Omar Al-Bashir and Africa's Longest War

by Paul Moorcraft

  The years 1958 and 1959 established a pattern: a bunch of incompetent politicians would be replaced by slightly less incompetent military officers, via a coup, followed by another attempted coup or even two. The earliest putsches did promise much. After all, it was a time of coups in Muslim states – in Pakistan, Iraq and Egypt. And they seemed successful at the time. Egypt’s example was especially influential on Sudanese events. The style – ideally, initially bloodless – was the same; as was the installation of a popular figurehead. Nasser had used the respected General Naguib, and likewise the Sudanese plotters had paraded the affable fatherly figure of General Abboud as their front man. Sadly, Sudan was soon to teach Egypt a thing or two about how to, and how not to, stage coups.

  President Abboud was too honest to be a politician. He believed Nasser’s promises about the Aswan dam – ‘soldier to soldier’, he thought. In 1960 construction began on the long-delayed High Dam at Aswan (and the Sudanese started on smaller dams). The Egyptian dam immediately produced a large displaced and disaffected Nubian population that had to leave their ancestral lands and eventually, decades later, it had created countless tons of Ethiopian sediment which rendered the project unworkable anyway. The relocated Nubians were just one element of immediate national discontent. In the absence of legal political parties, union leaders and university students rallied to the underground communist party, which had been the only political party publicly to oppose the military coup. The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, also developed a small but influential following in Sudan. As in Egypt, the Sudanese Brothers came to regard military rule as thoroughly un-Islamic.

  Being practical, if economically illiterate, men, the ruling officers had the common sense to abandon the previous coalition’s absurd pricing policy and the cotton mountain soon disappeared. They were also prepared to accept financial assistance from both East and West. Electricity for Khartoum and a railway from Kordofan to Wau, the first modern north-south rail-line, brought economic advance. Wasteful spending on pet projects, poor accounting and graft soon tainted the military’s can-do reputation, however.

  In October 1961, General Abboud made a state visit to Washington, where he was warmly welcomed by President John F. Kennedy. The young Democrat president was effusive toward the military man who had overturned the embryonic democracy in Sudan. Kennedy talked of Abboud ‘setting an example’ to Sudan’s immediate neighbours. He went even further by saying that Sudan ‘set a standard for the continent’. US presidents would rarely praise leaders of future Sudanese juntas, but they did so occasionally when cold war competition demanded.

  The military set up a system of regional and urban councils reporting to a central council in Khartoum, but it was mere window-dressing for the regime, not democracy. These modest reforms gave more power to rural conservatives at the expense of more secular urban opinion. The ruling military had done relatively little to improve politics in the north, but they had done nothing to resolve the ‘Southern Problem’. As the army was the only relatively effective national institution, the Supreme Council assumed that the iron-fisted crackdown following the 1955 mutiny and the continuing Arabization would settle the matter. The broken promises of federation and continued discrimination exacerbated deep-rooted differences while repression merely pushed the resistance underground. Some of the surviving 1955 mutineers had gone into the bush, although their armed opposition amounted to little more than banditry. The military could have dealt with this in their traditional way. But then the ministry of education in Khartoum took over the missionary schools and integrated them into a national Islamic curriculum, in which Arabic was now taught alongside English. The surviving missionary teachers were harassed and then expelled. The secondary schools in Rumbek and Juba, where many of the southern elite had been educated, were closed after a strike against the draconian northern policy. Many students and teachers joined the thousands of fellow refugees in Uganda or Zaire. In 1963 the Sudan African National Union (SANU) was formed in Kampala. Small south Sudanese groups sprang up in London and Khartoum, but effective southern political resistance inside Sudan was sparse.

  More promising for a southern fight-back was the establishment by the indigenous Latuka people of a small guerrilla base, Agu Camp, deep in eastern Equatoria; a few hundred men, led by Emedio Tafeng Odongi, a former lieutenant in the Equatorial Corps, started training. They conducted occasional raids on isolated government positions. Gradually, the resistance set up other bases in the forests and bush along the borders with Uganda and Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). A small group of Latuka priests and teachers in exile in Kampala tried to forge a political leadership for the sporadic fighting inside Sudan. The leading light was Father Saturnino Lohure, who had represented Torit in the Constituent Assembly, but had fled to Uganda after the 1958 coup. They needed a political name. SANU was discredited, less a movement and more a reference to other prominent African groups such as the Rhodesian ZANU (Zimbabwe African National Union). Like ZANU and numerous other anticolonial groups, south Sudanese dissidents suffered from tribal rivalries that spawned lots of small rival organizations. At first the southerners in Kampala played around with various titles with ‘Pan African’ or ‘Azanian’ included in their putative movements, in order to garner support from the Organization of African Unity and other potential financial and military sponsors. They settled eventually on a traditional African name, on the model of Mau Mau in Kenya. They agreed on Anya-Nya. This was a combination of the local word for the fatal poison extracted from a river snake and the name for army ants.

  The first Anya-Nya raids in Equatoria were small-scale. The insurgency spread to Bahr al-Ghazal, however. In January 1964 Commander William Deng Nhial, a Dinka, sent one of his lieutenants to attack Wau, the provincial capital. Over a dozen government soldiers were killed and a stash of automatic weapons was captured. This was the first major attack of what southerners call ‘The First War of Southern Independence’. By mid-1964 the insurgents numbered perhaps as many as 4,000, but they had no centralized command-and-control structure. Nor did they possess a unified political front. In mid-October 1964 various aspiring guerrilla leaders met in Kampala’s Silver Spring Hotel. Walks-out and rows from the ‘national convention’ inevitably ensued. But one result was the emergence of Agrrey Jaden as a leader. He was a former civil servant from the Pojulu ethnic group who had previously presided over the ineffectual SANU. Theoretically, he headed only one political offshoot of the Anya-Nya, but he did appoint ‘Colonel’ Joseph Lagu as the first overall military commander of the armed resistance. Lagu, from Madiland, south of Juba, had defected from the government army in 1963. He was to play a prominent part in the southern war, not least encouraging the career of the most charismatic of all southern commanders, John Garang, who served (briefly) under Lagu in the first war, also called the ‘Seventeen-Year War’ (1955-72).

  The racism of the north-south divide was ingrained. Northern Arabs contemptuously referred to southerners as abeed (slaves), while the southerners often called Arab northerners mundukuru – slavers. So far, to Khartoum’s generals, the southern rebels were not a military threat, but they were a political embarrassment. The military reluctantly allowed a debate by students at Khartoum University on the ‘Southern Question’. It got out of hand, whereupon the authorities prohibited any more public discussion. Predictably, the students went ahead on 21 October 1964 with another debate, and a confrontation with police was ensured. A student was killed. At the funeral cortege tens of thousands of marchers, many wearing university gowns, started shouting anti-government slogans. Rioting ensued throughout the capital that the army and police struggled to contain. A general strike followed, while the banned political leaders looked on in amazement at a popular revolt in which they had played almost no part. The Supreme Council was split – the younger officers were more sympathetic to the popular discontent, while the older officers opted for tanks rather than talks.

  Handing power back to civilian pol
iticians

  President Abboud, true to form, was reluctant to use force against his civilian compatriots. He had promised to return the country to civilian rule. On 26 October he announced the end of the Supreme Council and therefore the termination of military rule. The population of Khartoum erupted with joyous celebration in which the normally reserved capital witnessed men literally dancing in the streets. The ‘October Revolution’ entered Arab history as another bloodless intervention. In fact, scores of students and other demonstrators had already been killed by the police and army in the preceding week.

  Abboud stepped down after handing over to a transitional government headed by a respected educationalist, Sirr al-Khatim Khalifa. Very few Khartoum leaders had real civilian experience of the south – the men in uniform knew only about keeping order. The new prime minister, however, had worked extensively in schools there. He included two southerners in his cabinet as well as a balanced mix of communists, Muslim Brothers and representatives of the other main political parties. Abboud quietly retired to civilian life with no legal repercussions for his coup. The day after he stepped down, he was cheered in the souk as he ambled around doing his own food shopping. His reluctance to use violence against civilians and his hand-over to politicians may well have owed something to his long service in and with the British army. He had learned from the British that politicians, not soldiers, should be in charge – no matter how little the military respected the selfish, squabbling short-termism of their political masters. Abboud settled for a while in England, but died in Khartoum, aged 82, in 1983.

  Abboud bequeathed a civilian cabinet that was even more dysfunctional than the previous one. During military rule conventional parties had disintegrated, but the communist party and the Brotherhood had helped to fill the political vacuum by careful underground organization. The communists were also active in the new cabinet; this upset the Islamists. In the new state council of the transitional government a chairman with a vital skill was appointed. Tijani al-Mahi was a medical doctor who was the first Sudanese to specialize in psychiatry. Yet even a highly qualified psychiatrist could not regulate effectively the often self-destructive and occasionally psychotic behaviour of the civilian political leaders. The Umma Party summoned tens of thousands of Ansar to chant Mahdist war cries in the streets of Khartoum. Thoroughly alarmed, the cabinet collapsed in February 1965 and the NUP, the Umma and the political front of the Brotherhood dominated the new one. For the next four years coalitions of old and new parties staggered on in a murky haze of sleaze, tribalism and remarkable incompetence. Like the Bourbons, the Sudanese parties seemed to have forgotten nothing and learned nothing.

  The Southern Question continued to fester. On 6 December 1964 thousands of southerners in Khartoum had gathered to welcome back Clement Mboro. Universally referred to in the south as ‘Uncle Clement’ because of his genuine avuncular popularity, he had worked as a civil servant in the condominium in the south, and then became the first southerner to hold an important cabinet post in Khartoum. He had just been on a tour of the south, but rumours spread rapidly that he had been assassinated. Thousands of southerners went on the rampage killing any northern Arab they came across. Nearly a hundred northerners were killed in what was dubbed ‘Black Sunday’. From that day on, at any sign of southern revolt in the city, Arabs in Khartoum would reach for their guns and patrol their neighbourhood, just in case the police and army were not up to the job. The army restored order in the evening of Black Sunday. Some northern intellectuals came to the conclusion that the south was irreconcilable and should be allowed to go its own way. The majority, however, either favoured more repression, immediately, or perhaps an olive branch, first.

  A round table conference finally convened in Khartoum in March 1965. The southern representatives proved to be as fractious as their northern compatriots. SANU, for example, had two rival delegations called ‘Inside’ and ‘Out’, describing those in exile or operating inside the country. Two ALF parties pitched up – the Azanian Liberation Front and Sudan African Liberation Front, demanding inevitably a comparison with the Monty Python version of the various Judean Liberation Fronts at the time of Christ. It would have been an amusing farce were not the consequences so tragic. Leaders such as Father Saturnino were there, as were the able Clement Mboro, who had not been killed on Black Sunday, but merely delayed. Mboro led the Southern Front comprised of educated southerners living in Khartoum. The government also included a group officially called ‘Other Shades of Opinion’, which most southerners regarded as stooges. For fifty years the northerners were always to deploy the Quisling tactic. The delegates were divided by class, education, ideology and, of course, tribe. One issue they openly disputed was whether the south should secede or create a federal system. More privately, some southerners analyzed the best means of armed struggle, should peace talks fail.

  All the northern parties attended. In addition, delegates came from neighbouring African states. The northerners were able to manipulate the chronically disunited southerners. When all the northern party representatives predictably rejected southern independence, Aggrey Jaden flew off to Kampala in a fit of pique, thus removing his SANU-Outside from the game and allowing one of his main rivals, the Southern Front, to move up the pecking order.

  The conference failed to reach any consensus. This was probably the last chance for peace, and for unity of Africa’s largest country. True, a twelve-member committee, six from the north and six from the south, formed a working group to try to make a deal. It was chaired by a brilliant lawyer from the Muslim Brotherhood who would become the éminence grise of Sudanese Islamist politics after 1989: Dr Hassan al-Turabi. He was a ruthless and yet charming man who, intellectually, could run rings around nearly every other politician, north, south, east or west. And al-Turabi could accomplish this as easily in French or English as in Arabic. The lawyer was also an Islamic scholar who believed in the Islamization of the south, not its separation. As any proposal had to be agreed unanimously he used his veto to ensure the southerners did not get their way. Southerners wanted to ensure that the south remained one administrative unit, but northerners regarded this as a step towards independence. The northerners wanted to Balkanize the southern administration. The southerners also wanted a militia loyal to a local southern administration. Utterly frustrated, the southerners gave up eventually. Most concluded that the north would pay attention to their grievances only through armed struggle.

  In the 1965 elections other fissures appeared in Sudan’s body politic. The Beja Congress won ten seats. Formed in 1957, the Congress was set up to counter the alienation felt in the east of the country. They were committed to a federal system. Seven seats were also captured by independents in the Nuba Mountains. Both political groups represented the anger felt by marginalized peoples.

  The premiership changed hands four times in as many years in almost Italian-style rotation. Initially, a clever, pompous politician, Mohamed Ahmed al-Majub, led the Umma-NUP coalition. Learning nothing from the recent southern attempt to negotiate a peaceful solution, the new prime minster intensified Abboud’s policy of Arabization in the south. The army went into action against political dissidents among the small educated elite. In July 1965 a soldier and a local argued over a woman in Juba and in the ensuing fight the soldier was killed. On 8 July, officers in the Juba garrison gave the nod for their troops to rampage through the southern capital to exact revenge. Hundreds of southerners were killed and the town was trashed. Four days later troops from the Wau garrison went on a killing spree at a wedding party and murdered over seventy well-to-do southerners attending the celebration.

  A new wave of fugitives fled into the cross-border refugee camps, but other angry southerners bolstered the number of fighting men in the scattered Anya-Nya camps, which had recently acquired weapons supplied by Simba rebels fleeing from the war in next-door Congo. Facing a new stage of armed resistance, the army opted for a tried-and-tested method of isolating insurgents from their rural suppo
rt. The Sudanese set up ‘peace villages’, what the Americans called ‘strategic hamlets’ in Vietnam. The British had called them ‘concentration camps’ during the Boer War, and despite the furore had used them again in Malaya. It was a common method of draining the Maoist sea of peasant supply and support. The rural population of Equatoria was herded into thirty-three collective villages. Hundreds died from malnutrition and disease. This was an extreme counterinsurgency (COIN) technique, partly because Equatoria in the deep south was adjacent to neighbouring guerrilla sanctuaries in Uganda and the Congo. Along the north-south ‘border’ the army set up government-allied tribal militias to reinforce the centuries-old disputes over land, water and grazing rights. Sometimes tribes based in the north were encouraged to raid south, or Khartoum armed and bribed rival southern tribal leaders, a classic divide-and-rule principle. The policy of creating irregular tribal militias became a main pillar of northern COIN for the next five decades.

  In the face of the new containment policy, the southern politicians still failed to co-ordinate properly. The ‘boys in the bush’ grew to disdain the talkers in comfortable capitals such as Kampala while they fought hard on the ground. At one stage, some commanders insisted on their troops using their local tongues and not English as the language of command and communication. English had long been seen as a symbol of resistance to the enforced use of Arabic. This move by some Anya-Nya commanders was a deliberate rebuff to the failed leaders in exile. In response, the first major rally, the ‘national convention’, was held inside the south, at Angundri, thirty miles south-west of Juba in July 1967. There, leaders such as Aggrey Jaden declared a ‘Provisional Government of South Sudan’. This was the first real attempt to forge a united front of insurgents and politicians inside the country. Naturally, this new stage did not include all the fractious southern parties. The provisional government controlled only a small part of central Equatoria – when the army was not around. But it did publish newsletters to rally the faithful and later set up radio stations. The ad-hoc government collapsed when its president, the energetic but erratic Aggrey Jaden, suddenly decamped to the fleshpots of Nairobi. Once more a failure of leadership had scuppered the stuttering attempts at southern unity. Most insurgencies succeed when they are headed by one charismatic leader, but it would take decades for that kind of leadership to emerge among southerners. Agrrey had been frustrated by the clashes of the Equatorians who resented the aggressive intrusion of the most populous and warlike tribe, the Dinka. Tribalism, army reprisals, and sheer logistical challenges had destroyed the embryonic government almost as much as poor leadership.