Sudan

Khartoum decries Washington’s ‘myopic’ Sudan policy

When President Bill Clinton on August 20 1998 sent 17 cruise missiles crashing into a pharmaceutical company in Sudan’s capital city of Khartoum, instead of a striking a blow against international terrorism Washington was inadvertently exposing the corruption of its policy towards Africa’s largest country.

Parliamentarians, most in traditional dress, gather for a new session and the president's inauguration on February 13 this year.

Using the most convincing language it could muster, the Clinton administration said, in the words of then United Nations envoy Bill Richardson, that it had “undeniable physical evidence” that the Shifa pharmaceutical plant was used to manufacture chemical weapons.

But no evidence was ever produced, and the administration had to resort to the excuse that it could not divulge the evidence so as not to jeopardize its intelligence-gathering methods.

Samples of the soil and other materials collected at the plant and tested in international laboratories have shown that, contrary to the Clinton administration’s claim, there was no physical evidence that Shifa was making EMPTA, a precursor chemical used in the production of the nerve gas VX.

The administration’s other claim, namely that Saudi exile and international terrorist Osama Bin Laden, the purported target of the attack in Sudan as well as a concurrent missile attack in Afghanistan, was a business partner in Shifa also proved a fabrication.

How was it, then, that the mighty US intelligence apparatus that informs Washington policy was so inept? And why was it that America bombed to rubble a factory making a large portion of the medicines being consumed in one of the world’s poorest countries?

The ruins of Shifa lie as a monument to an American foreign policy that has been arrogant and myopic at best and outright blind and dumb at worst.

This policy has been to support a leftist rebel movement in the south of Sudan, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) and its military wing, the SPLA (Sudan People’s Liberation Army), lead by John Garang, in their attempts to defeat the central government in Khartoum.

Washington, especially under the foreign policy leadership of former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, has worked hard to destabilize Sudan, mobilizing neighboring countries against the government there and, in the last couple of years, directly funding the SPLM and supplying arms to the SPLA.

Much of this policy initiative has been based on close cooperation with Uganda, whose president, Yoweri Museveni, continues to meddle in several regional conflicts, including civil wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) and Rwanda.

So lopsided has the State Department’s involvement in Sudan been that the previous under-secretary of state for African affairs, Susan Rice, took several trips to southern Sudan but none to Khartoum.

And Mahdi Ibrahim, the last Sudanese ambassador to Washington, withdrawn by his government in protest over the Shifa bombing, says that in two and a half years his numerous requests to meet Rice were always rebuffed. She only agreed to meet him after the bombing, in other words after her government had made an irrevocable commitment to a course of action that was based on a blindly pro-south bias.

State Department bias has also been reflected in the Congress. Only two members of Congress have visited Khartoum, and then not as part of an effort to find the truth about claims made against the government there. They prefer to visit the south.

Frank Wolf (R-VA), the most vocal Khartoum critic in Congress, made his fourth visit to the south earlier this year, but has made none to the north.

His January 25 report glibly says that the government in Khartoum “has done nothing to stop” slavery and “I suspect is quietly supporting it.” Both allegations are false and apparently he has no grasp at all of the situation in the north. Wolf openly calls for continued support for the SPLM.

“Until the fighting actually ends and there is peace, the United States should support the SPLM,” he recommends.

That is like advising a continuation of war until there is peace, rather than a policy of supporting efforts for a ceasefire and negotiations as the way to end the conflict. Is this an intelligent approach? Should this be America’s position on Africa’s longest civil war, now in its 18th year?

Both Khartoum and the rebels agree that the only way to end the conflict is through a negotiated settlement. How come American leaders are advocating more war?

There are several reasons for Washington’s misreading of the situation in Sudan, most of which are dealt with in this report in some depth.

Among the salient causes we can touch on here, there has been first of all a failure to look at Sudan as a nation of people with characteristics that are contrary to the terrorist stereotypes it has been labeled with. The developments on the ground can only be understood in this human context.

There are only some five percent of Sudan’s 30 million population who are Christians, with four of six million southerners having fled north (rather than to other countries, which now host some 280,000 Sudanese refugees, according to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees).

In the south itself, only 17 percent of the population is Christian, with 19 percent Muslim and the rest animist.
The war has thoroughly mixed the Sudanese, north and south, and in general they are a peaceful people who have a long history of inter-religious coexistence.

Minister of Social Affairs Qutub Al Mahdi, who is responsible for inter-religious affairs, says that traditionally the attitude of Islam is “to protect ‘people of the book’” as Christians and Jews are described in the Quran, and that while Sudan’s constitution draws on Islamic law Islam is not the state religion.

“Every minority is secure,” he adds. His ministry has established a department to deal with any complaints of religious bias brought by citizens.

Second, there has been a related failure to appreciate the political and economic liberalization that has occurred in the north under the leadership of President Omar Hassan Al Bashir, who deposed Prime Minister Sadiq Al Mahdi in a bloodless 1989 military coup but has steadily charted a course that should be welcome in Washington. For one thing, Al Mahdi himself has returned to Sudan because of the improved atmosphere and is once more a major political player in Khartoum.

Third, Clinton administration officials have been much too willing to accept at face value the tales told by the SPLM and the lobbyists and NGOs allied to it. Western Christian sensibilities and good intentions have been grossly exploited by a cynical Garang and associates who have painted the civil war as a religious conflict between a Muslim north and Christian south, and have latched onto a centuries-old practice of tribal abductions to accuse Khartoum of engaging in a slave trade and other human rights abuses.

Washington continues to buy this line despite the contrary evidence provided by credible international NGOs, including the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and Save the Children, and despite the United Nations Human Rights Commission itself recognizing the condemnable phenomena on the ground as something other than a slave trade.

Fourth, the Clinton administration has apparently overlooked the benefits of working with Khartoum in helping it improve its democratic and human rights record and in building an economic and political alliance that could do America a great deal of good.

Without the participation of American companies or financial institutions, Khartoum has built a successful oil industry, including four refineries and the longest pipeline in Africa, and has become an exporter of oil. Initial exploration indicates that it might be sitting on reserves larger than those of Saudi Arabia, its president says.
Sudan also has vast tracts of arable land and, more important in this arid part of the world, plenty of water supplied by the White Nile and Blue Nile, which meet in Khartoum from where they run on to Egypt.

Furthermore, over the last few years it has built 25 state universities to reach a total of 30, complemented by 26 private colleges enrolling 50,000 students a year, a real feat by African standards.

Dozens of interviews conducted to prepare this report, with President Bashir and a host of ministers and other officials, with northerners and southerners, and with neutral observers such as international NGOs and diplomats, paint a picture of an American foreign policy blunder of huge proportions.

In fact, taken at its worst, Washington is the only major power supporting a continuation of the war in Sudan, rather than a policy of negotiations and reconciliation. It does this through official policy, through financial and military aid to the leftist rebels and through uncritical support of groups working to bring down the government in Khartoum.
What’s more, by supporting Christian NGOs, such as the Christian Coalition and Christian Solidarity International, Washington is protecting what is probably the only money-based trade in human beings in Sudan, since these groups raise funds to “purchase the freedom of slaves.” These funds go to SPLA officers in the SPLA-held areas who hand over children for money.

There are so many facts that argue against the current policy that it seems remarkable so few of them seem to have been included in the policy-formation process. This would seem to suggest that those responsible for Washington’s Sudan policy have been guided by their own biases rather than the interests of their nation.

To its credit, the State Department has sent a team to work with the authorities in Khartoum to assess the claim that the government supports international terrorism, for which no proof has ever been provided. Sudan has not been cleared of this charge. The sanctions imposed by Washington have not been lifted and the UN sanctions remain.

On January 29 this year, a group of 30 Catholic missionaries working in the south of Sudan (hardly a group that supports the Khartoum government) issued a statement from their annual meeting in Nairobi, Kenya calling on the world to stop the war.

“We have come to the unanimous conviction that the situation of war in Sudan at the present stage has become immoral and a tragic farce. It is not any longer a struggle for freedom of the Sudanese people and for the defense of human rights.”

The statement continued: “The war has become a struggle for power, business and greed. Many heartless people are taking advantage of it and enrich themselves at the expense of the poor.”

It concludes: “We appeal to you, political and economic powers of the world, ‘Give up your greed and your selfish interests! Help Sudan to regain its lost humanity and identity.’”

It would be wise for Washington to heed this call. With a new administration in place, this is an ideal moment for America’s Sudan policy to undergo a thorough review and to be put on a new, more credible footing.