SUDAN-POLITICS: Khartoum Regime Faces Major Challenge

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Jan 14 1997 (IPS) - A new alliance between southern rebels and northern opposition groups has brought Sudan’s civil war closer to Khartoum, posing one of the biggest threats ever to the Islamic fundamentalist regime of Lt-Gen Omar Hassan al Bashir.

A combined National Democratic Alliance (NDA) force Sunday captured Kurmuk and Gaissan, two key garrisons on Sudan’s border with Ethiopia.

And, on Tuesday, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) announced that three smaller military outposts located in the same region, the southern Blue Nile region, had also been taken, and that fighting was going on in areas bordering on Eritrea.

“With the capture of Kurmuk and Gaissan, the whole of the southern Blue Nile is liberated except for the main town of Damazine, which will soon follow,” George Garang, SPLA spokesman in Nairobi, said Tuesday. He said SPLA forces were advancing on the town of Roseire, where the main hydropower dam that supplies Khartoum with electricity is located.

The new developments forced al Bashir to put his army on maximum alert, announce a general mobilisation, and cancel a one- day official trip to the Kenyan capital on Tuesday.

This week’s attacks are part of an offensive that began in December when, for the first time since the SPLA began its rebellion 14 years ago, a combined force of northerners and southerners — the NDA — opened up a front in northern Sudan.

Seven factions have grouped under the umbrella of the NDA, including the Beja Congress, the Democratic Unionist Party, the Legitimate Command, the Sudan Alliance Forces, the Sudan Federal Democratic Forces and the Ummah Party.

The seventh member of the alliance is the New Sudan Brigade of the southern-based SPLA, which spearheaded the capture of Kurmuk and Gaissan.

The two garrisons are just about 600 kilometres southeast of the capital and, since their fall, all state-run television and radio stations across the country have been urging the faithful to embrace the on-going Jihad (Holy Islamic war) declared by the state and fight the “invaders”.

Radio Omdurman, Sudan’s largest, devotes 10 hours each day to jihad songs meant to inspire the population to join the war against the SPLA, which Khartoum claims is aided by Eritrea and Ethiopia. In fact, Sudan Monday accused the two countries of invading its territory, a claim rejected by SPLA leader Col John Garang. “That’s not true,” he said. “Our forces are deep inside the Sudan.”

Since May 1983, the SPLA has been fighting successive Islamic regimes in Khartoum to obtain greater autonomy for Southern Sudan, most of whose people are Christians or followers of traditional African religions.

Garang described the capture of Kurmuk and Gaissan as “a major victory” for the Sudanese people.

“This is the continuation of the Black Fox Offensive which we started last March,” Garang, who is also a commander of the NDA forces, told the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) on Monday. He said SPLA’s struggle was not isolated in the bush, but “is coordinated with the mass uprising in Khartoum.”

Exiled opposition leader Sadiq al Mahdi, who was Sudan’s prime minister until his ouster in June 1989 by a military junta led by al Bashir, said last week in Cairo that a popular uprising was most likely to topple the government in Khartoum.

“I think the regime has run out of steam. It is incapable of resolving domestic or external problems facing the Sudan. It is hanging to power by the feeblest of threads,” he told a press conference in the Egyptian capital.

In December, Al Mahdi fled Khartoum where he had been under house arrest since al Bashir’s 1989 coup. He later joined the Eritrea-based NDA, which launched its guerrilla war last month.

Garang said NDA forces recently shot down a government helicopter gunship when they opened up a front in the Homshkerob area near the Eritrean border. He also claimed that the government forces incurred severe losses in the most recent fighting.

“The enemy suffered heavy casualties including Lt-Col Mohamed Khalifa, a member of the NIF (the ruling National Islamic Front) 40-man Council, and Captain Nur el Din Ali, both of the 130 Unit. These are indeed serious operations…,” said Garang.

During a meeting last month of NDA leaders, Garang had pledged that “the NDA forces in the eastern front, both individually and as joint forces, will continue to intensify military operations under the overall command of Molana Mohammed Osman al Mirghani, the president of the NDA.

“… they will continue to develop and fight until they eventually converge with the Intifada (mass movement) in Khartoum and other cities to overthrow the NIF regime and establish a new order, the new Sudan,” he had added.

However, he acknowledged that the Khartoum regime was no pushover. “The NIF has supporters within the people, and so, whenever there are demonstrations in Khartoum, supporters of the NIF join the demonstrations and help in disturbing the Intifada,” he said.

He explained further that even when NIF supporters were just a tenth of the crowd in an anti-government demonstration they could disrupt it. “Their threat to the Intifada is especially serious because they are more organised than the remain 90 percent, and they share one vision and one ideology,” Garang said. “Moreover, some of this NIF 10 percent are armed as the NIF has armed some of its supporters among the population.

“The NIF is thus able to disperse the demonstrations from within and so the Intifada fizzes out before the NIF security organs even intervene; this actually happened in the recent bread riots (staged late 1996) in Khartoum and elsewhere.”