In Sudan, Hope Has a Hard Time

Idris Nazil, a newspaper editor and head of a publishing firm here, is well-to-do by Sudanese standards. But when he and family members recently came down with fevers, even he couldn’t afford the medicine his doctor prescribed.

“I said to my wife that I should go to my company and get a loan for this,” Nazil recalled scornfully. “Everything is so expensive--even for the director of a company like me.”

In a country facing its 29th year of civil war, and with electricity a fast-receding memory in Khartoum, the capital, problems of everyday life seem to keep piling up.

Nazil is not alone in wondering if his country’s tribulations are ever going to end. As almost anyone who has been to Sudan will admit, it is a place that tends to confound hope.

This country of desert and savanna straddling the middle course of the Nile could be described as nearly 1 million square miles of poverty, hunger, civil war, slavery, terrorism, religious persecution and repression. It is ruled over by a clique of extreme Islamist politicians whose claims to legitimacy and popularity are dubious.

The south of the country is in the throes of famine. There is little that millions of dollars in international food assistance have been able to do to save tens of thousands of people from a miserable, slow death from hunger.

As for the government-controlled north, the United States has charged that the regime has links with international terrorist networks, from Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden and Venezuelan-born guerrilla Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, known as “Carlos the Jackal,” to Iraq’s clandestine chemical weapons program. In August, the U.S. used cruise missiles to destroy a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum that it claimed was involved in chemical-weapons production, although the evidence of that connection is in dispute.

List of Problems Fuels International Apathy

Terrorism and hunger--these are the two faces of Sudan that the world most commonly sees. Humanitarian and political crises occur in Sudan with alarming regularity and grab the spotlight briefly. But Sudan’s underlying problems are so complex and intractable that the international community tends eventually to just look the other way.

“The world’s attention very quickly leaves Sudan,” said Jemera Rone of Human Rights Watch/Africa.

“It’s a forgotten place--no question about it,” said Rep. Tony P. Hall (D-Ohio), who this year visited Sudan.

It is depressing to recount the litany of troubles facing Sudan. Imagine a derby for the world’s most woebegone states, places that over the years have defeated the best efforts of policymakers and development experts. Sudan--isolated, impoverished and racked for decades by war, famine and human rights abuses--would certainly be near the front of the pack.

With a per capita income of less than $900 a year, Sudan is one of the dozen or so poorest countries on Earth. It is fighting a war with guerrillas on most fronts and squabbling with Egypt over territory along its northeastern border. Life expectancy is a meager 55.5 years. Less than half the adult population can read and write.

When British-Egyptian colonial rule ended in 1956, the country was home to one of the finest universities in Africa. It had a highly educated middle class, a relatively small population and a huge territory with abundant water and other resources. Agriculture experts say that if the rich farmland between the White and Blue Niles was fully cultivated, it alone could produce enough food to feed all of Africa.

What then were the reasons for Sudan’s decline, and are there any prospects of setting the nation on the road to recovery?

The fundamental dispute that has haunted and sapped modern Sudan is one of identity. Its rulers in Khartoum have always viewed it as a Muslim country and an integral part of the Arab world. But critics of this view regard Sudan as a multi-religious, multiethnic, multilingual state, one in which pure Arabs are a minority.

160 Ethnic Groups, 100 Distinct Languages

The country, the largest in Africa and roughly the size of the United States east of the Mississippi, has a population of 32 million people comprising 160 ethnic groups speaking 100 distinct languages. No tongue, not even Arabic, is understood everywhere.

In addition, there is a yawning gap in the level of development between the mainly Arab north, where there is some progress, and the black African south, where there is almost none.

That the north and south are in the same nation at all is a legacy of borders drawn by the Egyptian Ottoman pashas during the 19th century and during British-Egyptian colonial rule, from 1898 to 1956. The demand of southerners, mainly non-Muslims, to be free of Arab domination has been the main issue that has embroiled the north and south in a civil war for 28 of the last 40 years. The current phase of the war started in 1983.

By now a more or less permanent feature of Sudanese life, the war turned especially nasty after the current regime came to power in 1989 in a bloodless coup by military officers belonging to the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, who overthrew a popularly elected government. Led by the National Islamic Front, a party that had polled less than 10% in the previous election, the regime immediately banned political parties and moved to impose Sharia--Islamic law--across Sudan, even in areas where Muslims were not a majority.

The movement’s leader is Sorbonne-educated parliament speaker Hassan Turabi. His enemies call him a modern-day Machiavelli who took power by toppling his brother-in-law and erstwhile political ally, Sadek Mahdi. His government aims to consolidate Islamic rule throughout Sudan and foster Islamic political movements in other countries.

Human Rights Woes Deemed Inevitable

“They have a program of unifying the country by making everyone an Arabic-speaking Muslim,” said Rone, the Human Rights Watch official. “A lot of human rights problems spring from this intolerance and the need of a minority government to stay in power.”

As part of its effort to subjugate the south, Arab-influenced tribes in central Sudan were armed by the government and encouraged to scour neighboring rebel territory. These raiders--organized as the Popular Defense Forces--burn villages, rustle cattle and enslave black children they capture. With the countryside stripped of food, the black peasants and cattle herders have been forced into government-controlled garrison towns.

The war has taken a terrible toll--1.5 million people killed since 1983, including 250,000 from a war-induced famine in 1988-89. About 4 million Sudanese are displaced. No one yet knows how many have died in this year’s famine, which occurred in Bahr el Ghazal province in the southwest despite the largest food lift in history, a $115-million-plus annual operation carried out by the United Nations’ Lifeline Sudan.

The fortunes of the rebels, led by John Garang’s Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, or SPLA, wax and wane. In general, they control the border areas in the southern half of the country and much of the bush, and have encircled major towns. The SPLA claims to patrol an area larger than neighboring Uganda and has won powerful friends in the West. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright met with Garang in Uganda late last year.

Although it is officially denied, Washington is widely perceived to favor the rebels. Nonlethal U.S. military aid goes to Sudan’s neighbors Eritrea, Ethiopia and Uganda--governments that support Garang’s movement and, if Khartoum is to be believed, sometimes fight alongside it.

But the SPLA so far has proved a failure at governing. In the areas it controls, there is almost no civil administration or system of social services except for the occasional school or clinic run by missionaries or international nongovernmental organizations. Furthermore, SPLA soldiers have been accused of human rights abuses and of siphoning off food meant for starving people.

Sudan’s neighbors are for the most part fed up with Khartoum and its efforts to export its radical policies. The war has had a destabilizing effect on the whole Horn of Africa. Distant Iran and Iraq are practically the regime’s only friends.

The regime faces internal resistance as well--from businesspeople, professionals and supporters of the two long-established Sudanese political parties that lost out after the 1989 coup. “Only the rats and cats, the fat ones, are supporting this regime. We want to be a healthy member of the world community,” Fadallah Burma, a former defense minister under the last democratic government, told a reporter in Khartoum in June.

Yet for all its problems, the Khartoum government appears secure. It has the bulk of Sudan’s population under its thumb and the preponderance of weapons. Over the past nine years, it has purged the military, academia and unions of people of questionable loyalty. President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir has publicly challenged the regime’s opponents to try to take power by force if they dare.

One of the tragedies of Sudan is that neither the government nor its opponents are capable of a knockout blow, meaning that the slow bleeding of the country goes on and on. Is there any hope of stopping the suffering?

Calls From West for Attention to Be Paid

Some in the West, such as Hall, the Ohio congressman, are calling for higher-level and sustained engagement by the international community to try to bring the war to a negotiated conclusion. Hall points out that more people have died in Sudan’s war than in other high-profile conflicts, including those in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina, and that suffering on such a scale deserves a greater share of the world’s attention.

He argues for the appointment of an internationally recognized special envoy to mediate a settlement in Sudan, someone with the stature of former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, former Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Maine) or Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. ambassador-designate to the United Nations.

Hoping to burnish its image, Sudan this year adopted a more inclusive constitution and proclaimed a temporary cease-fire in the south--a truce matched by the rebels, who extended theirs Thursday for three months. Sudan also is seeking an international investigation to rebut U.S. claims that the Shifa Pharmaceutical plant hit by missiles in August was producing chemical weapons. Former President Jimmy Carter, the Arab League and Human Rights Watch are among those who, citing Washington’s somewhat contradictory explanations for the attack, have agreed that such an investigation is warranted.

The regime says it has closed its borders to terrorist groups and would like to repair relations with its neighbors and the United States. Such claims, however, meet skepticism in Egypt and Washington. For instance, Hall recounted how during his visit to Khartoum in May, his hotel was virtually taken over by Sheik Ahmed Yassin, founder of the Palestinian resistance group Hamas.

A Ruler Dismissive of All Criticism

Turabi, a loquacious talker who holds court at his spacious home in a Khartoum suburb, is airily dismissive of the charges that have been lodged against his government. Terrorists? Sudan took in a few Arab veterans of the war in Afghanistan who were not allowed to go home, he says. This year’s famine? A passing problem caused when a jealous warlord switched sides. Economic decay? It was Britain that left the country with nothing; this government finally is putting things right.

In Turabi’s eyes, Sudan is a success story, and the United States should hop aboard before it’s too late. “I am inviting investors, any investors, Americans, Europeans, to come and invest here,” he said in an interview.

Khartoum retains a certain dilapidated colonial charm, especially along the bank of the Blue Nile, where middle-class Sudanese--the men in the national garb of flowing white gowns and high white turbans, the women enveloped in bright scarves--come out at dusk to sit on the grass and picnic, gazing out at green fields dotted with grazing cattle.

A group of picnickers complained about high prices and lack of electricity--service is now down to two hours a day in much of the capital because the government cannot afford to maintain the electricity grid, which in turn means water cannot be pumped from many wells.

Most saw scant prospect of life improving until the war in the south is finished, and none had the slightest notion when that might be. Yet in the balmy evening, watching their children at play, they seemed resigned and even content. Perhaps that complacency, or powerlessness, could be seen as one more aspect of Sudan’s plight.

As Salah Abdul Wahab, a police officer out with his relatives, put it: “In Sudan we are used to saying, no matter what happens, ‘Thanks be to God.’ ”

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Sudan: A Nation at Risk

The world’s 10th-largest nation in area, Sudan faces an overwhelming litany of social ills: war, poverty, hunger, slavery and repression among them. Statistics give a picture of some of the nation’s woes:

Infant mortality: 74.3 out of every 1,000 live births

Literacy: 46.1% of those 15 and over

People killed in warfare since 1983: 1.5 million

Per capita gross domestic product: $860

Telephones: 1 for every 422 people

Life expectancy: 55.5 years

Calories consumed each day: 2,314* (U.S.: 3,641)

People at risk of starvation: 1.2 million**

Sources: United Nations Development Program; “The World Fact Book 1997,” Central Intelligence Agency; *”The New Book of World Rankings,” Facts on File, 1991; and **World Food Program statement, July 1998