Omar Al-Bashir and Africa's Longest War

by Paul Moorcraft

  Other paramilitaries

  Hundreds of pro-government militias, some permanent and others temporary, were formed in the north and south. Some were more or less autonomous. Some were anti-government forces that had come over to Khartoum, such as Minni Minawi’s faction of the Sudan Liberation Army (based in Darfur), or the South Sudan Defence Forces, based in the Nuer territories of the south. Some were less formal groups, armed but not controlled by Khartoum such as the Meidob forces of northern Darfur.

  Legally constituted paramilitaries with central government direction were the PDF, discussed above, but the Border Intelligence Guards and Central Police Reserve should also be included, although they did not have the prominence, or size, of the PDF. There were also tribal police, especially for nomadic groups.

  Procurement

  Sudan had a long history of local small-arms production, but protracted war and sanctions encouraged Khartoum to develop further its indigenous defence production. Also, being treated as pariah or rogue state by Western arms suppliers forced Khartoum into numerous illegal forays in the international arms bazaar. Poor equipment and lack of standardization had been one of Omar al-Bashir’s pre-occupations as a soldier, especially as the commander of an armoured division. In 1994 the Military Industry Corporation (MIC) was set up under the ministry of defence to co-ordinate the wide range of weapons suppliers. It absorbed a complex array of manufacturers. Alshagara Industrial Complex, for example, had been long established as a manufacturer of small-arms ammunition. The idea was to create dual-use products. In the massive GIAD complex, started in the mid-1990s, twenty-five miles outside Khartoum, Sudan’s largest employer had developed a range of vehicles and engines. In 2002 the MIC coordinated the manufacture and maintenance of armoured vehicles, as well as commercial heavy vehicles. It did the same with electronics for the military as well as the commercial telecommunications market through Sudatel. In 2005 the Safat Aviation Complex was set up to support military aviation.

  Sudan is a wonderland for defence equipment geeks and a nightmare for politically correct arms controllers. Sudan proved very adept at smuggling or buying equipment under licence, then cloning the machinery and producing its own clones. Its friends in China, Russia and Iran often turned a blind eye. The Marra pistol was a clone built on Chinese machinery that was originally designed and built in the Czech Republic. Often high-quality German designs were pilfered and then produced on Iranian machinery, for example the Dinar G3 assault rifle. Machine guns were vital in the defensive entrenched and mined warfare fought in the south. The Mokhtar was a PKM machine gun built from machinery bought from Russia/China; the Khawad was a DShK machine gun with the same provenance. Sudan often paid for the licences for the machinery or equipment; at other times its sanctioned status and cash-only economy gave it an edge in the arms bazaar. That was the case with a fancy range of clever clones of MBTs (main battle tanks). The Al Basheer MBT (Type 85 M-11) was an unlicensed copy from China. The Al Zubair 2 MBT was also an unlicensed copy from China, and it was suspiciously similar to the Type 59 D. Presumably the Chinese were taking so much oil, and paying often in kind not cash, that it was easy to turn a Nelson eye to such minor sleights of hand as cloning big tanks. It is not clear what Russia or Iran thought about unlicensed production. The MIC also built unlicensed Russian howitzers; and unlicensed Russian armoured vehicles derived from the BTR-80A. The MIC was even-handed – it built unlicensed copies of Iranian and Chinese infantry fighting vehicles. And so it went on. The artillery cloning resulted in a long list of stirring Islamist names such as Khalifa and Mahdi. One wonders what the Prophet would have said. Presumably anything goes in a jihad.

  It was also one of the many unintended results of sanctions. Arms sanctions inspired ingenious piracy and import substitution in Rhodesia and South Africa, and in the latter case it prompted a world-beating arms industry, especially its artillery pieces.

  The Sudanese procurers were often swashbuckling, but the armed forces still struggled with spares and standardization problems, besides the surcharges for purchasing on the black market.

  SOUTHERN FORCES

  The initial guerrilla forces were called Anya-Nya, but they often splintered into regional or tribal militias or, conversely, absorbed them. After the first peace agreement under the Numeiri government in 1972, some insurgents fought on and later formed Anya-Nya 2. The Sudan People’s Liberation Army and its accompanying political wing, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, usually written as SPLA/M, was founded in 1983. It was the dominant southern resistance force in the second round of the war from 1983 to 2005. It was led by John Garang de Mabior until his accidental (though this is disputed) death in 2005. Garang was succeeded as commander in chief by Salva Kiir Mayardit, who became vice president of Sudan as well as president of the southern autonomous region in 2005, and then president of the new state of the Republic of South Sudan in 2011. Kiir had joined the integrated army in the 1972 peace deal, and worked in military intelligence. He was one of the founders of the SPLA in 1983. Later, as its chief of staff, he forged a strong support base throughout the guerrilla army. As both Garang and Kiir, as well as other senior offices in the SPLA, had served in the northern army, the structure of the guerrilla army was modelled to a large extent on the Sudanese armed forces. This included an internal security branch, which conducted Garang’s various purges.

  Estimates vary of the SPLA size on independence, but some put it as 200,000 troops, along with a small air force. Many of these would have been part-time. The US spent a lot of time and money training the SPLA, especially after 2005. American sources estimated the SPLA total to be 300,000 at independence, with 125,000 regulars. When the southern civil war broke out in December 2013, the regular army fractured largely along ethnic lines, although the causes of the war were political and constitutional disputes that then played into pre-existing ethnic divisions and the legacy of betrayals in the long war against the north, when some of the senior officers defected to Khartoum.

  The initial southern rebellion was sparked by a mutiny in Torit in 1955 and the second stage of fighting was ignited by another mutiny, in Bor, in June 1983. The majority of southern leaders believed in secession for the south, but the dominant political and military personality, John Garang, argued that the search for democracy should be in the whole of a secular Sudan, to include marginalized people in the south, west and east as well as the Nuba peoples in the north. One of the main causi belli was the imposition of sharia law in the south, when the majority of people were animist or Christian. The debate on secession versus the struggle for democracy in a unified state was a part of the internecine fighting between the SPLA and Anya-Nya 2. One of the prominent Anya-Nya holdouts was Commander Gordon Kong Chuol, who eventually joined the SPLA in 1987.

  The main sanctuary for the SPLA was Ethiopia, led by the Derg. When this government collapsed in 1991, this helped to precipitate a split in the SPLA. Commanders Lam Akol and Riek Machar encouraged, respectively, the Shilluk and Nuer peoples to break away because of Garang’s alleged authoritarianism and human rights’ abuses. This new movement, called the SPLA-Nasir, advocated southern independence. The two SPLAs fought for supremacy against each other and the northern army. Despite the schism, the rebels made progress against the northern army, although SPLA-Nasir also did deals with Khartoum.

  The rebels received arms and training from the Israelis in the beginning, then extensively from the Ethiopians. At one stage Colonel Gaddafi provided cash and guns. Uganda and Kenya were generally supportive, and the USA provided funding. American aid and training were extensive in the transformation of the SPLA into a much more professional force after the signing of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement. Immediately after independence in 2011, border tensions flared with the north and disputes over the sharing of the oil wealth. In 2012 the southern army invaded the north and, surprisingly, their new armour pushed back the Khartoum forces near Heglig, a key oil installation. International pressure forced a pull-back.
An uneasy ceasefire lasted for over a year, as IGAD and Chinese and American as well as UN officials tried to prevent the return to full-scale war. Then, somewhat unexpectedly, political differences in Juba burst out into a major ethnic civil war in December 2013. Regional powers, the US and UN as well as China, worked hard to secure a number of ceasefires, which were repeatedly broken by mid-2014.

  After 2005 the SPLA was re-organized along more conventional lines as it transformed from a guerrilla to a more professional conventional army. It was reformed as six divisions and four independent brigades.

  1st Division (Upper Nile state)

  2nd Division (Equatoria region)

  3rd Division (Northern Bahr el-Ghazal and Warrap states)

  4th Division (Unity state)

  5th Division (Lakes state)

  6th SPLA (elements of the joint integrated units set up by the CPA)

  The four independent brigades were stationed in Southern Blue Nile, Bor (Jonglei), Raja (western Bahr el-Ghazal) and, controversially, north of the border in the Nuba Mountains in South Kordofan. Some of the units were re-organized after 2011 and the units in the north officially left the mainstream SPLA to become SPLA-North. Khartoum also repatriated 30,000 southerners in the regular army after 2011. The SPLA set up an SF or Commando brigade of approximately 3,500 men, which was activated at the end of 2007.

  The SPLA deployed a number of captured and reconditioned tanks, including T-55s and T-72s, the latter seeing action in the incursion into the north in 2012. It also deployed captured BM-21 Grad rocket launchers. Large supplies of small arms came originally from Ethiopia then via Kenya and Uganda. In September 2008 a Ukrainian-flagged ship, Faina, was seized by Somali pirates. It had on board thirty-three Soviet-era tanks, anti-aircraft (AA) guns, RPGs, etc., as well as ammunition and spares. It was officially bound for Mombasa. After a series of deals, the ship finally arrived in Kenya in February 2009. The Kenyans swore blind that the ancient equipment was for them. They didn’t need it, and the cargo manifest said it was for South Sudan. In 2013 reports came out of modern equipment, aircraft and tanks, sourced from Uganda. The air force operated mainly a small fleet of Mi-17s.

  The military high command was unstable in 2012. President Salva Kiir purged a large number of senior officers, including forty generals, in early 2013. Fearing a coup, he also sacked his entire cabinet in July 2013. Opponents accused him of establishing a dictatorship, despite his undoubted popularity, as evidenced by his winning over 90 per cent of the vote in the 2010 national election throughout Southern Sudan.

  Pro-government southern militias

  Numerous pro-Khartoum militias sprouted in southern Sudan. In 1997/8 the main ones were:

  Riek Machar’s South Sudan Independence Movement/Army (SSIM/A) (later renamed the South Sudan Defence Force (SSDF)

  Kerubino Kuanyin Bol’s SPLA-Bahr el-Ghazal

  Theophilus Ochang Lotti’s Equatoria Defence Force

  Arok Thon Arok’s Independence of the Bor Group

  Muhammad Harun Kafi’s SPLA-Nuba

  Kawac Makuei Mayar’s Independence Movement for Southern Sudan

  Lam Akol’s SPLA-United

  Paulino Matip’s South Sudan Unity Army (SSUA).

  Some of them were formally allied with, others took money or arms from, Khartoum, and some entered into temporary ceasefires. They split and renamed themselves frequently, though usually the regional or tribal/clan bases were consistent.

  Darfur etc.

  Darfur produced, inevitably, over twenty different insurgent groups, which were mainly Darfurian, let alone the groups connected to the civil war in Chad or south Sudan. The breakdown of the various insurgent groups in Darfur is outlined in Chapter 8, which also discusses the Chadian forces. Details on other fighting groups, such as the Lord’s Resistance Army, can be found in the text, by using the index.

  The main and most cohesive Darfur groups were:

  SLA (Sudan Liberation Army), led by Minni Minnawi. This splintered several times. Another prominent SLA leader was Abdul Wahid al-Nur. Justice and Equality Movement, led by Khalil Ibrahim.

  Various coalitions were formed from these groups, the most influential was the NRF (National Redemption Front).

  Militias in South Sudan after independence

  Besides the south Sudanese groups mentioned above, after 2005 a number of groups opposed the Dinka dominance of the government in Juba; some continued after 2011. Juba did persuade some of the followers of four militia groups to join the regular army:

  A militia led by Peter Gadet (a Bul Nuer);

  One led by Gatluak Gai (a Jagei Nuer);

  One led by David Yau Yau (a Murle);

  And one led by Gabriel Tanginya (a Nuer).

  Three groups remained outside the initial amnesty programme: the militias of George Athor (a Padeng Dinka) in Jonglei; Johnson Olonyi (a Shilluk) and Ayok Ogat (also a Shilluk), both operating in Upper Nile. Athor was killed in December 2011, and his successor, Kuol Chol, led around 1,000 men into the government’s amnesty programme. David Yau Yau defected back to Khartoum and was made overall commander of the South Sudan Liberation Army (SSLA) and the South Sudan Democratic Army in Jonglei State.

  Endnotes

  Chapter 1: The Historical Background

  1. Robert O. Collins, A History of Modern Sudan (Cambridge University Press, New York, 2010) p. 19.

  2. Gordon’s death has prompted literally hundreds of fictional and non-fictional books, most of them hagiographies. A recent impressive revisionist account is by Fergus Nichol, Gladstone, Gordon and the Sudan Wars (Pen and Sword, Barnsley, UK, 2013).

  3. Ataf Lutfi Sayyid-Marsot, A Short History of Egypt (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985) p.75.

  4. Slatin Bey, Fire and Sword in the Sudan, 1896 edition, p.158; see endnote 5 below.

  5. I would again recommend Nichol’s book Gladstone, Gordon and the Sudan Wars for the best short revisionist account of Gordon. It is interesting that in the foreword to Slatin Bey’s book, Fire and Sword in the Sudan, the head of military intelligence in Cairo, Colonel Reginald Wingate, adds a personal note on transliteration in the original 1896 edition. One would have thought that, in funding and promoting of the book, British intelligence would have been more discreet.

  6. See Paul Moorcraft and Philip M. Taylor, Shooting the Messenger: The Politics of War Reporting (Biteback, London, 2011) pp.19-22.

  Chapter 2: British Rule

  1. For more detail on Wingate’s time in the SDF, see Simon Anglim, Orde Wingate: Unconventional Warrior (Pen and Sword, Barnsley, UK, 2014).

  2. For a short summary of this war, and references for the figures, see Paul Moorcraft and Philip M. Taylor, Shooting the Messenger: The Politics of War Reporting (Biteback, London, 2011) pp.53-55.

  3. Cited in Collins, op. cit., p.65.

  Chapter 3: Failed Democracy – Failed Coups (1956-1989)

  1. Cited in Richard Cockett, Sudan: Darfur and the Failure of an African State (Yale University Press, London, 2010) p.62.

  2. Lam Akol, Southern Sudan: Colonialism, Resistance and Autonomy (Red Sea Press, Asmara, 2007).

  3. Cited in Gérard Prunier, ‘Sudan’s Regional Relations’, in John Ryle et al, The Sudan Handbook (James Currey, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2011) p.154.

  Chapter 4: The Makings of a President

  1. The phrase was quoted to me by Hadiya Mohamed al Zein, Omar al-Bashir’s mother, January 2014. Most of the quotes in this chapter came from interviews in Sudan in January 2014.

  2. Shura means council or the practice of consultation in Arabic. The implication is that al-Bashir is collegiate in his approach.

  Chapter 5: The Duopoly

  1. Cited in Collins, op. cit., p.195.

  2. Cockett, op. cit., p.119.

  3. Douglas H. Johnson, The Root Causes of Sudan s Civil Wars: Peace or Truce? (James Currey, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2011) p. 122.

  Chapter 6: The General Takes the Reins

  1. The quote came from Hassan Ali, the Secretary Ge
neral of Sudan’s Ministry of Energy and Mining, cited in Luke Patey, The New Kings of Crude: China, India and the Global Struggle for Oil in Sudan and South Sudan (Hurst, London, 2014) p.65. Patey’s book provides a comprehensive account of China’s oil politics in Sudan.

  Chapter 7: The Road to Peace in the South

  1. For a powerful dramatized version of a true story of one such boy, see Dave Eggers, What is the What (Penguin, London, 2006).

  2. For a detailed summary of the group, see Rebecca Hamilton, The Wonks Who Sold Washington on South Sudan (Reuters special report, 11 July 2012).

  3. Richard Dowden, Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles (Portobello, London, 2009) p.164.

  4. The main components of the NDA at this time were:

  1. The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).

  2. The Umma Party.

  3. The Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM/SPLA).

  4. The Union of Sudan African Parties (USAP).

  5. The Communist Party of Sudan (CPS).

  6. The General Council of the Trade Unions Federations.

  7. The Legitimate Command of the Sudanese Armed Forces.

  8. The Beja Congress.

  9. The Sudan Alliance Forces.

  10. The Federal Democratic Alliance.

  11. The Rashaida Free Lions.

  12. The Arab Baath Socialist Party.