‘Decisive Justice’--Amputations--Helped Topple Sudan Regime

Nodredin Ahmed Aissa felt as though red-hot lava had been poured through his veins and into his heart. He threw back the mask covering his eyes. On his left was a dead man hanging from the steel gallows, on his right, a bloodied prostrate body.

But what he most clearly remembers about that October morning is the prison guard who had picked up his severed right hand and left leg and was parading them to the cheers of the crowd. Aissa fainted.

“It was a massacre,” said Aissa, 27, balancing on a crutch, his soiled robes covering his wounds.

His words, spoken through a translator, were mumbled and his eyes stayed lowered. He flashed a brief, gap-toothed smile only when he said, yes, he still believes in the justice of Allah and Islamic law.

Aissa did not mind that a crowd was gathering around him by the gasoline station. His eyes were dull, and he told quietly how he had been arrested as a suspected thief, tried without counsel before a policeman, a soldier and a civilian judge, and sentenced to a “cross-limb amputation” at Kober Prison.

Typical Under Sharia

What happened to Aissa was typical of the punishment meted out here before the April 6 overthrow of President Jaafar Numeiri. Under the Islamic law, or sharia , that Numeiri imposed 19 months ago, there was no mercy. The “decisive justice courts” were swift and brutal and, contrary to the teachings of the Koran, imposed the maximum punishment without considering the circumstances of the alleged crime.

Between September, 1983, and last December, 54 suspected criminals lost hands and 16 others lost two limbs each to the long, thick knives imported from Saudi Arabia. “They were sharp and fast,” Aissa said.

In two more cases, appeals courts added amputation to a lesser sentence. On three occasions, men were sentenced to posthumous crucifixion after hanging, though the crucifixions were never carried out.

So controversial was this system of justice that when Numeiri was toppled, crowds immediately set off for Kober Prison. They broke through its 12-foot-high brick walls and danced around the trapdoor of the steel gallows. They set the prisoners free and chanted, “No more amputations!”

Purpose Questioned

For them, the northern Muslims, the excesses of sharia had become the symbol of Numeiri’s failed presidency. For the southern blacks, who are Christian and animist, the implementation of Islamic law was confirmation that they were second-class citizens. And for both, there was confusion: What was the sharia really meant to accomplish?

“If I had been judged by the old English law, I would have been released from Kober at once with no punishment,” Aissa said. He held up his scarred, amputated arm to make the point, and the crowd fell back a step.

The pressure on Numeiri to cast aside Western-style law in favor of the sharia came from the Muslim Brotherhood, a fundamentalist organization that wants to transform Sudan into an Islamic republic like Iran. Its leader is Hassan Turabi, 52, a charming, soft-spoken lawyer, educated in London and Paris, who fainted when he witnessed his first amputation in Kober Prison.

Turabi lives in an airy, government-owned home on the banks of the Blue Nile, two miles downriver from the prison. He sat barefooted in his living room the other day, killing flies with a can of insect spray and explaining that although Numeiri had abused the sharia, its principles remained a sound code for civilized behavior.

‘Africans Aren’t Shocked’

“Ultimately we can’t do away with amputation because it’s in the book (the Koran),” he said, sipping a cup of sugared tea. “It’s not as though hundreds of people were losing their limbs, and look how sharia has worked in Saudi Arabia. They have absolute security; they don’t even have to lock their doors.

“You know, the punishment really isn’t that shocking. In Zaire and other places in Africa, thieves are crucified and beaten to death. So, Africans aren’t shocked by the idea of flogging and corporal punishment.”

For Sudan’s northern Muslims, sharia was viewed with ambivalence. They are a devout, gentle people who like the concepts of Islamic law but not the restrictions--the harsh punishments, the ban on alcohol, the sexual segregation, the security agents who burst into homes to demand that couples prove they are married. But the Koran does not permit partial acceptance, for true believers do not question.

This presents the post-Numeiri government with a dilemma. If it repeals sharia, it might incite the religious zealots. If it enforces sharia, it condones amputations as an appropriate 20th-Century punishment in a country that wants to encourage foreign investment and tourism.

Sharia May Fade Away

What seems likely to happen is that the sharia will be allowed to fade away without official decree. Amputations, if carried out at all, would be ordered only in extraordinary cases; non-Muslims would be subject to Western-style justice.

Alcohol may eventually be sold to non-Sudanese in international hotels, government sources said. Already, the hotel swimming pools have again become sexually integrated after a test period in which men and women were allowed to sit together fully clothed at poolside. When no government crackdown resulted, women were given permission by the hotels to don bathing suits and swim before the eyes of men.