. Re-armed, Machar pushed into traditionally Dinka areas and eventually the mainly Dinka command of the SPLA felt forced to retaliate. Machar’s armed push was intended to show his strength and prise other commanders away from Garang, although attacks on the Dinka were much more likely to confirm Dinka solidarity around Garang, another classic Machar miscalculation. Machar’s Nuer troops and militias, known as the ‘White Army’, captured much territory belonging to their rivals. The White Army was largely made up of Luo Nuer, from the Upper Nile and Jonglei, who would traditionally smother their faces with white ash. Their main preoccupation had been cattle-raiding, especially against their age-old enemy, the Murle people. On 15 November 1991 Machar’s motley array of fighters captured Bor and killed over 2,000 Dinka, according to Amnesty International figures; other estimates were much higher. Although Machar dubbed the ‘Bor massacre’ a ‘myth and propaganda’ at the time, he apologized for the atrocity in 2012. The massacre was never forgotten in the south, and it became a brutal symbol of the Nuer-Dinka rift. Garang soon led the SPLA to inflict a major retaliation against the SPLA-Nasir, after the news of the massacre reached his HQ in Torit.

  Despite the Machar-Akol trouncing by the ‘official’ SPLA, Khartoum continued to treat both commanders seriously. Al-Bashir, who had experience of divide and rule in the south, appointed a top-ranking military team to deal with Machar’s militia. Senior military intelligence officers met Akol in Kenya and Germany to make vague promises of a federal south. Machar might well have thought that the new arsenal from Khartoum was more important, not least tactically, to fend off the SPLA advance. Khartoum had other ideas: using its new alliance, the regular northern army was allowed a free passage through Nuer territory to reach the core SPLA positions as far south as their HQ in Torit, displacing Garang. The SPLA general sought a new refuge in the deep forests of the Didinga Hills, beautiful and often shrouded in clouds.

  Garang ordered a diversionary attack on the southern capital, Juba, in July 1992. The rebels temporarily captured much of the town, aided by southern troops in the garrison. Eventually, the attack was repelled with heavy SPLA losses, especially in equipment, which it could ill afford to lose. A number of Equatorian troops and civilians were summarily killed in Juba by government forces. Having held Juba, just, Khartoum did not go on the offensive, partly because of an intelligence assessment that suggested that the recent arrival of US peacekeeping troops in Somalia might presage an American no-fly zone in southern Sudan. This was wide of the mark, because the Americans proved incapable of controlling the air space even around Mogadishu where its helicopters were downed by local fighters.

  Senior Equatorian commanders, not consulted about the Juba attack, now defected to the SPLA-Nasir. To further thicken the alphabet soup, SPLA-Nasir renamed itself SPLA/M-United and the SPLA was now sometimes referred to by outsiders as SPLA-Mainstream. Both SPLAs – whatever their titles – fought each other vigorously. (A little like in Afghanistan when the roughly forty mujahedeen groups spent more time fighting each other rather than the Russian occupiers in the 1980s.) The northern army inevitably took advantage by deploying heavily armed convoys to try to retake towns such as Rumbek, which stayed in rebel hands, however. The army made more progress in the Nuba Mountains; the last town held by the SPLA, Um Durain, fell in August 1993. President al-Bashir then publicly announced that the whole of Nuba would be conquered by the next dry season.

  Garang managed to keep his official SPLA from falling apart through iron discipline and increased foreign support. The Machar-led schism could never resolve the central contradiction: he advocated southern secession – in opposition to Garang’s holistic view – yet Machar and Co had to rely on a tough Islamist Arab regime that was unlikely to grant that secession. The OAU, and especially the Nigerians, made several attempts to reconcile the Machar-Garang divisions and to unify the southern rebellion. The Americans, now much more involved in the Sudan conflict, suggested that the local organisation, IGAD (Intergovernmental Agency for Development), the main regional diplomatic grouping, replace the Nigerian peace efforts. Garang and Machar were brought together in Washington in late October 1993. Nothing much came of the meeting, but it was an important symbol of Congressional interest in the civil war, which would be soon manipulated by powerful US lobbies, especially the Christian right and African-American groups. Various IGAD-backed meetings in the region failed either to reconcile the southerners or entice Khartoum.

  The fratricidal chaos of the civil war within the civil war allowed Kerubino to escape his hole in the ground. He was one of the most colourful SPLA commanders. A Catholic, born in 1948, he had grown up in the same Twic Dinka clan as Garang. Considered trigger-happy and impulsive by other commanders, he had represented the movement as ‘deputy commander in chief’ at the 1986 peace conference in one of the Emperor’s old palaces near Ethiopia’s Koka dam. With his omnipresent shooting stick, he used to give occasional press interviews in Nairobi, where his various wives and some of his twenty children were safely ensconced. He obviously harboured aspirations for the top job. So Garang’s pre-emptive strike against his friend was probably not just Stalinist paranoia. As with so many other dissident southern leaders, Khartoum offered him the chance to form a progovernment Dinka militia, but Kerubino could not match Garang’s popularity among his own tribe. He ditched the government side and resumed independent command in the south, managing in January 1998 to seize Wau briefly. On the strength of this achievement – he was an able field commander – he asked Garang to take him back into the main SPLA. Garang was not a forgiving man, but took back his old clan friend, though he kept him in HQ as a staff officer, not entrusting him with another field command. Angered by this, Kerubino once again defected north, where he allied with another renegade commander, Paulino Matip Nhial. Matip went on to lead the most powerful pro-government militia in south Sudan; he also set up a commercial empire among his Bol Nuer people. A competent field commander, Matip swapped back and forth between the SPLA and Khartoum (but with more strategic effect than Kerubino) and he also became a rival of another prominent Nuer commander, Riek Machar. It is not clear whether Khartoum’s effective military intelligence had a hand in another plot to kill Garang in Nairobi at a meeting of IGAD, but it may have been involved in Kerubino’s demise at the same time. Kerubino fell out with Matip and murky rumours surfaced of a shoot-out in which the old Dinka warrior met his martial fate. Few apart from himself ranked Kerubino as a national leader, but his chequered career did indicate the Byzantine world of southern leadership and the frequent successes of the north’s intelligence agencies in manipulating it.

  Pro-government northern militias sometimes used an old and highly offensive phrase to describe the divide-and-rule strateg
y: Aktul al-abid bil abid – kill the slave through the slave. More diplomatically, the technique was called the ‘peace from within’ strategy – doing deals with rebels who would work with Khartoum, unlike the official SPLA. This was soon developed into a Peace Charter, formalized in 1997. It was redolent of the so-called ‘internal settlements’ adopted by the white regimes in Rhodesia and later South West Africa. The apartheid government also tried to do the same with its homelands policy, while cutting out the African National Congress. In the end, the whites had to deal with the real leaders of the liberation movements, just as Khartoum was to discover.