Omar Al-Bashir and Africa's Longest War

by Paul Moorcraft

  In what was termed Republican Order Number One, a chilling Orwellian title, Khartoum set up three provinces with emasculated powers. The regional assembly in Juba was dead. Governors would be appointed by the president in Khartoum. Most of the previous local fiscal authority vanished. Arabic would be the main official language. The carefully balanced security arrangements in the south were also ditched and the newly integrated troops in the south would be sent on garrison duty in the north and west. Most of these proposals had been discussed secretly for some years among northern politicians in the national reconciliation process. Sadiq al-Mahdi and the Muslim Brotherhood were adamant that real northern agreement depended upon ending southern autonomy and Islamizing the whole constitution – north and south.

  Numeiri had steamrollered all opposition previously and now expected southerners to submit meekly. But he had sown the dragons’ teeth, not least by creating a cadre of experienced southern officers in his own army. They wanted freedom for the south and an end to Numeiri, not least for the betrayal of his promises. The inevitable result was the resumption of the southern war. This time the rebels were much better led and armed. Yet it would take two decades to force Khartoum to return to the negotiating table.

  The Second War of Independence

  Some of the integrated battalions of the First Division of the Southern Command went very reluctantly to garrisons in Darfur. The 105th Battalion at Bor refused to go. The integration process into the new SPAF – the Sudan People’s Armed Forces – had produced patchy results. Some southerners felt that their training had not brought them up to the standards of the more experienced professional army. This would be true, however, of any integration of irregulars with professionals, as the Zimbabwean and South African experiences were later to demonstrate. A small minority of officers had been carefully selected and trained in the northern military colleges, but it was a maximum of 13.5 per cent, not the 33 per cent agreed at Addis. The intrinsic military grievances and general anger at Khartoum’s cavalier treatment of the Addis deal came to a head in May 1983. The 105th Battalion at Bor, the Jonglei state capital, was already on the point of mutiny. The mood was exacerbated by late pay and food shortages. The Dinka major in command, Kerubino Kuanyin Bol, refused to allow a steamer carrying a company of northern troops to land at the dock in Bor. A week later northern troops from the Armoured Division returned to storm the town. The Bor garrison retreated into the bush, as did troops in Pibor. They and other garrisons crossed into Ethiopia with their weapons.

  The Bor mutiny and the Republican Order Number One a month later marked the onset of the new war. Thousands of southern troops retreated to Ethiopia while others further west created camps in isolated bush. Some of the hold-outs in Anya-Nya, who had rejected the Addis agreement, now linked up with the defectors from the integrated army. Most of the new dissidents congregated in the Gambella region of Ethiopia. Besides mutineers from the regular army and Anya-Nya diehards, a third element, the Students Revolutionary Group, led by Pagan Amum Okiech, joined them. Okiech was later to become secretary general of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM).

  Who would lead the new southern rebellion? Numeiri had deliberately siphoned off some of the brightest and best of southern officers to promote them into loyalty in the integrated army. The president had specifically intended to use Colonel John Garang, a Twic Dinka, to defuse the Bor mutiny. Unfortunately for Khartoum, Garang was party to the mutiny he was supposed to suppress. If Sadiq al-Mahdi was Numeiri’s political nemesis, John Garang became his prime military enemy. The difference was that Garang was by far the most decisive, ruthless and, ultimately, most successful opponent.

  Garang was born into a poor family in 1945 in Twic East in Jonglei state. Orphaned at ten, a kindly uncle ensured the studious young man a good secondary education, first in South Sudan and then in Tanzania. He later secured a scholarship in the US at Grinella College in Iowa, and was then offered a further scholarship at the University of California, Berkeley, but decided to return to the University of Dar Es Salaam. While in America he is said to have been impressed by the success of the melting pot of US society and this helped to secure his belief in a united – democratic and non-racial – Sudan. For his later doctorate he studied the ill-fated Jonglei Canal, first proposed by the British in 1907 and finally begun in 1978. By the outbreak of the second southern war, two-thirds of the 223-mile canal had been built. Today one of the giant German earth-moving machines lies rusting as a symbol of one of the biggest development projects killed off by the war.

  After his initial studies, Garang made a second, successful, attempt to join the southern rebels six months before the Addis agreement. The first time he had been judged too young to fight. Quickly promoted because of his education, some of the seasoned Anya-Nya commanders resented his lack of battlefield experience. This is what attracted his northern commanders in the new post-Addis army. He rapidly rose from captain to colonel, and was sent on both civilian scholarships in America and training at the US Army’s advanced infantry training school at Fort Benning, Georgia. He also lectured in agriculture in Khartoum University, clearly a man of many parts. Garang had become the best educated and trained southerner in the army, and had kept out of the political intrigues in Sudan, or so the northern generals thought.

  A month before the Bor mutiny, Colonel Garang was planning the new war and drew up a programme for the formation of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement. Garang joined his fellow defectors in Ethiopia and set about forming the armed wing of his new SPLM – the SPLA, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. New defectors and hardline existing rebels soon swelled the ranks of the initial 3,000 mutineers. Some commanders still resented Garang’s lack of bushfighting skills and were jealous of his education and rapid promotion, courtesy of Khartoum. Nevertheless, his obvious leadership skills won the day, and the question of Sudanese unity versus southern independence was glossed over in the interests of establishing the SPLM, but above all defeating the great betrayer in Khartoum: Numeiri. Moreover, the vital sanctuaries in Ethiopia dictated a diplomatic silence on the question of secession. Under the old emperor and the dour communist leader, Mengistu Haile Mariam, who replaced the Emperor in 1974, the northern Sudanese support for Eritrean secession had made southern secession an awkward subject.

  Garang wrote the new SPLM manifesto himself, and it was personally approved by the great Afro-Stalinist, Mengistu. It was radical, clichéd and anti-separatist, to match the dictates of the OAU as well as the Derg. In Garang’s manifesto, and the accompanying penal code, it was clear that the army, not the people, was the fundamental source of authority. Garang later toned down the broadcasts on the SPLM radio – gone were the Marxist rants of the initial manifesto. An inclusive, democratic and secular ‘New Sudan’ would appeal to some northerners. Garang also toned down anti-Muslim rhetoric, although the propaganda was often anti-Arab. He wanted to reach the African Muslims in Darfur and the Nuba Mountains who formed a large part of the northern regular army. Garang, a good strategist, also could not ignore potential backers in the US, although Washington’s later support was predicated on the principle of southern independence to weaken the Islamist regime in Khartoum.

  Remnants of the old rebel groups, renamed Anya-Nya 2, still resisted inclusion in the SPLA. Some of the resistance also came from Nuer groups, which the northern army started arming to disrupt SPLA supply lines into Ethiopia. In Equatoria, militias also supported Khartoum in operations against what many Equatorians dubbed the ‘Dinka army’, the SPLA. In May 1984 the Derg had encouraged Garang to order the assassination of the leader of Anya-Nya 2, Gai Tut. Paulino Matip then led the Anya-Nya survivors to western Upper Nile where he did a deal with Numeiri. Salva Kiir, an internal critic of Garang, often said that the first bullets of the SPLA were used to kill separatists. Kiir never broke with his boss; Lam Akol did – on a number of occasions. Akol claimed that from 1984 to 1989 more SPLA were killed by rival southern militias than in fighting betw
een the SPLA and the northern army.2

  The first SPLA attacks launched from Ethiopia in 1983 were directed against the Nasir area inside Sudan. Eventually Garang established a permanent base in eastern Equatoria on the Boma Plateau near the Ethiopian border. The SPLA sometimes allied with other Anya-Nya 2 Nuer to hit the Chevron oil sites near Bentiu, in the Nuer heartland. Khartoum had promised the Americans the army was more than capable of defending the oil installations. Three foreign oil workers were killed and a small number injured in a rebel raid on 3 February 1984. Chevron, dissatisfied with Khartoum’s response, pulled out of the oilfield. The US would later impose sanctions on US oil exploration, but the original Chevron concession proved to be the heart of the Sudanese oil bonanza, which benefited the Chinese and Malaysians (and a few Sudanese). The SPLA had previously captured seven French workers on the Jonglei Canal project. Garang had a personal animus about the canal, but attacks on the few big economic projects in the south, while admittedly embarrassing Khartoum, were bound to undermine economic development in a south that had precious little infrastructure or employment. In the next two decades of fighting, it was often hard to make economic sense of the north-south attrition, and even less when fighting spread to the east and west of the massive but fragile country.

  Numeiri’s endgame

  Throughout most of his military career Numeiri had been a conventionally observant Muslim, not distinguished by Islamic zeal. In fact, the whisky-drinking and cigar-chomping leader had publicly preached a secular state and often cracked down on the Brotherhood. Gradually, he moved towards a more exaggerated belief in his personal Islamist mission. He interpreted his escape from a number of coups and assassinations as divine intervention. He also believed he had survived various heart operations as a sign of Allah’s munificence (though cynics whispered that it had more to do with the quality of his American doctors and their hospitals). He started pronouncing on religious matters and published a book in 1980 on spiritual reform. He enacted secret Brotherhood plans, devised by al-Turabi, by announcing in September 1983 that sharia law would apply in all of Sudan, including the south. Many southerners regarded the September Laws as a declaration of war, although the rural nas (ordinary people) in the north welcomed the harsh laws that would clear out what they perceived as the fleshpots in Khartoum. Numeiri finally declared himself a religious leader with the title of Imam.

  The hudud punishments such as amputations for theft and stoning for adultery were not only enforced, but publicized. Ministers were compelled to attend public executions and amputations. Even the hard-line attorney general, Hassan al-Turabi, fainted at the sight of his first amputation. Radio and television reported the punishments in gruesome detail. Conservative northerners may have had some sympathy with the crackdown on law and order and would tell foreigners that sharia meant that the city streets were the safest in Africa, which was probably true. The law-and-order argument was a little undermined by Numeiri’s release of over 10,000 common criminals from Khartoum’s Kober Prison. The president claimed that he had acted mercifully in the same manner as the Prophet, who had forgiven the people of Mecca. That unsubtle comparison between himself and Mohammed was enough to make ardent members of the Brotherhood a little concerned about their president’s mental state. They wondered if absolute power or illness had turned his brain or whether he was genuinely a late convert to radical Islamism. Many ordinary Sudanese were suffering acutely from the decline in the economy. Now they could not seek psychic balm in their traditional beer. Early travellers in Sudan always marvelled at the joyous and copious rural consumption of vast quantities of traditional marissa alcohol, even in religious heartlands such as Darfur. And if they could enjoy Western spirits, they would usually extol its medicinal value. Whisky became the favourite of many middle-class professionals in the capital. Now thousands of gallons of best Scotch were poured into the Nile (prompting lots of local jokes about drunken fish) or crushed by bulldozers; all the stunts were heavily publicized. Whether the politicians and civil servants could now make better decisions while being continuously stone-cold sober was yet to be proven. The well-to-do kept their whisky hidden even more carefully and were much more selective about very good friends with whom they could share their Western ‘medicine’.

  Numeiri started indulging in long religious rants on the radio, blaming everyone but himself for the economic meltdown. He attacked ‘profiteers’ in foul-mouthed tirades which conservative Sudanese radio listeners were not used to hearing from an imam. He continued to compare himself with the Prophet so that accusations of heresy and insanity grew apace. Any opposition was crushed, martial law and states of emergency were imposed and emergency courts handed out fines and floggings as well as executions and amputations.

  The reign of terror reached a height with the execution of Mahmud Muhammad Taha, the leader of a small mild-mannered group called the Republican Brothers. There were also Sisters, because Taha advocated women’s equality as well as religious reforms based on his Sufi ideals. Most people in the three towns treated the Brothers’ polite distribution of leaflets advocating peaceful co-existence, not just between north and south but with the Israelis, with tolerance and occasional amusement. But they were never seen as any kind of threat. It is true that Taha had been accused of religious sedition as far back as the 1960s, but in the 1980s and aged 76 he was generally considered as a gentle intellectual with odd views. Taha published an innocuous leaflet in December 1984 that criticized the imposition of sharia law in the south and called for the return of civil liberties throughout the country. Numeiri decided to make an example of Taha. He and four of his followers were rapidly convicted of apostasy. By this stage the president appeared to believe he had a hot line to God, and promptly hanged Taha, while allowing his four followers to recant, and live. Taha’s body was dumped in the desert and a traditional burial was denied.

  The Muslim Brotherhood had grown much stronger under Numeiri’s religious mania, mainly because of Hassan al-Turabi’s organizational genius, though it was a tragedy that his legal training and position as attorney general did not restrain the presidential reign of injustice and terror. In fact, Numeiri’s perversion of Islam had caused grave disquiet among the Brothers, but al-Turabi had enforced a rigid discipline upon them. The time was not yet right to strike, they were told. Slowly, they built up their influence – modelled on Leninist cells – in the professions, schools and universities, but above all in the army. They also constructed an extensive financial network in the Gulf and among Sudanese in exile. Wealthy Sudanese businessmen abroad could now believe that they could serve Allah and their commercial interests, not least via the new Islamic banks.

  Despite banking reforms, the Sudanese economy continued to deteriorate and ensuing government austerity led to strikes. A railway strike was called treasonable and Numeiri’s inevitable response was to deploy the army to crush the industrial action. It was more difficult to send in the army to stamp out strikes by judges, doctors, engineers and university professors. Foreign debt mounted and debt servicing became unmanageable. Inflation soared. World Bank measures led inevitably to cuts in subsidies to basic commodities. Nature intervened as the world became aware of the ‘biblical’ famine in Ethiopia in 1984, but less was made internationally of the drought in Sudan, especially Darfur. Tens of thousands of starving westerners descended on the three towns to live in shanty towns, in defiance of the army trucking back desperate people to Darfur. By 1985 tens of thousands of Darfuris had perished of starvation. Western charities went in to help, but also pointed out that the big mechanized farms along the Nile were harvesting grain, but not sending it to Darfur. Numeiri seemed unmoved by the drought and famine in his own land.

  Numeiri had garlanded himself with extra titles from field marshal to Supreme Commander to Imam, and he was both prime minister and president. He had restarted the war in the south and bankrupted the economy, while alienating nearly all his erstwhile political and religious supporters. Only the ever-patien
t Muslim Brotherhood, burrowing deeply into all strata of society, remained as his ally. In March 1985 he finally turned on them and blamed the Brothers for all the country’s woes. Hassan al-Turabi and other prominent Brothers were arrested for religious plotting. Hundreds of rank-and-file Brothers were also incarcerated. Numeiri installed another layer of kangaroo courts that meted out even more public floggings, amputations and executions.

  By April 1985 Numeiri seemed unaware of the seething state of the nation. He flew off to Washington to see his doctors and to beg for more loans from the World Bank and the USA. He would not have left the country if he had had the wit to realize how fragile his position was. A general strike on 4 April 1985 paralyzed the capital. The president had just one remaining ally, the army, but many senior officers were sickened by the abasement of Sudanese society. The minister of defence, Major General Abdel Rahman Swar al-Dahab, announced on national radio that the army would respect the people’s wishes and depose the president, but they would stay in power for the time being. Numeiri tried to fly back to Khartoum. His plane was diverted to Cairo, however. His military friend, President Hosni Mubarak, provided him with a luxurious villa in a plush suburb where he stayed for the next fourteen years. Sudanese took to the streets to rejoice at the fall of the military dictator, as they had done before in 1964. History was repeating itself again, as farce. Or perhaps they had short memories, for when Numeiri returned to Sudan, in May 1999, he received a rapturous welcome. The next year he ran again for president against the incumbent, Omar al-Bashir, but secured less than ten per cent of the poll. ‘The people still love me, but the polls were rigged,’ he must have told himself.

  The military were in power once more; they had simply changed generals as head of state. They had already tried two rounds of rule by generalissimo and the politicians had essayed two periods of chaotic civilian governance. And the southern war was raging. So what next? Major General al-Dahab did try to bring in civilians. They met at the staff club of the University of Khartoum to sort out a joint front for the new regime. They called themselves the ‘modern forces’, but regressed to ancient feuds. The military, traditionally suspicious of indecisive politicians, moved quickly to set up their own Transitional Military Council. It was made up of different factions, as ever, but the council consisted mainly off senior officers in command of elite units that could rapidly control the three towns, if necessary. The Military Council governed by a state of emergency, but the generals did release many political prisoners in Numeiri’s jails. They also hollowed out a traditional enemy, the hated state security service. A few prominent cronies of the ousted president were put on trial. One proved embarrassing for important intelligence links: Vice President Omar Muhammad al-Tayib, who had run the state security organization. The details of his televised show trial annoyed the Central Intelligence Agency and Mossad because al-Tayib had been a central player in Operation MOSES. Organized from the US embassy in Khartoum, nearly 8,000 Falasha Jews were airlifted from Sudanese camps, where they had fled persecution and famine in Ethiopia. The Israelis uncharacteristically leaked the semi-covert operation in January 1985. This prompted Arab states to influence Sudan to stop the mercy mission. Later, two other CIA/Mossad operations (JOSHUA and SOLOMON) rescued the thousands of remaining Falasha still trapped in the Horn. Al-Tayib had reputedly been paid a few million US dollars to assist his foreign intelligence friends. That might have covered his massive court fine, but not his sentence of life imprisonment.