SUDAN-POLITICS: Under Siege

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Analysis David Hecht

DAKAR, Nov 28 1996 (IPS) - The battles in the Sudanese regime’s 13- year-old civil war have been against the African, non-Muslim majority in the south of the country, but the Islamic state’s leaders have long claimed that the southerners are backed by allies of the real enemy — the United States.

The scenario may or may not have been true in the past, but it certainly appears true today. This month, the U.S. government announced what could be its first effort to destabilise an African country since the end of the Cold War.

Nearly 20 million dollars in surplus U.S. military equipment will be channelled to Ethiopia, Eritrea and Uganda, each of which reportedly support Sudanese rebel groups.

The rebels have also announced a new joint offensive. In the course of the war, they had become divided and various factions have been fighting each other. But in October, two major groups, the Sudan Alliance Forces and the Beja Congress, joined the main faction of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) led by John Garang to co-ordinate military operations against Khartoum.

The war has so far killed over 1.3 million Sudanese and driven three million from their homes.

George E. Moose, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, denied that the U.S. equipment was earmarked for the rebels. “We are assisting these governments in their own defence,” he was recently quoted as saying by the ‘Washington Post’.

But a Pentagon official noted in an interview with the U.S. daily that all “three governments have more or less said they want to topple this (the Sudanese) regime,” and, also according to the ‘Washington Post’, several U.S. officials believe the equipment will likely end up in rebel hands as much of it consists of items suitable for a guerrilla force.

Fifteen million dollars of the military aid had been promised a year ago, but the first shipments are only expected to arrive in East Africa around Christmas. The delay, explained an official, was partly because the U.S. first wanted to close its embassy in Khartoum to ensure the safety of American diplomats.

Another 4.7 million dollars was added for fiscal year 1997, which began on Oct. 1.

Congressional and administration sources have said that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Council are the driving forces behind the tougher line. The CIA claims that some 4,000 Islamic radicals are receiving military training in Sudan, including the Palestinian group, Hamas, which is high on the agency’s list of terrorist groups.

Washington considers Sudan second only to Iran as a sponsor of international terrorism.

The U.N. Security Council has been demanding that the Sudanese government extradite three suspects in last year’s attempted assassination of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak who are widely believed to have received support from Sudan. Sanctions to isolate the government and restrict the travel of officials were imposed in April and strengthened in August.

Yet it is the opening of a northern front from Eritrea that could cause Sudan’s regime to “collapse under its own weight,” said the Pentagon official.

Eritrean President Issaias Afewerki, who led a 30-year war for his country’s independence from Ethiopia, has set up training camps to form a new guerrilla force and Eritrea is strategically located to launch guerrilla attacks on the Khartoum-Port Sudan highway and other key targets, said the official.

Afewerki told a British reporter a year ago that his country would no longer play “Tom and Jerry games” with Khartoum. “The stability of the region depends on the regime’s defeat. There is no more room for diplomacy and no compromise,” said Afewerki.

More than 3,000 rebels are now marshalled in Eritrea, according to U.S. estimates. In July, they claimed to have destroyed two vital bridges, although Sudan’s official news agency, SUNA, said the Sudanese armed forces had repulsed the attacks.

Meanwhile, from Ethiopia, SPLA forces captured the Sudanese settlements of Tami, Shima and Uza after heavy artillery shelling in April. Sudanese authorities confirmed the take-over but claimed Ethiopian forces, not rebels, carried out the attacks. Ethiopia denied any involvement and accused Sudan of deploying troops near its border and said the troops were killing peasants.

Uganda, the other country to receive the U.S. military assistance, has exchanged long-range artillery fire across its border with Sudan at various time this year. It also reported that Sudanese refugees were being attacked and killed at camps in Kitgum, northern Uganda, by Ugandan rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army who, it said, receive support from Sudan.

Relations with many of Sudan’s six other neighbours are also strained. In September, the Sudanese air force reportedly bombed the towns of Tambura near the border with the Central African Republic and Maridi near the Zairean border. Even relations with Libya, bordering on the northwest, are at a low. According to one expert in Sudan, the country has been harbouring a Libyan Islamic movement that hopes to overthrow the Gadaffi regime.

In Egypt, to the north, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir met with Mubarak during the Arab summit in June. But a senior adviser to Mubarak said relations would not be restored. Sudan’s “wish for trouble-making outweighs its desire to co-operate,” he said. Egypt has ordered Sudan to reduce its diplomatic staff, as has the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, and Canada.

Sudan’s leaders deny all the allegations and say that the real agenda of outsiders is to undermine their country’s sovereignty and their people’s religious belief. In response, they have launched a “public mobilisation” campaign.

Boys are reportedly being picked up off the streets and forced to join government-sanctioned para-military groups, and the notorious secret police now have greater powers than before and are said to be forcing citizens to spy on each other. In October, the state also decreed new, stricter, Islamic laws. Men and women now cannot sit together in public and men may not watch women play sports.

Many Sudanese Muslims had accepted these political and religious decrees, viewing Western secular values as a source of their society’s woes. But according to Abdul Maliq Simone, an urban expert for the African NGO caucus on Human Settlement, they were accepted partly because people found ways to get around them.

“Community life in Khartoum had always been strong and very separate from the state,” he said. “Now the state is undermining that solidarity and people are getting angry.”

With citizens also finding it harder to make ends meet there have been numerous protests and strikes. Dozens of doctors protesting the beating of a colleague by security forces were dismissed from public hospitals this month. In September, riot police fought with students and workers who poured into central Khartoum and its twin city Omdurman to protest a bread shortage, killing three people and injuring dozens.

This month the government hiked the price of gasoline and cooking gas. Inflation has risen to 83.9 percent from 71 percent in December last year.

In addition, there have been coup attempts in Sudan this year. Opposition sources say that the government executed 11 military officers by firing squad on Aug. 17 on charges of taking part in an alleged conspiracy to attack government targets in Port Sudan.

In May, 95 prisoners, jailed for an attempted coup in March, seized control of their prison in el-Duwaim and took the prison’s commander hostage, according to the Sudanese newspaper Al-Rai Al- Akhar. The newspaper was subsequently closed by security forces and told it could only resume publication if it denied the story.

But the regime has had some successes. In April, Riek Machar, leader of the rebel Southern Sudan Independence Movement (SSIM), signed a three-way peace charter in Khartoum with the government of Sudan and a breakaway SPLA faction. Machar is reported to be merging his rebels with units of government forces, although he is known to have changed sides before.

Also, internationally, Sudanese officials have continued to travel outside the country to Syria and Iran, as well as Holland, despite the UN restrictions. And China recently announced it would invest 24 million dollars in the country.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, which has not had good relations with the Sudanese regime, is reported to have shut down Sudanese opposition offices in Riyadh in July. At the same time, renegade Saudi businessman, Osama Bin Ladin, who is believed to finance radical Islamic groups, left Sudan for Afghanistan.

Also, Uganda surprisingly signed on to a draft peace agreement with Sudan this month following Iranian-brokered talks, although many observers doubt it will stand.