Islamic Militants Build Power Base in Sudan : Religion: The regime vows to export beliefs, worrying its more secular Arab neighbors and the West.

The stifling heat of spring lies on the backs of the Blue Nile and the White Nile where they meet here on this dusty plain. The result is soporific.

A driver, arms and head sprawling from his taxi’s window, snores. A soldier lets his rifle dangle in the dirt as his chin dips onto his chest. Men in white robes and turbans droop under the few trees along the river. Nearby, at the popular Acropole Hotel, the afternoon stillness is disturbed only by the slow wheeling of ceiling fan blades and an occasional fly.

This sand-swept African backwater may seem an unlikely spot for it. But Sudan’s Arab neighbors--casting a wary eye at the ruling regime’s vow to spread an Islamic “earthquake” through the region--have a new name for the Saharan country that is both Africa’s largest and one of its poorest. They call it, “Fundamentalism International.”

In the nearly three years since Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir’s Islamic regime took power in 1989, Sudan’s Islamic universities have attracted young Muslim intellectuals from all over the region to study Sudan’s unique brand of Islam and politics.

Sudanese activists have been arrested or expelled for allegedly trying to undermine the governments in Algeria, Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates.

Sudan has provided temporary haven for Islamic radical leaders of organizations suspected in the murder of former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and, last year, the death of Rifaat Mahgoub, Speaker of Egypt’s Parliament.

Sudanese leaders have made no secret of their view that many of the governments of their Arab neighbors, from Tunisia to Morocco to Saudi Arabia, are illegitimate and likely to be short-lived.

Sudan’s opposition leaders say that a three-member committee from Sudan has been tapping wealthy Islamic fundamentalists in the Gulf region and the West. The committee collected up to $30 million to finance the surprising, if short-lived, Islamic fundamentalist victory at the polls in Algeria last December.

American, Egyptian and other Western officials report that up to 20 military training camps have been established recently in northern Sudan. Some of them, they believe, may be serving Islamic militant groups that have sent representatives to Khartoum, including the notorious Abu Nidal terrorist organization, the Iranian-backed Hezbollah, the Palestinian fundamentalist group Hamas and Islamic Jihad for the Liberation of Palestine.

Further alarming Sudan’s Arab neighbors, and the United States, has been the highly visible entry of Iran on the scene, with multimillion-dollar military and trade contracts. Those agreements have enabled Sudan’s fledgling Islamic government to mount a major new assault in the long-running civil war with the Christian and animist-dominated south.

“The head of their agenda is the export of their ideology, which is radical, political Islam. They’re determined to infect anyone in the world with this virus, and certainly their neighbors, by any means,” a senior Western official said recently of the Sudanese.

Why Sudan? The answer rests largely with Hassan Abdullah Turabi, Sudan’s erudite, soft-spoken, Sorbonne-educated Islamic leader. He is believed to be not only the behind-the-scenes power in Khartoum but also one of the key architects of Islamic movements in Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Chad and Afghanistan.

This grandfatherly figure has challenged the conventional wisdom of traditional fundamentalist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. He has helped to develop a new brand of populist Islam that has won widespread support among young Muslim intellectuals and the Islamic business community.

He is a religious leader who claims to adhere to fundamentalist Islam’s stringent teachings regulating art, music and women’s rights. But under his policies, women in Sudan can serve in the new people’s militia and work side-by-side with men, although women still must wear the veil. And instead of condemning money as a source of evil, Turabi has inspired a generation of young Muslims to make money, live well and spend what is left over on propagating Islam.

The holder of graduate degrees from schools in Paris and London, he speaks Arabic, English, French and German. His supporters say the West has come to fear him because, in so many ways, Turabi is so Western.

“He understands Western philosophy, he understands both worlds. Maybe this is why people here respect him, and why your people are afraid of him. . . . He understands your visions, your philosophy, your strategies and your shortcomings,” said a young Islamic banker.

Turabi has capitalized on the wave of anti-Western sentiment that accompanied the Gulf War and led the march of a growing number of leftist, secular Arab intellectuals from the disillusion of Arab nationalism to a new sanctuary in Islamic fundamentalism.

On the one hand, he says it is “ridiculous” that a poverty-stricken country like Sudan would finance or train terrorists. But, on the other hand, he admits that Sudan is ready to export its Islamic revolution by example.

“As a model, it radiates most powerfully,” he said in a recent interview. “Most of what the West is afraid of is subconscious, historical backlog. You know, Islam was a target of antagonism and hostility during the Crusades and the colonial wars. Most of these (Western) powers had to fight their way in Muslim territories, and, during the liberation wars, they were thrown out by force in Algeria and many other countries, and they developed some antipathy toward Islam. . . . They came to realize that the revival of Islam would correct the equation between West and East, the Third World. . . .

“The other factor, I think, there is a vacuum now, a threat vacuum, with Russia out of the scene,” he added. “You (in the West) need an empire of evil to mobilize against. . . .”

Turabi’s discourse is peppered with obscure historical references and quiet, self-deprecating chuckles when he talks of the impossibility of a poor nation like Sudan exporting terrorism or challenging the West. Then, in the same breath, he applauds the collapse of the Soviet Union, because it gave Muslim countries access to nuclear technology.

“It’s just that America’s been trying hard, and visibly, to stop Muslims from developing any technology,” he explained. “And, of course, anyone who’s powerful would want to maintain the equation. I mean, it makes them exclusively powerful. . . .

“Islam as a religion,” he added, “had a strong international law message long before international law was known, and it was always against the excesses of war against noncombatants. I would go for the banning of atomic weapons completely, just like chemical warfare, if only the other side would accept the deal. But I won’t accept a lopsided deal at all. . . . The Muslims won’t accept a double standard. And if you slap them on the cheek, they don’t turn the other.”

As for Sudan, Islam claimed it in the middle of the night, not by force, but by stealth.

The army’s high command had already threatened to withdraw its support from the foundering government of former Prime Minister Sadek Mahdi. The military leaders demanded that he clean up the country’s economic mess and throw Turabi’s increasingly powerful National Islamic Front out of his coalition government.

In that regime, Turabi’s party had worked to impose the Sharia--Islamic law imposing strict Islamic practices--that was one of the main objects of the civil war with the non-Muslim south.

Mahdi adopted some of the army command’s reforms. But on the night of June 30, 1989, a group of junior officers knocked at the doors of their commanders and arrested them, then sent out radio messages to the rest of the force that the senior command had launched a coup. The troops, only too willing, joined in; the young colonels and majors took power, without bloodshed, overnight.

Political parties then were banned and their leaders, including Turabi, were arrested.

A debate persists in Sudan up to now about whether Turabi’s Islamic Front secretly planned the coup, especially since military leader Bashir and his colleagues, most of them doctors in the army, were Islamic fundamentalists.

Mudawi Turabi, a cousin and an opposition leader in exile in Cairo and Paris, said he shared a cell with the Sudanese leader just after the coup. He found him serene about the cataclysmic events unfolding in the capital. Turabi “was denying . . . that this (coup) could be done by his people. . . . He said to me, ‘I don’t have a mechanical grip on them, but I can influence their directions and policies,’ ” he recalled in a recent interview.

He said that Turabi, with whom he had been relatively close before the coup, had met twice with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein before the Gulf War and had appeared to be designing his own Islamic empire even then.

Just months after Sudan’s coup, Turabi was released from prison, the National Islamic Front unofficially joined hands with the government, and it went about the business of establishing an Islamic state from the ground up.

Women in public service and at schools, under a directive from Bashir, still must wear the veil. And a special Islamic tax known as zakat, based on the Koran’s directive to Muslims to aid the poor, is now being collected on the basis of 2.5% to 10% of businesses’ capital and profits.

More importantly, Sudan--for years desperately dependent on international relief and foreign aid to bail it out of a lingering cycle of famine and poverty--has embarked on a program of self-sufficiency in the face of a near boycott of foreign assistance by Western governments hostile to the new regime.

In recent months, Sudan has worked to open its economy--privatizing industry, eliminating import and export restrictions, floating the Sudanese pound, eliminating heavy food subsidies.

It has done so without the kind of massive outside help that has poured into the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and Egypt. Foreign aid has dwindled from 55% of the budget, when the new regime took power in 1989, to just 5% this year. The deficit has climbed to an alarming 25 billion Sudanese pounds (slightly less than half the budget) and inflation is approaching 200%.

With the minimum wage at just 1,500 Sudanese pounds a month, many families cannot afford to eat more than a single meal a day; a pair of shoes costs twice the minimum monthly wage. “We have hit people with horrendous measures, 500% increases in the price of bread, a devaluation of 300% and they have accepted it. They have seen the government is working in a very sincere way and, more importantly, in a very uncorrupted way, and, therefore, people have accepted it and endured,” said Finance Minister Abdul Rahim Hamdi.

Sirri Ibrahim Mohammed, assistant general manager at Faisal Islamic Bank and an Islamic Front activist, contended that the Sudanese have accepted the hardships because they feel their nation is pursuing higher, spiritual and philosophic goals in creating an Islamic state.

“If you want to be really your own country, you have to sacrifice, and a lot more,” he said. “We are now sacrificing certain luxuries, maybe. That doesn’t mean we will impoverish our people to the extent of depriving them of meals. But whatever alternative we are pushed to, we will take it.”

Not everyone has been impoverished by the government “economic salvation plan.” Islamic Front activists have taken over key positions in the foreign ministry, army, security forces, universities, newspapers and civil service; many have benefited from their nation’s new entrepreneurial climate.

Government opponents say lucrative import licenses and distribution contracts routinely go to Islamic Front supporters. Farmers applying for government-supplied fertilizers are asked if they are party members.

Accompanying the bonanza for the Islamic Front has been a vicious crackdown on the regime’s opponents. Hundreds of opposition figures have been rounded up, taken to unmarked locations known as “ghost houses” and beaten or detained under miserable conditions.

The Bashir government admits this situation has affected many. “This was a military takeover, it had to lock up people for some time,” said Hamdi, the finance minister. “This is a fact of life in Sudan. I myself have been locked up three times. But if you compare our human rights record to your friends in Egypt, in Saudi Arabia, you find Sudan is shining.”

The government claims now to hold no political prisoners, although opposition figures can name people who they say are still in detention.

“Whatever difficulties were faced by a democratic system, the failures of this system are greater and more dangerous,” said Mahdi, the former prime minister who lives under heavy surveillance in his Nile villa. “I say very clearly, any system which does not respect Islam’s political imperatives can’t call itself Islamic. Unless you are based on the consent of the governed and remove compulsion from the equation, you can’t call yourself Islamic.”

In Khartoum, opponents of the regime are photocopying tens of thousands of copies of news articles and pamphlets critical of the government and distributing them. Businessmen sympathetic to the opposition ferry materials back and forth from Cairo.

“We are here organizing a sort of army, and we use modern ways of attacking them,” said one opposition businessman. “Despite the shortages, many Sudanese appreciate the Western stand of not giving any aid, any support to this government, despite the fact that poverty now is knocking on the door of every Sudanese.”

But Western diplomats say Turabi and company are likely here to stay, at least for now. At least four attempted coups have been put down already, one of them with the controversial execution of 28 army officers. More importantly, just coping with the desperate poverty in Sudan may have anesthetized much of the population against an uprising, analysts say.

“It’s no wonder these people are so cocky,” one Western envoy said of Sudan’s fundamentalists. “They’ve got confidence in the timidity and fearfulness of their own people, and they’re right.”

Sweeping Changes in Sudan

Sudan is at the center of a wave of Islamic fundamentalism sweeping through the Middle East and Africa. Here is some background information on the country.

Population: *25.9 million

Area: 967,500 square miles (about one-quarter the size of United States)

Monetary unit: Sudanese pound

Language: Arabic (official), Dinka, Nubian, Nuer, Beja

Religions: Islam, Christianity, animism

Per capita income: $330

Literacy: 27% of those age 15 and older can read and write

Economic activity: Agriculture (cotton, sorghum, sesame seed); fishing; forestry; food processing (sugar refining); textiles; cement production; petroleum refining.

* Estimated, 1991

Source: World Almanac, 1992