excerpted from
Today's Costliest Civil War (Sudan)
by Dan Connell
The Progressive magazine, June 2000
... Sudan is the largest country in Africa, with borders that
touch Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, the Congo, the
Central African Republic, Chad, and Libya. It straddles the Nile
and abuts the Red Sea, a location that made it the target of revolving-door
superpower intervention throughout much of the Cold War. The United
States alone provided more than $2 billion in arms-ostensibly
to counter Soviet influence in neighboring Ethiopia, though most
of the weaponry ended up being used in the civil war.
As corrupt civilian regimes alternated with both Soviet- and
U.S.-supported military coups, the country slid into economic
and social crisis. Then, in June 1989, days before a truce was
to be signed that would have suspended the controversial application
of Islamic law, General Omar al-Bashir seized power on behalf
of the extremist National Islamic Front. The new regime quickly
banned all political parties, trade unions, and other "non-religious
institutions." It imposed tight controls on the press and
strict dress and behavior codes on women as it moved to restructure
the entire society in its image.
More than 78,000 people were purged from the army, police,
and civil administration, thoroughly reshaping the state apparatus,
while dissidents were routinely detained in torture centers. Conscription
of child soldiers became widespread, and forms of slavery reappeared
when the government allowed its allied militias to raid rebel-held
areas for booty, taking captured civilians with them. The National
Islamic Front merged religious indoctrination and conversion with
education, social services, economic development, and political
mobilization. It used the paramilitary Popular Defense Forces
to enforce Arabization and Islamization along narrowly sectarian
lines. This provoked many Muslims to join the opposition, which
gelled in the mid-1990s into a multi-ethnic and explicitly secular
coalition, the National Democratic Alliance.
But it was not the regime's internal policies that triggered
the break with the United States. Only after Sudan supported Iraq
in the Gulf War in 1991 and after it began to harbor international
Islamist guerrillas did Washington respond. The Clinton Administration
prohibited U.S. economic investment, increased anti-Sudan moves
in the United Nations and other international forums, and isolated
Sudan as a "rogue" state.
In November 1996, the Clinton Administration pledged $20 million
in non-lethal military aid to Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Uganda to
counter Sudan's border intrusions. But the eruption of a war between
Eritrea and Ethiopia in 1998 wrecked the front-line alliance,
and half-hearted U.S. mediation has so far failed to achieve a
lasting truce there. Meanwhile, the United States has opted for
punitive actions aimed directly at the regime-such as the August
1998 bombing of the Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum-because
the United States suspected the Sudanese government of harboring
terrorists associated with the renegade Saudi financier Osama
Bin Laden.
At a highly publicized meeting with rebel leaders in Kampala,
Uganda, last year, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told
the opposition privately that military help would be forthcoming,
but opposition members say they have heard (and seen) nothing
since. A recent U.S. offer to provide food aid directly to the
rebels has so far gone unfilled.
These gestures do little to weaken the Islamist government,
but they lend credibility to its claims that it is battling not
just indigenous opposition but also imperial American power...
Africa watch