Omar Al-Bashir and Africa's Longest War

by Paul Moorcraft

  Ultimately, the ICC intervention unintentionally bolstered al-Bashir’s position. He now had to enter the endgame of the long north-south diplomacy – the national election of 2010 and the southern referendum on independence in 2011. Omar al-Bashir had weathered many storms since his coup: 2010 and 2011 were to be perhaps his most challenging years, not least in keeping his country unified.

  Chapter 10

  The Fall of the Republic

  So much of Khartoum’s political energy had been used up by the crisis in Darfur. Nevertheless, Khartoum still had to make the new government of national unity function. Getting old enemies to work alongside each other was never going to be easy. The CPA itself, a set of highly complex and sometimes ambiguous documents, established over forty joint commissions and committees made up of SPLM and largely NCP northerners. Often the southerners lacked the experience and capability to populate these power-sharing arrangements, some of which rarely met. When they did, usually the northerners ran circles around the southerners, as in the old days. Often NCP ministers made decisions without consulting their southern colleagues. The MPs from both parties sat in parliament, in roughly proportionate numbers to their respective populations, so they could talk to, or at, each other. The southern ministers now had smart cars and offices. What really mattered, though, was money and security.

  The northern government remained in charge of calculating and distributing the oil revenue; southerners estimated that they were being short-changed by at least 20 per cent. In the case of military integration, the CPA said 21,000 troops from joint units from both forces would create the nucleus of a future unified army. Only one fully functioning joint unit was formed, and it was under-resourced, partly because Khartoum was reluctant to expend too much money and energy on arming their former foes. The two sides came to blows in the field and, in a few cases, such as in Malakal in February 2009, they got caught up in a major fire-fight (although most of the continued fighting in the south was caused by inter-tribal warlordism). The national security apparatus was still tightly controlled by Saleh Gosh, but some genuine operational integration did take place. The real decisions, especially on security matters, were made in a small coterie around al-Bashir – his long-term allies in the NCP such as Ali Othman Taha, Nafie Ali Nafie and Dr Ibrahim Ghandour.

  The new government of South Sudan (GoSS) in Juba, led by President Salva Kiir, appeared to have earnestly adopted all the bad habits they learned from Khartoum. The wealth was centralized in Juba among fat-cat commanders-turned-politicians and most of the oil money was spent on weapons. The SPLM officials were quite open about this – they said it was a prudent policy of insurance against the north should the CPA fall apart. As in Pakistan, the SPLA was an army that happened also to run a country. By 2009 GoSS had received about $6 billion in oil money, but perhaps as much as 90 per cent was spent on re-equipping the SPLA. Amid a sea of corruption and cronyism, very little was left over for funding education, health and agriculture as well as infrastructure, which was largely provided by foreign donors.

  Despite its good intentions the CPA had bequeathed a winner-takes-all system that entrenched power in Juba and Khartoum and left very little power to the states in both north and south. This mattered especially in the south, where the states received just 2 per cent of oil revenues. Nor did the CPA introduce term limitation for the respective presidents. It had long been accepted, though not enacted, that the main advance in African politics would be limitation on the terms a president could serve, to avoid the too-common habit of presidents for life.

  Salva Kiir had frequently tackled Garang about his authoritarianism. It came to a head in a leadership meeting in Rumbek in November 2004. He accused Garang of carrying the movement ‘in his own briefcase’. But Kiir refused to split the leadership, after the trauma of 1991, and gradually won around his colleagues to the concept of a greater collective leadership. After Garang died, Kiir did not purge the leadership of senior Garang supporters. Instead, he tried to embrace some of the former dissident commanders as well as civilian critics of Garang. So there was optimism in the SPLM that the new leader would continue to avoid some of the Stalinist traits perceived in Garang.

  Unity was required not least to begin the shift from army politics to the development of the country. One visiting Western economist told me he thought Juba was ‘a scrap heap built on a rubbish dump’. To be fair, it had been under siege for over twenty years. The standard yardstick usually quoted was that only thirty miles of tarred road had been built by GoSS, and these roads were in the capital, around the new high-walled villas owned by senior politicians. Smart new government buildings had been erected, with carefully marked-out white lines in the car parks for the fleets of government Land Cruisers.

  Outside Juba, the country was starving and wrecked. In early 2010 I stopped off at a small village halfway between Juba and Torit. I was invited to take tea with the headman, who introduced me to the sole teacher in the village school. The teacher pointed at the dirt track – supposedly a main highway – and complained of no road-building.

  ‘Nor have we been given any schoolbooks,’ he said. ‘We have none at all.’ He listed other things that he’d asked Juba for, but not received. ‘There is not a single tractor for miles,’ he added.

  What have five years of your own government brought you then?

  ‘Nothing – but we’ll all vote for the SPLA, for freedom next year.’ And he smiled.

  Entrepreneurs had moved in from Uganda, Ethiopia and Kenya and developed small businesses in and around Juba, including the occasional hotel. For thirsty travellers from the sharia north, a new South African brewery had been built as well. The local Equatorians, however, felt doubly squeezed – by the Dinka dominance in the new government and job competition from foreign workers. Overall, South Sudan had developed very little in five years, despite the often tireless efforts of foreign NGOs and lots of American money. In the words of one British financial journalist, ‘Southern Sudan was beginning to resemble a new African phenomenon, a pre-failed state – prostrate and enfeebled before it was born.’1

  The three towns in the north had enjoyed boom times, however. The oil bonanza, championed by Chinese, Malaysian and Indian companies, had created lots of new infrastructure, from the massive Merowe dam scheme to roads and power stations as well as the sparkling new international airport. When I asked President al-Bashir in early 2014 what he considered to be his main legacy, he immediately replied: ‘All the economic and infrastructural developments.’ He then listed all the new universities and hospitals built during his rule. He also added that Western duplicity, broken promises and, above all, sanctions had made him turn east, to Sudan’s great advantage. As he told a colleague on Time magazine, Sam Dealey:

  From the first day, our policy was clear: to look eastward, toward China, Malaysia, India, Pakistan, Indonesia and even Korea and Japan, even if the Western influence on some of these countries is strong. We believe that the Chinese expansion was natural because it filled the space left by Western governments, the United States and international funding agencies. The success of the Sudanese experiment in dealing with China without political conditions or pressures encouraged other African countries to look toward China.

  Despite the UN arms embargo on Darfur, China and Russia continued to supply the bulk of imported Sudanese weapons; both nations insisted nothing was going to Darfur – although it was the main centre of fighting once the CPA was agreed with the south. China had built factories in the industrial belt around Khartoum which made Sudan one of the biggest arms manufacturers in Africa, after South Africa and Nigeria (for details see Appendix).

  Armed by China, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, and boosted by new investments from, especially, Qatar and Turkey on top of Beijing’s financial largesse, Khartoum had less need to bend to American diktats. Paradoxically, massive amounts of food aid from the West, especially America, were going not only to the south and Darfur, but also to the north, not least for the la
rge refugee camps around Khartoum. An American UN worker told me that he had questioned a Dinka tribesman from the south who was wearing a cross, but standing at a Red Crescent feeding centre in the capital. The American asked the Dinka about the cross. The man laughed: ‘I might be a Muslim in the morning, a Christian in the afternoon, but at night I pray to my own [Dinka] god.’ In the absence of a synagogue, I used to make a point of visiting church services in Khartoum and saw no problems, just as I have visited mosques freely throughout the world.

  * * * *

  Al-Bashir still had to deal with the West over Darfur and UN engagement. But other diplomatic resources, such as increasing support from the AU, the Arab League and support from the Gulf states (but not the Saudis), added flexibility to the Asian economic and political alternatives. In particular, al-Bashir drew very close to Thabo Mbeki, the South African premier, who later acted as an AU envoy to Sudan. ‘Mbeki was a wise man – a real African,’ the President told me. ‘He wanted to keep out foreign intervention from outside Africa.’ Unlike Mbeki, whose policy on AIDS proved highly ignorant, stubborn and disastrous at home, al-Bashir took a far different line towards AIDS by spending money on education and health programmes to combat the disease, an unusually enlightened policy for an Islamic government.

  Even before the ICC intervention, al-Bashir had despaired of working with the West – he constantly felt betrayed by their broken promises, not least on sanctions and removal from the terror list. US sanctions did make life difficult. One senior finance minister told me that removal of Washington’s restrictions would improve the economy by perhaps 40 to 50 per cent. Because nearly all Western credit cards worked through a central system in New York, it forced northern Sudan to be a totally cash economy. Paying for everything in wads of US dollars created numerous problems, not least for visiting foreign businessmen and diplomats; and it encouraged corruption inside the country. It also led to actual shortages of dollars, not always provided by the Chinese who often preferred barter deals – oil for projects. The cauterization of the Sudanese economy did, however, prove a boon when the Western economic depression hit in 2007-2008; by accident, Khartoum was largely immune. Nevertheless, al-Bashir chafed at America’s economic and political restrictions. Then came the final break: the ICC indictment, which he blamed largely on the Americans for encouraging the Security Council to mandate The Hague.

  Yet Khartoum still needed to work with the West, not least the American, British and Norwegian co-architects of the CPA. They played an important role, for example, in keeping the IGAD members and the southern army in line. By 2010 Darfur had been largely contained as a military problem. There was no peace, but the conflict was low intensity, and the food programmes were working. Health, education and nutritional standards had surpassed pre-war levels and were often higher than the east and south of the country. Yes, the scorched-earth tactics of both sides had driven hundreds of thousands into camps, now increasingly looking like the permanent semitowns inhabited by the Palestinian diaspora. Few could expect to return to their villages, destroyed or re-settled by nomadic tribes. The IDP camps would store up anger for the desert intifadas of the future.

  In the east, al-Bashir had done a deal with the Beja Congress (and the Free Lions from the Rashaida clans) in 2006. Eritrea had been the main fixer. It covered the states of Kassala, Gedarif and Red Sea. Like the western deals it involved a figurehead post – a membership of the team ‘assisting’ the president, but not a vice presidency, plus assembly seats and absorption of some rebels into the national army. The deal took four months. Khartoum also set out to buy peace with the promise of big injections of development aid through the Eastern Sudan Reconstruction and Development Fund, although few of the promised millions ended up in infrastructural improvements outside the thriving area around Port Sudan. The government also made deals with the exiled politicians in the NDA and encouraged them to come home to take part in the first internationally supervised elections, which were delayed until 2010.

  The Elections

  The presidential elections in 1996 and 2000 were highly controlled affairs with limited electorates, although the government made much of al-Bashir’s popular mandate. The last reasonably democratic elections had been held as far back as 1986 when the lacklustre Sadiq al-Mahdi became premier. Now, under the aegis of the Western-backed CPA, a free and fair election had to be held in the whole country, despite the NCP dominance in the north and the equally dominant SPLM in the south as well as trying to run elections in the devastation that was Darfur. It was a tough call and worrying for Khartoum because lots of foreign busybodies had to be allowed in as election observers.

  I included myself as a ‘busybody’. I was head of mission for fifty independent British observers, organized by the Centre for Foreign Policy Analysis, a small London think tank of which I was director.2 The team comprised experienced British civil servants, mainly from the Ministry of Defence, former British officers, lawyers, academics, and local government officials with election expertise, as well as observers from previous EU and UN missions. Some were long-term observers serving in the country for two to three months, but most were short-term observers who were placed throughout the south and partially in the north. We were excluded from Darfur. On the eve of the arrival of the main body of my foreign observers, plus the larger influx from the EU and American Carter Center, President al-Bashir made an ill-tempered and ill-judged intervention. He warned any foreigners who tried to delay or interrupt the elections that ‘we will cut off their fingers and put them under our shoes’. I had some trouble explaining to my teams about to leave from the UK that this was mere hyperbolic Arab rhetoric and could be dismissed. They would be met by hospitality, I said, and they were. What could not be so easily dismissed were the many obstacles that could prevent a free and fair election: inaccurate census numbers, gerrymandering (especially in Darfur), censorship and limiting air time and rallies for opposition politicians in the north. In the south, the SPLM were intimidating their much smaller rivals.

  My teams traversed the country and were generally met with friendliness and co-operation, not least from the UN. One female member of a team in Wau was assaulted by an SPLA policeman and we came across many irregularities, for example, often party members – innocently or maliciously – tried to ‘help’ people to cast their ballot, especially among the vast majority of the illiterate voters in the south. The voting method – for national president, regional president, governors, state and national assemblies – was very complex, based on a mixture of US, French and British models. Twenty-five per cent of seats in the assemblies were reserved for females, and women – especially in the south – were vocally enthusiastic voters.

  Al-Bashir did a lot better than his own party expected – he won 68 per cent of the vote for national president, although most of the northern challengers were straw men and women, and some dropped out because of the government’s restrictions on campaigning, especially free and equal access to radio and TV. Salva Kiir took 93 per cent for the southern presidency, although the old warhorse Lam Akol complained to me personally, regularly and bitterly, by phone and email, about how he and his candidates were bullied by the SPLM. In the end, in north and south, the elections confirmed the existing domination of the two leaders. The results were predictable, but were they fair?

  The larger EU and Carter Center observer teams basically said ‘good try, but you didn’t meet international standards’. Nevertheless, the earnest and affable former president, Jimmy Carter, said the elections were ‘relatively peaceful, calm and orderly’. Of course, the AU and Arab League, many of whose representatives would not recognize a free election if it bit them on the backside, raved about the election process. The verdict produced by the Centre for Foreign Policy Analysis came somewhere in between the two extremes. Its final report said:

  After continuous disaffection or war since 1955, the fact that a national election was held in Africa’s largest country, with few traditions of democratic
contests, widespread illiteracy and poor infrastructure, especially in the south, is to be commended. We consider the election to be a credible and important step on the road to political pluralism.

  The centre’s team did offer a number of recommendations to improve the process for next time, especially the forthcoming referendum in the south. To temper what some might judge to be the patronizing tone of the centre’s final verdict, it was also noted that these elections would have confused even a sophisticated Western electorate. In the concurrent UK national election, foreign electoral observers in Britain noted failures, not least in postal voting, lack of IDs, shortage of ballot papers and closure of some polling stations while angry queues remained outside. In South Sudan, the fact that the presidential candidate, Salva Kiir, had to go to three polling stations to find his name could be forgiven, perhaps, in the first and most inclusive and free elections ever held in the south. The Brits, on the other hand, should have known, and done, better.