Sudan: end of the longest war? Paul Moorcraft returned to Sudan to report on peace in the south and, paradoxically, the tragedy in the west of the country. The longest war on the African continent – in its biggest country, Sudan – looks as if it has finally ended. Although African peace accords are torn up almost daily, this one could well work, mainly because of major international pressure and general war-weariness in both the north and south. The Islamic government in Khartoum had already agreed to a permanent ceasefire with the rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement. In Naivasha, Kenya, amid much VIP hob-nobbing, a formal peace treaty was signed on 9 January 2005, thus ending 21 years of fighting. A chronicle of cruelty Sudan was officially an Anglo-Egyptian condominium, but de facto a successful British colony run by a tiny and highly efficient colonial civil service. Except for the 1885 decapitation of the British ‘governor’, General ‘Chinese’ Gordon, and some derring-do by Winston Churchill, Sudan had been largely a media backwater. Even before 1956, when it became independent, on-off clashes between the Arab Muslim government and the largely African and Christian/animist south went largely unreported. In 1958 the first of many coups toppled a Khartoum government. The military replaced a civilian administration elected a year earlier. In 1962 a full-scale civil war began in the south. Eventually, southerners were given some autonomy, but in 1978 oil was discovered in Bentiu in southern Sudan. In 1983 southerners, led by Colonel John Garang, rebelled again. Islamic Sharia law was imposed by Khartoum, which did not endear the regime to the southerners. Once a close US ally, Sudan increasingly fell out of favour with Washington -– especially after the 1989 installation of a revolutionary Islamic regime which the Americans put in the same box as Iran (even though Sudan adheres to a Sunni model of Islam, unlike the more radical Shi’ite creed espoused in Teheran). Washington also damned the Sudanese as being too pro-Saddam in the Gulf war. In 1993 the Clinton administration listed Sudan as a state sponsor of terrorism. UN and US sanctions were imposed and the American embassy in Khartoum was closed in 1996. Following the 1989 military coup, General Omar al-Bashir emerged as president, and he’s still in power. The eminence grise of the regime was Dr Hasan al-Turabi, an Islamic intellectual, who was pleased to host Osama bin Laden from 1991 to 1996. Although the alcohol ban imposed after the Islamic revolution did not entice many foreign correspondents, in May 1996 I went out to interview Mr bin Laden. I wanted to make up for my missed opportunities when I worked in Afghanistan in the 1980s. In Sudan I again missed the Islamic warlord – by a few days. US and Egyptian arm-twisting encouraged Khartoum to ask Osama to go somewhere else (except Somalia). Later, the Islamic government said that it would have handed over Osama, perhaps in a deal that would prompt Washington to lift its sanctions and to show that Sudan was not a rogue state. Both US and UK intelligence agencies questioned whether the offer was genuine, but Bill Clinton said that, in retrospect, turning down Osama’s head on a plate was the biggest mistake of his presidency. Khartoum said it wanted to open a new chapter with the West, but I was not impressed by the fact that I and the film crew were arrested on the first day in the country – by the Minister of Justice himself. We were quickly released and allowed to film the government’s attempts to end the war in the deep south. There we managed to secretly interview the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Juba, Paulino Loro. He complained of the Arabisation of the south and of many attacks on the Christian faith. But the Islamic spiritual leader of the country, Dr al-Turabi, a man at ease in a turban or tie, insisted that there was no religious discrimination in Sudan. He listed the various Christians in the Khartoum government. He also refuted American accusations about the slave trade. ‘There is absolutely no slavery in Sudan,’ he told me. (He had a point: many of the so-called ‘slave redemptions’ paid for by well-meaning American Christians were elaborate local scams.) US hostility reached a climax in 1998 when President Clinton authorised a cruise missile attack on the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum. This alleged chemical weapons factory was producing half the anti-malaria tablets in the country. Washington soon realised that this was a massive intelligence error but it never apologized, or compensated the Sudanese. (Some US intelligence experts also bought the line that Sudanese facilities were being used to make elements of biological and chemical weapons. Both the cruise missile attack and the bogus WMD claims portended the faulty intelligence over Iraq’s arsenal. Here was early evidence of both the politicization and corruption of intelligence, partly caused by over-influential indigenous domestic lobbies in the US, as well as self-serving inputs from exile groups. They cried wolf in Sudan and Iraq. Perhaps Iran is next.) Despite – or perhaps because of – al-Shifa, Khartoum upped the volume on the offers of intelligence cooperation, especially on al-Qaeda. And the arch-troublemaker Turabi was locked up in Khartoum. Meanwhile, the government continued its overtures to the southern rebels. Nevertheless, after 9/11 and the war on Afghanistan, Sudan thought it was next in line. The US had, after all, been providing aid to the rebels in the south for years. Sudan’s oil was key, however, and the new Texan President had a more cynical line in petro-politics. Khartoum needed peace to exploit its oil bonanza. UN and EU sanctions were dropped; America still kept its economic restrictions but behind the scenes the US, backed by the British and the Norwegians, supported a series of peace talks in Kenya. The principles of the agreement were that the south could have autonomy for six years to be followed by a referendum on secession. Oil wealth and the jobs this created were to be shared equitably. Sharia law, though, was to remain in the north. When I was again in Sudan in 2002, I sensed the optimism which filled the air. The leaders of the two sides, al-Bashir and Garang met for the first time, through the mediation efforts of the Ugandans, whose country was also being damaged by the Sudanese civil war. Khartoum had been assisting the Lord’s Resistance Army, which specialised in forcing Ugandan children to become boy-soldiers. In turn, Uganda had been aiding Garang’s troops. In the south, and in other dissident areas in the east and in the Nuba mountains, a sense of war-weariness pervaded. Khartoum continued its PR blitz in the West to avoid being a victim of the war on terror. Critics of the Islamic regime, however, insisted that this was not so much a charm offensive as a form of diplomatic deterrence by a very manipulative government in Khartoum. Terror state? The CIA accused bin Laden of being the mastermind behind an international terror network, yet the Sudanese government insists that, during his stay in Sudan, he was involved in purely civil engineering and charity projects. Sudan ejected the Islamic warlord on 18 May 1996. According to a Sudanese government minister who knew him well, bin Laden was ‘very angry’. Bin Laden told him: ‘The Saudis and the US didn’t even pay you — you are throwing me out for nothing.’ An embittered bin Laden returned to Afghanistan. Denied an opportunity to engage in more constructive enterprises, he turned to terrorism. This is the official Sudanese line. Western intelligence sources, however, have indicated that bin Laden had been politically active in Sudan, co-ordinating what became the al-Qaeda network. Lieutenant-General Gutbi al-Mahdi, former head of the Sudan’s powerful Mukhabarat, denied this: ‘When he was here he was under surveillance. We were watching him. He was busy. He was preoccupied with his business…Kicking him out was a big mistake.’ Bin Laden was being watched by a whole array of other agencies too. But in Afghanistan it was almost impossible to monitor him. This miscalculation, according to Khartoum, led directly to the abominations of 11 September. Khartoum still claims that in 1996 it offered bin Laden on a platter to both Washington and Saudi Arabia. But there was ingrained scepticism in US intelligence about the ruling National Islamic Front in Khartoum, partly because nearly 100 bogus reports from unreliable agents in Sudan had created a distorted assessment of the country’s sponsorship of terrorism. On the other hand, opponents of Khartoum insist that the ruling regime was too implicated in the embryonic al-Qaeda to ever give up bin Laden to the CIA. Elements in the FBI and CIA wanted to take the Sudanese at their word; meanwhile others, in the State Department, argued that there was not enough evidence to convict bin Laden in US courts, that the Sudanese offer was a bluff and that, even if it were not, intelligence dialogue would weaken the sanctions pressure on a ‘rogue’ state that the US was trying to isolate. Diplomatic conundrum The bin Laden issue is at the epicentre of a much larger diplomatic conundrum. Khartoum argued that Washington has demonised Sudan because it doesn’t like the Islamist government. The Americans have been real terrorists, Khartoum said, because Washington has, at different times, encouraged Uganda, Eritrea, and Ethiopia to support guerrilla and conventional incursions against the Sudan government. Lethal meddling along a perceived Christian-Muslim fault line could have plummeted Sudan into anarchy, a second Somalia, and create further breeding grounds for international terrorism The Islamic regime, however, has also dabbled continuously in its neighbours’ affairs. Because of lobbying by the US black congressional caucus and by the religious right, Washington has consistently supported, with diplomacy and money, the rebels in the south. (The US has also recently picked up some of the tab for Darfur rebels’ bills during their separate peace talks.) Khartoum insisted that it had bent over backwards to satisfy American demands. The Sudanese government repeatedly requested US inspections of the alleged chemical weapons factories at al-Shifa and elsewhere in Sudan. As one Sudanese diplomat explained to an American audience: ‘You guys bombed Iraq because it blocked UN weapons inspectors. We’re begging for a UN inspection and you’re blocking it.’ Washington finally took up the invitation: in May 2000 a joint FBI-CIA team arrived in Sudan to investigate the alleged terror connections. The visiting US team was given carte blanche in its search for any terror infrastructure. It would appear that the Americans were sufficiently satisfied with the team’s progress not to oppose the lifting of UN sanctions. According to Khartoum, by the end of the first year of investigation, the joint FBI-CIA team was prepared to ‘sign off’ – dismiss – the key terrorist allegations. A US intelligence team (although reduced in numbers) is still in Sudan, working on joint counter-terrorism, says Khartoum. Curiously, senior Sudanese security sources also indicated that, at the beginning, the top American intelligence experts initially showed little interest in the 400 major files on al-Qaeda which were stored in intelligence headquarters. The response by Western intelligence agencies is that the Sudanese were much more protective of their information and Islamic connections than they now pretend. A charm offensive After 11 September Khartoum’s charm offensive went into overdrive. A replay of the al-Shifa debacle was expected. In the event the expected attack never came. But why did the US apparently turn down the bin Laden offer? And, later, why didn’t the resident CIA-FBI team in Khartoum ask immediately to see the al-Qaeda materials, especially as they had expended millions of dollars on electronic surveillance of bin Laden’s network in Afghanistan? The Sudanese explanation is that ‘US intelligence was too politicised’. The Minister for Peace, Dr Ghazi Salah al-Din al-Atabani, explained that ‘US policy had been ideological not pragmatic. There was no way to break the barrier.’ The Sudanese rationale may have been partly true of sections of the State Department in the Clinton administration, but it cuts no ice in interpreting the Bush administration. ‘The Americans see the world differently now,’ conceded the peace minister. Western intelligence sources, however, insist that the Sudanese are not as open as they pretend to be. ‘They have skeletons in the cupboard, and they don’t want us to get too close,’ warned a senior UK Foreign Office official. Eventually, about a month after 11 September, the US requested access to some of the crucial files. Photographs and important biographical details were copied and taken to Washington. It is unclear how much was shared with its major ally in the coalition war, the UK. Initially, the Sudanese may have been politely rebuffed by MI6, but in 2002 they found more willing partners in other UK security agencies, which dramatically beefed up their resources in the hunt for Islamic extremists based in England. Perhaps the unofficial Sudanese jibe to the Americans – ‘If you want to bomb a country with Islamic terrorist cells you should try hitting London – or Saudi Arabia’ – had finally found its mark. Khartoum’s many opponents in the US and the domestic opposition insisted that the government was still a centre of Islamic extremism. The regime was still charged also with tolerating, or practising, slavery and bombing civilians in the civil war. More than two million people have been killed in the southern war since 1983 and a further 4.5 million have been internally displaced. Not all the blame rests with the Islamic government: many, perhaps most, of the fatalities have been caused by internal faction-fighting in the south. Southerners explain this is partly a result of Khartoum’s divide-and-rule policy of arming factions. Amnesty International has said: ‘All parties to the conflict committed gross human rights abuses against civilians living in contested areas including indiscriminate bombing [only the Khartoum government has an air force], abduction, enslavement, forcible recruitment, torture and killings.’ President al-Bashir’s government remains a thinly veiled junta (although now the civilian technocrats are trying to ease into retirement the old men in uniform). The government has tried hard to modify its military image. Khartoum, though, has been accused of spending the new petro-dollars on a big defence programme, including the purchase of Russian Mig-29s. The reclusive Sudanese defence minister, General Bakri Hassan Saleh – a towering man sporting imposing sun-glasses indoors – gave his first-ever media interview to a foreign journalist in 2002. He told this writer: ‘Oil does allow us extra revenues which permit some modernisation, but if we modernise we are accused of militarism. This is a dilemma for us. But we have to be concerned with modernisation because there are nine countries around us and we need helicopters, for example, to guard the pipelines.’ In military terms, the Sudanese army and its allied militias have performed relatively well by African standards. The equipment is often poorly maintained, but their generals have managed to conduct, simultaneously, regular, semi-conventional and counter-insurgency wars over many years. Their battle-hardened neighbours have on occasions provided brigade-level fully armoured forces to support the SPLA. The largely conscript government forces have confounded regular predictions of their imminent collapse. Peace to exploit the oil and political reforms to counter its pariah status were main pillars of the government’s image-building. It organised presidential and parliamentary elections in December 2000. ‘Both UN and European Union monitors turned down invitations to monitor the elections which were widely believed to be seriously flawed,’ stated Amnesty International. ‘Arrests of journalists, political opponents and humans rights activists intensified ahead of the elections.’ Ironically, most of those arrested were anti-government Islamic activists. From Western perspectives, Khartoum appeared to be shedding some of its fundamentalist baggage. Foreign business interests were also attracted by the rapid improvement in the economy. Government statistics – although Sudan is a twilight zone for hard facts – claimed that the country was enjoying an eight per cent rise in its GDP. The boom in luxury cars, mobile phones, property and construction was evidence of the new prosperity, at least in the capital. Nevertheless, US economic sanctions on Sudan remain in place for the time being. The US listing of Sudan as a state sponsor of terrorism has not been removed; though Afghanistan, for example, was not listed even when US intelligence was focussed on al-Qaeda operations in the two years prior to 11 September. As with Iraq, which had been on and off the list since 1979, (it was conveniently de-listed in 1982 when it went to war with Iran) what matters more is political expediency and not so much the level of state-sponsored terrorism. Political expediency was also a factor in ditching Clinton’s former human rights agenda. The Bush administration engaged more with Khartoum as part of a general re-alignment of political allegiances in the region; one goal was to restore some stability in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa. A stubborn fact, however, skewered Khartoum’s charm offensive: bin Laden had been an honoured guest of the National Islamic Front, which still rules in Khartoum. Fashions change however – bin Laden was once a US-backed pin-up boy in the 1980s war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. A wider war So was Sudan a terror state or simply the victim of mistaken identity? After 11 September the initial – convenient – demonisation of one holy warrior has now given way to a much wider strategic perspective. The attempted reconstruction of relations in the Muslim world amidst the Iraqi debacle meant that Khartoum’s friendship with bin Laden, no matter how culpable, has been sacrificed on the alter of realpolitik. In 2002, when Secretary of State Colin Powell criticised the Sudanese armed forces for their bombing campaign in the south, he conceded that ‘The Sudanese have been helpful with respect to intelligence sharing and shutting down some of the terrorist activities that were at least …headquartered in Sudan…’ And yet the Sudanese connection with bin Laden is more than a footnote in a widening war; it may have highlighted important strategic intelligence deficiencies. American politics rather than Sudanese realities have sometimes influenced Washington as it vacillated between constructive engagement and isolation, between military assault on the Islamic government or grabbing some of the oil bonanza, which has been dominated by European, Canadian and Asian interests. The Sudanese government has insisted for years – long before the Iraq WMD fiasco – that US intelligence had been corrupted by received wisdom rather than informed by hard facts. On the other hand, Madelaine Albright, former secretary of state, Samuel R Berger, the former national security advisor, and others have insisted that on numerous occasions between 1996 and 2001 senior US officials met with the Sudanese and nothing of significant operational value was offered. A senior US intelligence officer told me: ‘Do you really think we would turn down any information on bin Laden, especially from an organisation like the Mukhabarat? We would look at it, carefully. It just doesn’t make sense just to say no.’ Whether Khartoum would really have handed over bin Laden in 1996 remains an open question. Khartoum would have been condemned by the Islamic world, but the Sudanese might just have done it in return for the lifting of its pariah status. And the world would have been a far different place. Peace in the south – but war in Darfur Whatever the intelligence input, US policy became increasingly pragmatic towards Khartoum. With some prodding from Washington, a shaky ceasefire in the south was signed in November 2002. The US continued to defuse neighbouring disputes. Senior politicians and intelligence experts in Sudan were now focused on this peace deal. Nearly all were caught unawares by the western insurrection in February 2003 in Darfur, roughly the size of France. Though there had been previous fighting, mainly caused by drought and inter-tribal disputes, a full-scale war – while the rest of the country was on the verge of a desperately needed peace – well, it just didn’t make any sense. In December 2004 I went back to Khartoum, and then travelled to the centre of fighting in North Darfur. This is a very complex war, related to, but distinct from, the southern war. It is tribal and political but it is not racial. It is not Arab versus African, it is not Omar Sharif versus Kunta Kinte, the hero of Roots. Intermarriage makes it usually impossible to physically differentiate ‘African’ from ‘Arab’ among the 35 tribes and ethnic groups who may be roughly divided between nomadic herders and sedentary farming communities. Nevertheless, ten years after the Rwandan massacres, the US State Department dubbed the tragedy in Darfur ‘genocide’. The UN estimated that some 70,000 had been killed. But Kofi Annan contradicted US claims when he said: ‘I cannot call the killing a genocide even though there have been massive violations of international humanitarian law.’ A critic of Khartoum, Alex de Waal, said that ‘characterising the Darfur war as “Arabs” versus “Africans” obscures the reality. Darfur’s Arabs are black, indigenous, African Muslims – just like Darfur’s non-Arabs.’ While the historical conflict between Arabs versus Africans is a recurring theme of Sudanese history, it would be wrong to assume that the Arabs are always the victors and the Africans the victims. Late last year I witnessed the results of attacks by the main rebel Darfur groups (the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement) and the counter-attacks by the government forces, as well as by the militias, armed tribesmen and bandits, often all dubbed ‘Janjaweed’. Both sides are guilty of atrocities. It is true that black Africans – if that term can be used – are in a majority among the 1.8 million who have been displaced and most of them say they fled attacks by the Janjaweed. But there are also displaced ‘Arab’ communities who were attacked by ‘African’ groups. Besides inter-‘African’ ethnic fighting, there were parts of South Darfur, for example, where the World Food Programme could not work because of highly charged traditional conflicts between rival ‘Arab’ groups. A government scorched-earth policy has destroyed many ‘African’ villages – draining the sea, Maoist-style, to prevent the rebels from operating. Sudan’s military intelligence initially had a free hand in Darfur, though it seems now that the ‘civilian’ technocrats in Khartoum have reined them in. The rebels claim that Khartoum has marginalized the three Darfur states (despite recent improvements in transport, education and infrastructure). Factions in neighbouring Chad have also meddled across the border. And a fratricidal factor is the intimate civil war within the Islamic revolution itself. Elements loyal to Hasan al-Turabi formed the Darfur JEM movement. Although US intelligence has rightly been concerned about the growth of jihad in the Sahel – a soft underbelly of both pro-Western North African states and Europe itself – the alleged al-Qaeda connections with JEM have been overplayed. The Darfur rebels have seen what it is on offer to the southerners – especially oil dividends, jobs and autonomy – and they want some of the goodies too. With the comparative stabilisation of the emergency feeding programmes by the end of 2004, the rebels, by attacking aid convoys, have sought to use famine as a means of focusing more international pressure on the Khartoum authorities. The African Union sent a few hundred monitors (the number has now increased to 2,000) and the EU flew in a handful of military observers, but the rebels seem to want to provoke a much larger military intervention. Hence the “the 5,000 British troops” which the media bandied about in 2004. The MoD replied that this was nonsense. And the Foreign Office briefed that Western troops would probably unite all sides in Darfur to launch an Iraq-style jihad against the ‘foreign occupiers’. Historically, the Sudanese government forces would intervene to settle the tribal and nomadic-versus-pastoralist conflicts. Formerly they were seen as referees, but they have been drawn into the fighting. Now they are absent or seen as partisan when they are operational, although the ‘African’ victims often say that they trust the police, while fearing the army and despising the ‘Janjaweed’. Neils Scott, of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, explained in his HQ in El Fashir that ‘the Janjaweed is historical – it’s been around for years. What we’re seeing now is, to a great extent, criminality… We’re in a bandaging situation. What we need here is a political solution.’ Aspects of the Darfur rebellion which relate to the political infighting within the ruling Islamic elite in Khartoum can be resolved internally by a government famous for its muscularity. Many separate issues have been resolved in the Nairobi agreements terminating the war in the south. In December 2004, a senior government minister in Khartoum told me: ‘We want peace now – at any price. President Bush is helping us a lot in the agreement to end the war in the south. It is, for a change, not America’s fault. Actually, you British caused the problem – you separated north and south when you ruled Sudan; and you, by accident, sowed the seeds of conflict in Darfur, when you didn’t give settled land-rights to some of the nomadic herders when you took over the independent sultanate of Darfur in 1916.’ Actually the British government (and Norway and Washington) has played a very useful role in securing the deal in the south. London has also helped to facilitate the logistics of humanitarian aid in Darfur. A real peace The Nairobi peace deal to end the southern war will need continued international support, political and financial. Normalisation with the US should follow. Real peace will also require UN peace-keepers or monitors. The UN is nervous about this because troublesome Sierra Leone, which until recently was the largest peace support operation, is 35 times smaller than Sudan. Moreover, the right to secession runs counter to the traditions of ultra-Islamic Sudanese and the African Union. Khartoum has quashed a number of attempted coups in the last year, and there are still Islamic radicals who dislike international meddling, especially if it means giving up half the country. Both north and distrust each other – not surprisingly after decades of broken agreements. The two regions are very different – in terrain, culture, religion and ethnicity. “How can those with turbans on their heads have peace with those who wear ostrich feathers,” joked President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, in a lively breach of political correctness. But there has been an unique blend of pressures and events: international goodwill and démarches (especially by Washington to stop foot-dragging by Garang and Co.) as well as exhaustion with the war – and the desire to stop Darfur from getting worse. Above all, the desperately poor country wants to spend the projected 2006 figure of one million barrels of oil a day on reconstruction. Though Darfur lacks the so-called ‘literature of accord’ which infused the years of Khartoum’s haggling with the south, the west is a far less intractable problem. And the US needs alternatives to Middle Eastern oil suppliers. It also needs Islamic allies. If Washington keeps the southern peace train running, it could well travel as far as Darfur. Dr Paul Moorcraft formerly worked in the MoD. He has also been a freelance war correspondent for Time, BBC radio and most of the major Western TV networks. Part of his film on Darfur was shown recently on Channel Four News.