SUDAN: Kabila’s Victory Likely To Inspire Region’s Rebels

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

LONDON, May 20 1997 (IPS) - Exiled Sudanese opposition leaders have welcomed Laurent-Desire Kabila’s victory in Zaire, hoping that his remarkable seven-month military blitz can inspire their own bid to topple the Islamic fundamentalist regime in the Sudan.

Kabila’s army marched into the capital Kinshasa on Saturday, effectively ending president Mobutu Sese Seko’s 32 years in office in Zaire, which Kabila has renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The events unfolding there are unlikely to pass unnoticed in the Sudan, a key neighbour. Sudanese opposition officials here strongly believe that Kabila’s success in toppling Mobutu would have political implications in the volatile region, where there is no shortage of dictators.

They are particularly excited by the swiftness with which Kabila carried out and ended the fighting, devoid of foreign interference.

“There was no foreign hand in the uprising that we have just witnessed in the Democratic Republic of Congo,” said former Sudanese Premier Sadiq al-Mahdi when addressing a Sudanese community meeting in London Sunday. “It was an African initiative, carr ied out by Africans themselves.”

He said some foreign experts were trying to link the conflict in that Central African country to the scramble for influence in sub-Saharan Africa between Paris and rivals London and Washington. “That is not true. The scramble between the Francophone and Anglophone were exaggerated,” said al Mahdi, to rapturous applause.

Keith Hart, the director of the African Studies Centre in Cambridge, England, said last week that a new alliance has been forged, extending from Eritrea in the Horn of Africa, passing through the Sudan, to Angola in southern Africa, one that aims at chan ging the political face of the region.

That alliance, which he said is being spearheaded by president Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, include Colonel John Garang of the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA).

Garang, who launched a bush war against the Khartoum government in 1983, met Museveni in the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in the 1970s. Dar es Salaam was then a centre for radical African students.

Now Garang is the commander of the military wing of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), of which al Mahdi’s Ummah party is a key member.

The NDA, formed in the Eritrean capital of Asmara in December last year, is an umbrella body for various exiled Sudanese opposition groups. Its objective is to topple the Islamic fundamentalist regime in Khartoum and set up plural democracy in the Northe ast African country.

That alliance, led by Museveni, looks likely to be checked by Sudanese government. For a long-time Khartoum has been accusing Uganda of supporting the SPLA. In response, Uganda too has been charging that Khartoum has been backing the Lord’s Resistance Ar my (LRA) and the West Nile Bank Front (WNBF), made up of remnants of dictator Idi Amin’s army, fighting a bush war in the north of the country.

Experts on the region say Museveni’s plan is to change the political face of that region by backing “progressive” leaders, like Kabila and Garang.

Garang now controls the entire swathe of territory on the border with Zaire and Uganda, raising suspicion in Khartoum that Kampala and Kinshasa may be intending to use the open flank to ferry arms to the SPLA.

In fact Garang has been scoring a string of military successes against Sudanese government forces soon after Kabila launched his war of liberation in the then Zaire in October last year.

Unconfirmed Sudanese opposition sources here say al Mahdi, who was prime minister from 1986 until he was toppled by Lt- General Omar Hassan al-Bashir in June 1989, would visit Kinshasa soon.

“Our objective is to build solidarity in the region… to help us to get rid of the Islamic fundamentalist regime in Khartoum,” one opposition source told IPS on Monday.

The latter-day African guerrilla leaders have come to learn through hard way that foreign assistance linked to ideology, which used to be dished out in abundance during the Cold War, has now dried up.

Hart, giving a talk on ‘The African Diaspora’ in the University of London, noted that the British Foreign Office no longer cared much about its former colonies.

“The foreign office has been Thatcherite with markets. For example, if a crisis erupts in Nigeria, the foreign office will based its decision on whether that crisis will affect Britain’s trade with Nigeria or not,” he said. “They don’t think in terms

of imperialism anymore,” said Hart.