Neighbors Lose No Love Over Sudan Regime

When it comes to bad guys in sub-Saharan Africa, it is hard to find one so universally despised as the government of Sudan.

Despite deep sympathy for the country’s starving thousands, its neighbors hate the regime in Khartoum. Many of its own people do too. And for the better part of five years, so has the U.S. government, which took the extraordinary step Thursday night of launching a missile attack on a suspected chemical weapons factory in the Sudanese capital.

“A minority has hijacked the Sudanese government and has become extremely fanatical,” said Jacob Akol of World Vision, an international relief and development organization with extensive operations in southern Sudan. “It does not represent the point of view of most Sudanese.”

It’s not just that the military regime in Khartoum has one of the worst human rights records in the world, torturing political opponents, using starvation as a weapon of civil war and tolerating slavery among its own people. Sudan, one of the poorest countries in Africa, has more than 4 million displaced citizens.

But the troubles extend beyond Sudan’s borders. Since overthrowing the last democratically elected government in 1989, the ruling National Islamic Front has tried to destabilize neighboring Uganda, Ethiopia and Eritrea and is accused of participating in an assassination attempt on President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Sudan’s neighbor to the north.

To top it off, the U.S. government and others allege that Khartoum has provided a haven for international terrorists, at one time including Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born financier suspected of orchestrating the recent bomb attacks in Kenya and Tanzania that killed more than 260 people. Bin Laden now lives in Afghanistan, the other target of the U.S. military attacks Thursday, after finally being deported by Khartoum.

“You say terrorism, you say Africa, and you say Sudan,” said Constance Freeman, director of African affairs at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “Whether that is fair or not remains to be seen.”

In 1993, the Clinton administration placed Sudan on the list of state sponsors of terrorism, joining such countries as Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, North Korea and Cuba. Three years later, relations between the two countries had become so bad that the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum closed and moved to neighboring Kenya, ending years of efforts to moderate the Sudanese regime through so-called “constructive engagement”--and setting the stage for Thursday’s attack.

“That was a hotly contested decision, but the threat of terrorism finally prevailed,” said Freeman, who was the top economic officer at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi when the move was being debated. “As a result, we do not have regular live-in American presence in Khartoum.”

In a statement Friday, Sudanese officials here in the Kenyan capital denied any link to terrorist groups and insisted that “tolerance, peace and respect for other opinion” is enshrined in their government policy. It went on to accuse the U.S. government of behaving like terrorists by destroying the Shifa Pharmaceuticals factory in north Khartoum.

“The sole motive behind the attack was the crippling of the economy of Sudan and stunting its development,” the embassy statement said. “And the timing was chosen to serve the wish of a sexual pervert and maniac to divert attention away from his crumbling credibility and reputation.”

Sudan is huge, stretching from a vast desert in the north to an expansive savanna in the south. It has a population about the size of California’s, and as in other large countries, there is a sharp divide between north and south, which were swept into one by the fancy of colonial Britain.

The mostly Arab north looks to the Middle East for its ethnic and religious origins, while the predominantly black south is firmly rooted in African traditions. For the past 15 years, the two sides have been at war, as the Christian and animist south resists the Muslim government’s bid to impose Arab culture and Islamic law on the country as a whole. Since independence in 1956, on-again, off-again fighting between the north and south has claimed about 1.5 million lives.

“The British left a very underdeveloped African south to get hooked up with a slightly more developed Arabic-speaking Islamic north, and that has led to a lot of discrimination against southerners and other marginalized people,” said Jemera Rone, an expert on Sudan at Human Rights Watch. “It is a structural problem that has not been dealt with successfully by any government, democratic or military. The current government is taking it to the extreme by ‘Arabizing’ and ‘Islamizing’ the south.”

Although the Sudanese version of an Islamic state is significantly less restrictive than those in such places as Iran and Saudi Arabia, the demographics of Sudan are also far less homogeneous than in most of its Middle East counterparts. Less than 40% of the population is Arab, and about one-third of Sudanese practice a religion other than Islam.

Even among the Muslim population, the fundamentalist ruling National Islamic Front collected just one-fifth of the popular vote in elections before seizing power in a bloodless coup nine years ago; the party won an overwhelming majority in elections in 1996, but most opposition groups boycotted the poll.

Recently, there have been reports of greater cooperation among rebel groups in the south and disaffected Muslims in the north in a common battle against the government. Many Muslims are opposed to the imposition of a strict Islamic code of conduct and fear that the current government has condemned the country to a slow and painful death through international isolation.

Nonetheless, under the country’s Islamic Sharia laws passed in the early 1990s, a Muslim converting to another religion can be sentenced to death. According to testimony last month in the U.S. Congress, Mekki Kuku, a schoolteacher living in the north, has been charged with apostasy for converting from Islam to Christianity and faces a death sentence.

Last year, the U.N. Human Rights Commission expressed serious concern over reports of “religious persecution, including forced conversions of Christians and animists, in government-controlled areas.”

Despite its differences with Khartoum, the United States has spent about $700 million in the past 10 years on humanitarian assistance for Sudan, largely to help alleviate widespread food shortages caused by the fighting.

As to the specific allegation that Sudan has harbored chemical weapons facilities, a Human Rights Watch report issued this week says that Sudanese opposition leaders have charged that the government has stored chemical weapons for Iraq at the Yarmouk Military Manufacturing Complex in Sheggera, about eight miles south of Khartoum.

“Sudanese opposition leaders, supported by officials in Eritrea and Ethiopia and by diplomatic sources in the region, have also charged that the government of Sudan has been working to develop a chemical weapons capacity,” the Human Rights Watch report said. “However, government officials have strenuously denied the charges.”

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The Power in Sudan

Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir

Post: President

Age: 63

Political career: Chairman of Revolutionary Command Council for National Salvation (RCC), 1989; head of state, prime minister, minister of defense, 1989; appointed president, 1993; elected president 1996.

Came to power in 1989 in a military coup that overthrew Sudan’s democratically elected government. Bashir and the RCC suspended the 1985 constitution, abrogated press freedom and disbanded all political parties and trade unions. In 1993 the RCC dissolved itself and appointed Bashir president. In March 1996 Bashir won the presidency in highly structured national elections.

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Hassan Turabi

Post: Leader of the National Congress, considered to be the de facto leader of Sudan.

Age: 65

Education: Degrees in law from Khartoum University, London University and the Sorbonne

Political career: Appointed deputy prime minister under regime of his brother-in-law, Sadek Mahdi, 1989. Elected secretary-general of National Islamic Front, 1991; speaker of parliament, 1996-1998.

The National Congress is regarded as a substitute for the National Islamic Front (NIF), which Turabi headed but was officially disbanded along with other political parties when Bashir seized power.