Omar Al-Bashir and Africa's Longest War

by Paul Moorcraft

  On 9 January 2005, at a grand international celebration in Nairobi, the CPA was signed by Garang and al-Bashir with international top brass such as Colin Powell as witnesses. Officially the north-south war that began in 1955 was finally over. On 8 July 2005 Vice President John Garang and his wife, Rebecca de Mabior, as well as all the new southern ministers, drove through the streets of Khartoum to be greeted by cheering mass crowds of northerners and southerners. The southern leaders were to be sworn in as members of the new joint government. For Garang, this was to be the start of the New Sudan for which he had fought for decades.

  It was not to be. Garang was killed on 30 July in an air crash in the rugged mountains of the deep south of Sudan. He was flying at night in a Ugandan Mi-172 helicopter after visiting his long-time ally, President Yoweri Museveni. Riots swept through the poorer parts of Omdurman and Khartoum, but a panel of international experts could later find no evidence of foul play. Sudanese intelligence officers were convinced, however, that Garang was deliberately killed and some murmured about a ‘French connection’. It remains a mystery, although pilot error still stands at the top of the suspect list.

  John Garang was buried in Juba, his soon-to-be independent capital. At the funeral ceremony his wife, Rebecca, promised to continue his work: ‘In our culture we say, “If you kill the lion, you see what the lioness will do.”’ It is rarely accurate to say that someone, especially a political leader, is indispensable, but Garang was the only southerner who could perhaps have made it all work. Instead, his legacy was continued (if much diminished) conflict with the north and bitter civil war in a south he had dedicated his life to set free.

  The burden of southern peace now largely rested upon the shoulders of al-Bashir, but he was about to be sucked into an international maelstrom over the war in Darfur. Garang was succeeded by his second in command, Salva Kiir Mayardit, who became the President of GoSS and first vice president of Sudan. He was a military man through and through, which encouraged a meeting of minds with Field Marshal al-Bashir, but he lacked the intellectual political dexterity of his soldier-statesman predecessor. Could both men escape the prison of their pasts?

  Chapter 8

  War in the West: Darfur

  After the success of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement and the ending of Africa’s longest civil war, friends in Omar al-Bashir’s circle suggested he might be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In early 2004 the president was asked if he would attend a reception at the White House. He was regularly phoned directly by President Bush. The CPA was also probably President Bush’s biggest (and perhaps only) successful peace deal. Instead, the US visit was cancelled and soon President al-Bashir became the first sitting head of state to be indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court. The great peacemaker, Washington’s ally and African saviour, was transformed into a hunted war criminal and leader of a rogue state again. How did this happen? The one word answer is simply Darfur.

  Journalists are expected to say that Darfur is the same size as Texas or France, depending on whether they are reporting for American or European media. Darfur is certainly big, mainly desert or scrub, and it has a colourful and violent history. The British conquered the Sultanate of Darfur during the First World War. A senior Khartoum minister once told me:

  Actually, you British caused the problem – you separated north and south when you ruled Sudan; and you, by accident, sowed the seeds of conflict in Darfur when you didn’t give the settled land rights to some of the nomadic herders when you took over in 1916.

  Until then Ali Dinar had ruled a largely independent state based in El Fasher. The town had once been the starting point for one of Africa’s most famous caravan routes, the ‘forty-day road’. Big camel trains, loaded with ivory, ebony and slaves, made the long trip through the desert to Aswan and Asyut in Egypt. There the young male slaves who had survived the journey were usually castrated. It was also the route from West Africa to the Red Sea and maritime access to the culmination of the Haj in Arabia. The British had initially supported Ali Dinar, but they soon came to dislike his truculence. He was probably set up – the word now used is ‘entrapped’ – by British intelligence using bogus communications with Istanbul. Ali Dinar was accused of dealing with an enemy allied to Germany. The British infantry ambushed and killed the last sultan in November 1916, and promptly made Ali Dinar a martyr. It was also one of the early uses of air power in Africa: two aircraft from the Royal Flying Corps, one flown by a young Lieutenant John Slessor, later to be a head of the Royal Air Force. Technically, the operations in Darfur were designated a local colonial action. This irritated the British officers involved in the Darfur campaign, who could not claim First World War medals for their soldiering. The reason was financial: the bill could be sent to Cairo, not the War Office in London. The introduction of modern weapons, and the arming of local militias, caused endless problems for the French and British imperial authorities long after 1918. There are many comparisons with the influx of new guns to Darfur in the early twenty-first century. It is also ironic that the first use of mounted Arab and African militias in Darfur, armed with modern weapons, was by the British army in its 1916 campaign. Were they perhaps responsible for the genesis of the Janjaweed?

  The nature of the war

  If the Nile provided one source of water power, the alternative was the Chad basin, the biggest inland drainage system in Africa. Lake Chad is in the centre. The basin incorporates parts or all of nine territories, especially Chad, Libya, Niger and west Darfur. In the colonial period it became a French sphere of interest. With the tribal gravitational pull from the west, Darfur often had more in common with Chad rather than the distant Khartoum in the east. For hundreds of years Darfuris fought in wars connected to Chad, more currently in the civil wars beginning in the 1960s, later instigated by the Libyans and sometimes contained by French troops, especially in 2006 and 2008. Even EU troops found themselves involved in Chad after 2007.

  Even under distant British rule intermittent fighting had continued after 1916, mainly caused by drought and inter-tribal disputes. But the political background of the latest war can also be traced partly to the so-called Black Book published illegally in Khartoum in 2000. It was created largely by the small Darfurian intelligentsia in Khartoum who castigated not only the neglect of their own province, but also the usurpation of power and wealth by the tribal clique of riverine Arabs. Fighting erupted again on a small scale in Darfur in 2000, but the firestorm of the major war did not break out until early 2003 and lasted in a high-intensity form for just over a year.

  The full-scale modern warfare disrupted the optimism engendered by the increasingly successful north-south peace talks in Kenya. The complex war in Darfur was distinct, but also related to the war in the south. The first 2,000 Darfur rebels were trained by the SPLA, who clearly wished to see more pressure applied on the Khartoum authorities even as they negotiated with them. The Darfur conflict was tribal and political, but it was not usually racial. It was not Arab versus African, not Omar Sharif versus Kunta Kinte, the hero of Roots. Inter-marriage made it often impossible to physically differentiate ‘African’ from ‘Arab’ among the thirty-five tribes and ethnic groups which could be roughly divided between nomadic herders and sedentary farming communities.

  A critic of Khartoum, and probably the leading Western expert on the region, Alex de Waal, wrote: ‘Characterizing the Darfur war as “Arabs” versus “Africans” obscures the reality. Darfur’s Arabs are black, indigenous, African Muslims – just like Darfur’s non-Arabs.’ I travelled in various parts of Darfur and frequently challenged the locals as to whether they could identify a Darfurian stranger as ‘Arab’ or ‘African’. They nearly always got it wrong. Often darker-skinned Darfuris turned out to be Arabs, while the lighter-skinned locals often claimed to be African. The only obvious difference I could discern was that some ‘Africans’ could speak an African language as well as Arabic. While the historical conflict between Arabs versus Africans has been a
recurring theme of wider Sudanese history, it would be wrong to assume that the Arabs were always the victors and the Africans the victims, especially in Darfur.

  Ten years after the Rwandan massacres, the US State Department dubbed the tragedy in Darfur a ‘genocide’. Figures varied dramatically, but tens of thousands were killed and hundreds of thousands displaced; both sides committed atrocities. Kofi Annan, then UN Secretary General, contradicted US claims when he said, ‘I cannot call the killing a genocide even though there have been massive violations of international humanitarian law.’

  It is true that Africans – if that term can be used – were in a majority among the displaced, and most of them would say they had fled attacks by the Janjaweed, a generic term for bandits, but often also applied to progovernment militias. But there were also displaced ‘Arab’ communities who were attacked by ‘African’ groups. Besides inter-‘African’ ethnic fighting, in parts of South Darfur, however, the World Food Programme could not work because of highly charged traditional conflicts between rival ‘Arab’ groups. Darfur was an even more complicated war than the southern imbroglio. It was also a much misreported and misrepresented conflict.

  In addition, Darfur’s catastrophe was caused by factors associated with climate change: the desertification of the Sahel. In this sense, it became perhaps the first environmental war of the twenty-first century. The crisis also had roots in old-fashioned warfare. A government scorched-earth policy had destroyed many ‘African’ villages, thus draining the Maoist-style sea, to prevent the rebels from operating. Soon after February 2003, following surprise rebel attacks, Sudan’s military intelligence initially had free rein to operate in Darfur, and the army and allied militias went in very hard. The military hardliners wanted to crush the revolt before signing an international peace deal in Kenya that might clip their wings.

  With their good intelligence ties with America, the Mukhabarat believed that Washington would turn a blind eye to a quick surgical suppression of the Darfur revolt, especially as the Bush administration would not want to risk the CPA prize, a foreign policy success useful in a close presidential reelection race. Khartoum also assumed that the Washington elites would be less concerned about the killings of Muslims in Darfur than the murder of Christians in the south. As it happened, the American Christian lobbies were far more exercised about Muslim deaths than many in the three towns. This was despite the massive Western media focus on the war in Iraq.

  A war in Darfur was the last thing that al-Bashir wanted after he had expended so much personal, political, military and diplomatic capital over the deal in the south. Khartoum’s leaders were desperate to keep the Americans happy because they thought they had cast-iron guarantees that the USA would rescind sanctions as soon as the CPA was done and dusted. Close down the Darfur problem quickly and Khartoum would be welcomed back into the economic and diplomatic community of nations. Al-Bashir’s coterie was convinced of that. Washington, utterly distracted by Iraq, chose not to act on Darfur, especially in the first year when fighting was most intense, partly because of the belief in sequencing or compartmentalizing – complete the CPA first, then Darfur could be addressed. Ironic that, to save some lives in the north-south war, the Western diplomats glossed over the slaughter in the west. Some more junior UN diplomats tried to nudge the Security Council to intervene early, but it would not. Two of the five permanent members prioritized the CPA, while Russia was busy selling arms to Khartoum and China was equally busy hoovering up the oil.

  In the true Sudanese fashion at least twenty rebel groups emerged, although the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) were the most cohesive. They claimed that Khartoum had marginalized the three Darfur states (despite recent improvements in transport, education and physical infrastructure). Factions in Chad, often tribally linked, also meddled across the border; and, equally, Khartoum stirred the pot in Chad. And a fratricidal factor was the intimate civil war within the Islamist revolutionaries in Khartoum. Elements loyal to Hassan al-Turabi had formed and funded JEM. Although US intelligence was rightly concerned about the growth of jihad in the Sahel – a soft underbelly of both pro-western North African states and Europe itself – the alleged al-Qaeda connections with JEM have been overdone. Later in the war, Osama bin Laden did, however, call for a jihad against ‘crusader infidels and infidel apostates’ in the UN-led force.

  In essence the Darfur insurgents had seen what was on offer to the southerners – especially oil money, jobs and autonomy – and they wanted some of the same goodies too. When the emergency feeding programmes had reached a reasonable level of stabilization, the rebels – by attacking aid convoys – sought to use famine as a means of concentrating more international pressure on Khartoum. The African Union initially sent in a small number of peacekeepers, backed by a handful of EU observers, but the rebels wanted to provoke a much larger foreign military intervention. Later the AU size was boosted, then UN peacekeepers joined them.

  Historically Sudanese government forces would intervene to settle the tribal and nomad-versus-pastoralist battles. Second Lieutenant Omar al-Bashir’s first posting had been to monitor tribal clashes in Darfur in the late 1960s. Formerly Khartoum was seen as a referee, but now the government had become a prime, and sometimes brutal, antagonist. While the rebels called for more African Union and then UN intervention, Khartoum said no, arguing that Western intervention in another oil-rich Islamic state could create chaos, drawing in jihadist crazies from A-Z, Algeria to Zanzibar, to spawn another Somalia.

  My first visit to Darfur was in late 2004. After much permit-chasing in Khartoum, I caught an internal flight to El Fasher, capital of North Darfur. If I had moaned about no beer in the Khartoum Hilton, in rundown El Fasher there was no hotel, not much at all in fact – except lots of donkeys, and plastic bags adorning urban scrubland. I was travelling with my friend and cameraman, Irwin Armstrong. We hired a white 4x4 and driver the first day. Luckily, the van was similar to the vehicles used by the African Union peacekeepers. I found out from a friendly South African soldier what time the AU convoy was leaving the next day for the rebel-held areas. On time, it left the AU base, and we tucked in to the end of it. Except for the lack of a big AU sign we looked official. So we sped through the government roadblocks and then through the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) blockades to enter rebel territory.

  After much rough cross-country travel, we reached Debed, the site of a recent air attack by government forces. I managed to find a villager who was a former English teacher; he recounted the details and deaths on camera. Irwin filmed the burnt-out huts. And then I interviewed a loquacious Swedish army major, acting as an EU observer. We also filmed the SLA fighters, with dashing turbans and sunglasses, and all festooned in amulets that they believed made enemy bullets turn to water. Enduring various rough rides, and punctures, we made many forays into the unforgiving desert scrub around El Fasher. We filmed government-held villages, such as Tawila, and later the camps for the IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons) squatting around the dusty capital. Irwin and I recorded detailed life stories about the disruption of traditional ways, of murder and rape. The camps were taking on a dispiritingly permanent air, portents perhaps of Palestinian-style armed anger in the future. The NGOs were doing a noble job, though the Darfurian political activists in the camps sometimes ensured that discipline was maintained by a reign of terror.

  We also talked to NGOs. The most illuminating official was Neils Scott, of the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs. At his HQ he told us about the Janjaweed – literally the devils on horseback. ‘The Janjaweed is historical,’ he said. ‘It’s been around for years. What we’re seeing now is, to a great extent, criminality … We’re in a bandaging situation. What we need here is a political solution.’

  A few months later Irwin and I set out again for Darfur, having secured all our various governmental and military permissions. This time we stayed in the guest quarters of the Wali, or Governor, a kindness someti
mes granted to visiting journalists. The most that could be said was that it had a toilet. Still, we were treated with generous Sudanese hospitality. I needed the wali’s backing to persuade the army to let us accompany them on patrols against the rebels. The colonel assigned to mind us had no idea at all of what filming involved. He kept putting his hand in front of the camera, even before we left his base. In the end, we managed to secure dramatic pictures of government counter-insurgency, although it was a training exercise, not real ‘bang-bang’. Khartoum was often accused of clever PR campaigns to cover up its wrongdoing. In Darfur they totally failed to put their side of the argument, and they did have a case. So, sometimes by default, the Western media castigated the Sudanese forces, who rarely ‘put up’ a convincing spokesperson or any spokesman at all. Thus, even in the best BBC tradition, it was difficult to ‘balance’ highly critical stories. Also, it was a very nasty war. Leaving El Fasher was always complicated by lack of planes. Just like the mercenaries in the Wild Geese film, we ended up having to run into the back of a lowered cargo flap of a UN plane just as it was about to taxi on to the runway. No health and safety busybodies plagued that airport.