Omar Al-Bashir and Africa's Longest War

by Paul Moorcraft

  Chapter 7

  The Road to Peace in the South

  A more pragmatic foreign policy

  Chinese diplomatic and military relations were excellent. The oil deals were sweet for both sides, although Sudan was swapping over-reliance on one commodity, cotton, for another, more valuable, one – oil. The Chinese had also largely built the country’s biggest construction project, the Merowe dam. Chinese businessmen and workers continued to pour into Khartoum, many of them paying a ceremonial visit to the Mahdi’s tomb in Omdurman. After all, a Sudanese hero had killed General Chinese Gordon, a hate figure for many contemporary Chinese.

  The fences with Egypt had been partially mended after al-Turabi’s ousting. Khartoum continued to improve its relations with Cairo – over twenty properties owned by Egypt in Sudan had been returned. And the Khartoum branch of Cairo University was re-opened after its closure over the disputes about the Halayeb Triangle. Cairo, though, was more concerned about the security of the Nile headwaters. Mubarak wanted a peace deal in the south which could ensure this; he did not want a separate state run by the SPLM that could complicate the control of the Nile. In May 2000 John Garang personally assured the Egyptian president that he wanted a single democratic Sudan. Egypt worked with the IGAD group to ensure stability in the headwaters. Cairo also assisted Khartoum’s efforts to restore good relations in the Arab League with countries such as Syria and Saudi Arabia, which had been inimical to al-Turabi’s calls for international jihad.

  President al-Bashir was determined to improve relations with the south, and one crucial ingredient was the American support for the SPLM. Some American diplomats (usually Democrats, it has to be said) compared al-Bashir with Ronald Reagan. Both were pragmatic populists and both tended to take non-intellectual broadbrush approaches to policy while leaving the details to subordinates. (Actually, al-Bashir was respected by his colleagues for his attention to detail, unlike Reagan.) The State Department hoped that they could work with Khartoum, now that al-Turabi had been banished from power. There was even some talk of returning relations to the period of engagement with Numeiri during his pro-Western phase; at that time the US donated its largest aid programme in sub-Saharan Africa to Sudan.

  Relations had gone badly wrong after the 1989 revolution. Almost a lone Arab voice, Khartoum’s apparent support of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait was a big diplomatic mistake which brought Sudan nothing but opprobrium. That was al-Turabi’s doing. He was almost as obsessive as Osama bin Laden about US troops ‘defiling’ the holy places in Saudi Arabia, even though Americans in uniform did not go near Mecca or Medina. The hosting of bin Laden turned out to be Khartoum’s most stupendous error of judgement – that too had been an al-Turabi project. Other egregious pratfalls, such as the assassination attempt on Mubarak, were blamed on the mischief-making imam. Al-Bashir claimed to be ignorant of the plot. That was surprising for someone who prided himself on his grip on the security services, but some intelligence sources have acquitted the president of that charge. Nevertheless, sanctions and isolation had left Sudan a pariah state.

  This led to a US policy of ‘containment, aggression and regime change’, as one senior US State Department official put it. Once, Sudan had been a front-line ally against Marxist Ethiopia. Now US policy was the converse: to co-ordinate a front-line alliance with Ethiopia, Eritrea and Uganda to bring Khartoum down. Covert annual aid of around $30 million was going to the SPLM. It was supposed to be for non-lethal purposes, but the C-130s donated were a vital tool of the insurgency, for example. This was said to be part of the State Department’s policy – the Pentagon kept largely aloof. The US military considered State’s covert forays amateurish. A small complement of US special forces could have made a big difference, but the 1992 intervention in Somalia, given the Hollywood treatment in Black Hawk Down, was seem as a partial reason not to re-engage militarily in Africa, despite the Western hand-wringing over Rwanda in 1994. Washington also nurtured the NDA Sudanese opposition in Asmara, along the lines of the Contra policy once associated with President Reagan. Historically, Sudan’s neighbouring states held as much sway – if not more – over the east, west and south as Khartoum did, so an American front-line containment strategy made sense. At least until Eritrea and Ethiopia were sucked into a savage border war against each other in 1998.

  The Christian lobbies in the US demanded more muscular intervention. The right-wing evangelical groups had played a very large part in the election of President George W. Bush and they wanted a payback. President Bush often displayed a magisterial ignorance of world affairs, but he did actually know something about Sudan. Not only had his father, as vice president, been closely involved with the country during the 1984-85 famine, but also during the exodus of the Falasha Jews. And with the constant accompaniment of evangelist Franklin Graham, son of Billy, as a presidential candidate, Bush had had to pay polite attention to numerous Christian lobbyists in the Bible belt. One of the causes celebres was the so-called ‘Lost Boys’. Thousands of southern youngsters had to flee the refugee camps when the fall of the Derg forced them from Ethiopia. Their emotive stories of escaping the Sudanese militias, seeking refuge in Ethiopian camps, and then ejection and their long dangerous odysseys to new camps in Kenya, pulled at many heartstrings when some were resettled in the US.1 Radical Christian groups were also exercised by allegations of Arab slavery of southerners. American Christians raised money for their redemption, although some of the alleged slavery was a bogus cash-raising scam by unscrupulous nomadic tribesmen. Many terrible human rights abuses were happening on both sides in Sudan, but some of it was unduly exaggerated by American lobbies for their own ends. Secretary of State Colin Powell said that the greatest tragedy on earth was unfolding in Sudan and President Bush specially condemned Sudan for violations of religious freedoms. Partly to placate the Christian lobbies and Congress, in September 2001, Senator John Danforth was appointed as a special envoy to Sudan. In the previous year Washington had re-activated its embassy in Khartoum, albeit with a reduced number and rank of staff.

  Behind the diplomatic scenes and the media campaigns of the NGOs, a much tougher intelligence game was being played out. The Islamist assault on the World Trade Center made Khartoum much more attentive to US sensitivities. The 1998 cruise missile attacks were a fresh and unnerving memory. Under al-Bashir’s direction the Sudanese government went into overdrive to keep Washington happy, particularly the US intelligence services. The president appointed his close confidant, Major General Saleh Abdullah Gosh, the head of the National Intelligence and Security Service, to focus on intelligence and anti-terrorism liaison with the CIA and State Department. The CIA-Mukhabarat courtship had begun warily in the late 1990s; in early 2000 a joint FBI-CIA team arrived in Khartoum. The 9/11 abomination did not derail the blossoming intelligence ties; it accelerated the process. The swift American-led removal of the Taliban put the (extra) fear of God into the Sudanese government. Very shortly after the retribution in Afghanistan, Saleh Gosh and Ali Othman Taha met top CIA officials in a London hotel. It was what diplomats call a very frank meeting. The Americans listed precisely what targets their cruise missiles would take out in Sudan, for example the Port Sudan oil refinery as well as the Sudanese air force, conveniently congregated on two main airfields. All in one afternoon. The Afghan demonstration effect had worked wonders for US leverage. The initial Sudanese intelligence co-operation had provided interesting but not major information from the vast wealth of material that the Mukhabarat had collected on nearly all the Islamist groups that had assembled or lived in Sudan from 1990 to 1996 and especially a cornucopia of data on bin Laden and his thousands of employees and acolytes. Most of his foreign radical followers had been kicked out or left, but those who had remained suddenly seemed to disappear. A few were said to have reappeared, in manacles, in the USA, but others, allegedly, were rendered to prisons in pro-Western states not over-burdened with intrusive legal systems.

  The enhanced demonstration effect of the U
S-led invasion of Iraq transformed the Mukhabarat into one of the CIA’s closest ‘friends’. So much so that Saleh Gosh spent a week at Langley, the HQ of the CIA, as an honoured guest. He was feted in a fashion usually reserved for senior spooks from major NATO states. In October 2005 I attended an elaborate garden party in the grounds of the new National Security HQ in Khartoum. Saleh Gosh was the host; he was in good spirits, backslapping his peers and even dancing on stage while the band played. Many of the top spooks in Africa – it was a summit for director generals of intelligence agencies – had assembled in the Sudanese capital. It was officially called the ‘Fourth Conference of the Committee for Intelligence and Security Systems in Africa’, which operated under the AU umbrella. No one could complain about the quality of the food, and big fans kept the guests cool. Spooks rarely let their guards down, but this was a unique occasion to relax among very discreet peers. MI6 and the CIA had sent senior people. They were incognito of course, so they did not expect Major General Gosh to call the senior CIA officer forward, by name, to step up to the well-lit platform and give him a handshake and a hug, a mark of a close male relationship in northern Sudan. The CIA man smiled awkwardly when he was given a spangly carrier bag full of small gifts. Then the MI6 spook was called up and given the same treatment. It was a touching display of rapport in the intelligence world, but a tiny bit awkward as a sprinkling of senior press people had been invited (to advertise that Khartoum was respectable again). I sat next to a distinguished journalist who wrote for the UK Guardian, a newspaper not always favoured by the intelligence community.

  This process of détente had already started when President Bush’s emissary, Senator Danforth, arrived in Khartoum in late 2001. He was met by senior officials determined to please. Danforth was no placeman. He was a high-powered, moderate Republican who was once tipped to be Bush’s vice-presidential nominee. A Princeton and Yale graduate, he was a lawyer and an Episcopalian minister. He was also energetic and hardworking – a good choice to try to bring peace to Sudan. Danforth toured the south and then the Nuba Mountains where he helped to negotiate a ceasefire. He then beavered away at formalizing a ceasefire in the south. But President Bush’s Sudan Peace Act in October 2002 soured some of the goodwill in Khartoum. This authorized relief money for the south in SPLM-held territory. It also threatened harsh penalties such as sanctions on oil exports used to purchase weapons and even further prohibition of World Bank and IMF credits to Sudan. The US peace initiative would be closed down if Khartoum did not act in good and prompt faith. Al-Bashir had hoped that Washington would drop existing sanctions, not threaten to increase them. Although the peace treaty was finally signed in January 2005, the outbreak of a major conflict in Darfur in 2003 was to derail Khartoum’s hopes of a full rapprochement with the USA. Al-Bashir felt personally betrayed by Washington, but the US lobbies were soon to focus on an altogether new onslaught because of alleged genocide in Darfur. The al-Bashir government was caught out by the Darfur crisis, because almost its entire intelligence effort was concentrated on bringing peace to the south, not the west.

  The old imperial power, Britain, was courted too, not least in closer intelligence ties, though the British were initially more reserved than their cousins in Washington. In a highly symbolic visit in January 2002, Prime Minister Tony Blair sent his independently minded Minister for International Development, Clare Short, to Khartoum. Always a straight hitter, the minister seemed pleased by what she had found. During a conversation in Khartoum, she told me:

  Any objective observer in the world can see that the government of Sudan has moved. Turabi has been removed from power. They have co-operated since 11 September. Sanctions have been lifted by the UN. There’s been progress.

  Despite the love-in between Gosh and Langley, the affair was not unconditional. The Muhakbarat yearned for the respect of, and co-operation with, MI6. Force majeure and a deep suspicion that regime change was still Washington policy encouraged Khartoum to ask MI6 to do more of the heavy lifting in the ongoing talks with the south. The British had (eventually) sought specific data on al-Qaeda, as well as other Middle Eastern radicals. Above all, the British FCO was not trying to finesse a change of regime. Also, most of the talks were taking place in Kenya, a British sphere of influence in US-UK intelligence terms. The Kenyan general, Lazarus Sumbeiywo, who co-ordinated the north-south talks, had been ‘spotted’ early while he was a cadet at Sandhurst in the early 1970s. Eventually, under President Arap Moi, General Sumbeiywo became head of Kenya’s revived intelligence service. When he was re-jigging the service, he was ably assisted by his old mentors in MI6. Because of the post-colonial ties and nifty MI6 footwork, London was to play an unusually large secret role in the final settlement of Africa’s longest war.

  The lobbies

  The improvement in diplomatic relations with both former enemies and old friends could perhaps provide the right international context for real progress in the south. Yet public diplomacy and covert intelligence networking did not tell the whole story. What was equally significant was the activity of influential lobby groups, mainly in the USA, but also in Europe. A so-called ‘constituency of conscience’ emerged in the US. A few older lobbyists, mostly Democrats, had worked on succouring dissidents in the Soviet system, but the collapse of the USSR allowed some to pivot their consciences to Africa. Younger Christian activists in the Republican Party also took up what they termed the ‘Wilberforce Agenda’, especially in south Sudan. A good example was Andrew Natsios, who later became President Bush’s envoy to Darfur in 2006. The allegations of slavery obviously resonated emotionally with African-Americans and politically, especially in Congress, while the persecution of Christians in south Sudan energized the Bible belt, both black and white. America’s most famous evangelist, Billy Graham, was a frequent visitor to south Sudan. His son, Franklin, was even more committed – he raised millions of dollars to set up hospitals in the region. The movement to help south Sudan became bi-partisan – Sudan was often the only thing the two rival parties could agree on. This cross-party alliance later morphed into the Save Darfur lobby. Millions, if not billions, were raised for humanitarian aid, often via Operation LIFELINE SUDAN. Technically, Khartoum had to give permission for aid flights into the south, but often the aid and visiting lobbyists entered the country illegally from Uganda or Kenya. Some aid reached starving civilians, but much of it went directly to the better-fed SPLA troops.

  The issue of slavery had a special and much more current resonance in the US compared with the UK. The USA was also a much more fervent Christian society, especially compared with secular Europe. In addition, in the 1990s, Europeans tended to be more distracted by massive human rights abuses and religious war on their doorstep, in the Balkans. Further, pro-south Sudanese lobbyists in the UK were convinced that the FCO was still staffed by too many romantic Arabists.

  One of the most important lobbies in the UK was the Swiss-based Christian Solidarity International, a sort of Amnesty International at prayer. It was led in Britain by John Eibner, an upstate New Yorker who had settled in London. The most well-known (and formidable) British member was Baroness Caroline Cox, who prided herself on working for the Lord in the Lords. Ennobled by Margaret Thatcher – with whom her toughness was compared – the former nurse and always devout Christian took her first trip to Sudan in 1992. She later castigated slavery as a counter-insurgency tool of the Sudanese army. Eibner activated his ‘buy-back’ scheme where slaves were redeemed for as little as $20. The CSI claimed to have emancipated over 80,000 slaves. Black churchmen and Congressmen took up this cause, although critics argued that this cash flow could incentivize, not curtail, slavery.

  These lobbies made a lot of noise in the media, but – as ever – more was being done quietly in the shadows, or specifically in the gloom of the Otello Italian restaurant in Washington. This is where the ‘gang of four’ met to plot the destiny of south Sudan. They were influential, very, on US policy, but the policy wonks were not as all-powerful or sinist
er as Khartoum came to believe. In particular, President al-Bashir was adamant in his conversations with me that the gang had done much harm to US-Sudan relations and contributed to the disasters in the south. So who were these ‘gangsters’ and what did they do?

  The gang comprised more than four people, but the members of the inner core – never more than seven – dubbed themselves the ‘Council’ and gave themselves playful titles such as ‘emperor’. From the 1980s they plotted in support of John Garang. A prime member was Roger Winter, a former State Department envoy to Sudan and well-known as a younger diplomat for his pony tail. Another was Eric Reeves, a university English professor. John Prendergast, who set up the Enough NGO, was a co-founder, as was Ted Dagne, an Ethiopian-American who worked in the congressional research service. Susan Rice, later a US ambassador to the UN, was an occasional lunch member. All exerted extensive influence in Washington. They smoothed the path of visiting south Sudanese as well as helping to shape US legislation. ‘We never controlled anything, but we did try to influence things in the way we thought most benefitted the people of south Sudan,’ Roger Winter said. Winter was dubbed the ‘spear carrier’ in the Council.2 Francis Deng, a southerner who was later to climb the ladder at the UN, was also a member. Deng used his southern connections to get the lobbyists into the liberated zones: Winter first met Garang there in 1986.