Dust and duplicity: Bashir’s ‘brutal pragmatism’ binds fragmented Sudan
Barney Jopson, Financial Times, July 30, 2008
SHENDI, Sudan - Lunchtime in Shendi, birthplace of an alleged génocidaire, and the carcass of a sheep hangs outside the al-Waha restaurant. A cook stirs a blackened vat of boiling orange sauce while Ramadan, a lanky man in white skullcap and robe, leans across the plastic table and lowers his voice.
“One rule in Shendi,” he whispers. “No photos.”
On the dirt road outside, the dusty bustle of life in a Sudanese market town is interrupted by an immaculate policeman on a motor cycle, who glides through the crowds, inscrutable behind his sunglasses. “There is security everywhere, but not only police,” says Ramadan, scooping up a chunk of lamb. “Most of them are spies in plain clothes and they are always listening.” For what? “Talk against the president.”
This is the home town of Omar al-Bashir, Sudan’s president and the first sitting head of state to be indicted for genocide by a permanent international court. On the banks of the Nile north of the capital Khartoum, Shendi ostensibly has little relation to the remote western region of Darfur, where Mr Bashir is accused of masterminding a five-year campaign of killing, rape and torture.
That conflict has increased the reputation of the Bashir regime overseas as a cabal of ruthless securocrats, willing to use the cruelest tactics to maintain a grasp on one of Africa’s most diverse societies. But the president’s birthplace reveals another side to it: an agitated paranoia rooted in an awareness of its own vulnerability.
Mr Bashir’s indictment this month by Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, may even for the moment have strengthened his hand. According to Khartoum-based observers, it has triggered a closing of ranks inside the ruling party, the often factionalised National Congress, as its members calculated that a challenge to Mr Bashir – shown above greeting supporters from the back of a Toyota on a visit to Darfur last week – was potentially a challenge to them all.
However, the indictment has also underscored the central dilemma facing the regime. To give the rest of Sudan and the west what they demand – democracy, justice and a fairer distribution of the nation’s wealth – would be to sign its own death warrant. To deny those things allows pressures to build that are ultimately uncontainable.
“Look at their track record and, yes, they lack that large vision,” says one western diplomat in Khartoum. “But they’ve come up with a strategy that combines brutality and pragmatism. They know what they need to do to survive.”
Mr Bashir came to power in a military coup in 1989 in alliance with radical Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood, led by Hassan al-Turabi. To avoid itself falling victim to a coup and to contain insurgencies from the nation’s margins, the regime created a surveillance state run by security chiefs who hail mostly from around Shendi. Under Mr Bashir, power and wealth have been concentrated in the hands of the same Riverine elite from north of Khartoum who dominated previous governments But his regime has been in power for longer than any other since independence in 1956.
It has weathered a civil war with southern rebels, its own declaration of support for Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, its provision of a safe haven to Osama bin Laden, a US cruise missile strike, American economic sanctions and a split within the ruling party engineered by Mr Turabi.
In 1999 the country also began to pump oil, extracted in the south and piped to refineries in the north, which brings in revenue that underwrites the regime’s existence. Even so, in the long term, can it cling on? Mr Bashir and his supporters have developed a coping mechanism that, nonetheless, gradually reduces their ability to manoeuvre, the diplomat adds. “Can they get out of the mess they’ve created even if they want to? Maybe yes, maybe no.”
The regime is “a huge iceberg that is sinking and carrying everyone with it”, says Eltayeb Hag Ateya, director of the Peace Research Institute at the University of Khartoum. “They all know there is something terribly wrong but nobody is trying to analyse it or correct it.”
If the regime were toppled, or Sudan were to break up, the consequences would be felt around the world. As sub-Saharan Africa’s largest state by land area, stretching from the Sahara desert to the jungles at Africa’s heart, it affects three conflict zones: Uganda to the south, the Horn of Africa and the Darfur-Chad-Libya zone. Its oil industry churns out an estimated 500,000 barrels a day, with a significant but variable proportion going to China. The credibility of the United Nations in the country – its peacemakers, peacekeepers and the Security Council that gave the ICC its mandate – is meanwhile on the line.
Five years after an anti-government insurgency was launched by Darfur rebels from three non-Arab (but Muslim) tribes – the Fur, Zaghawa and Masalit – the western region is testing the limits of Khartoum’s methods. “Mass killing has become so routine that it no longer needs conspiracy or deliberation. It is simply how the security elite does business. It is ingrained intent, atrocity by force of habit,” write Alex de Waal and Julie Flint in Darfur: A Short History of a Long War.
Government forces bombed rebel villages from the air and unleashed Arab militia – the mounted janjaweed – to execute its scorched-earth policy. But in spite of an estimated 300,000 deaths that resulted and the fact that 2.5m people – or 40 per cent of Darfur’s population – have been forced from their homes, it has failed to crush the rebels.
In May it became clear that the danger the conflict poses is not limited to Sudan’s periphery. More than 300 vehicles from one rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement (Jem), advanced rapidly across more than 1,000km of desert and scrub to launch an attack on Omdurman, Khartoum’s twin city across the Nile – the first time regional insurgents had reached the capital’s doorstep.
“It shook whatever faith anyone had in the ability of the government to deal with this,” says Mr Ateya at the University of Khartoum. After hours of fighting, the attack was repelled by the security services and paramilitary police. But the army was not deployed, exposing the regime’s doubts over the loyalty of its rank-and-file, which is dominated by Darfurians.
Jem’s assault scotched the misconception that Mr Bashir’s regime is all-powerful and all-knowing, says Mr Turabi, the regime’s eminence grise before he was purged in 1999 for plotting to usurp the president (he has been repeatedly jailed since). “They came all the way here to say there is something wrong in the centre. They can’t take over Sudan with 300 cars but they wanted to rock, to shock, to tell the government it is never safe.”
Two months later, Mr Moreno-Ocampo launched his own attack from The Hague, filing charges against Mr Bashir on three counts of genocide, five of crimes against humanity and two of murder, and requesting an arrest warrant. The court’s judges are expected to rule on the application in September or October.
When Mr Bashir was forewarned of the indictments, he is reported to have reacted with fury. But by the time of the announcement, the regime had devised a sophisticated response that did not include lashing out at UN staff in Sudan as many had feared: the reaction was a reminder that while its default setting may be violence, the regime has developed cunning political and diplomatic responses to repeated crises.
“It’s ‘force, negotiate, force, negotiate’, like the alternating electric current,” says Mohamed Ibrahim Nugud, political secretary of the Communist party of Sudan. “In essence, Bashir will not change. But he is manoeuvring. It depends on the balance of power in the field and the pressure from the UN and the west.”
To rally the support of the public, the president has been sending out a message of strength and defiance, including last week’s tour of Darfur – painting the indictments as an insult to all Sudanese and Mr Moreno-Ocampo as an agent of foreign conspirators. “The notion of statehood is being challenged,” says Ghazi Salahuddin Atabani, a civilian presidential adviser. “If you compromise a state that is already compromised, you end up with chaos where no one can guarantee the safety of anyone.”
Such scaremongering has helped rally some political foes to the regime’s side, as have the president’s loose declarations last week of a renewed commitment to finding peace in Darfur. The same is true of the African Union, the Arab League and China, which look set to support Sudan’s diplomatic efforts to have the indictments deferred for a year.
But seasoned Sudan watchers caution against investing much credibility in the regime’s promises. The western diplomat says that contrary to perceptions outside the country, Khartoum’s strongest suit is not fighting but negotiating, where it routinely runs rings around opponents through the ruthless use of “deception, duplicity and delay”.
One salutary warning is the north-south peace deal, signed in 2005, which ended a civil war between successive Khartoum governments and southern rebels, latterly the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), that had raged on and off since the 1950s. Its causes were similar to the more recent Darfur conflict but the rebels’ sense of marginalisation was aggravated by the cultural divide between Muslim and Arabised northerners and Christian and animist southerners.
The discovery that the south possessed oil heightened the north’s determination to fight and, in the second phase of the war alone, from 1983, some 2m lost their lives. When it saw it was cornered, however, the Bashir regime agreed to make peace. Alfred Taban, editor of the Khartoum Monitor, an English-language newspaper, says: “They signed it not because they wanted to give concessions but because they saw the SPLM getting stronger, because diplomatically they were under pressure from America, and because inside the country there was a lot of unrest, so they saw no alternative. It was about survival.”
The deal created a semi-autonomous government for the south, established a government of national unity in Khartoum, split oil revenues evenly between the two sides and promised presidential and legislative elections next year. But Mr Bashir refused to relinquish any real power to the unity government. He focused the state’s surveillance apparatus on southerners in the north and dragged his feet in implementing key provisions of the deal, including the demarcation of the north-south border.
In late May the town of Abyei, capital of an oil-rich region that straddles the disputed border, was destroyed in a battle between northern and southern troops. Few expect next year’s elections to be free or fair. “It’s always a question of buying time without really giving anything, in the hope that things will die out or become more complex,” says Peter Adwok Nyaba, an SPLM senator.
But the peace deal also contained the seeds of Sudan’s fragmentation because it promised the southerners a referendum on independence in 2011. True to its survivalism, the Bashir regime has done nothing to make unity attractive to the south, not even building a new road to connect its main towns to the north. Instead it has insisted on pumping as much oil as it can as quickly as possible – in the process damaging many of the wells – but has made no arrangements on how to manage the industry if the south secedes.
“If the south goes in 2011 and they try to stop it, if the rebels take Darfur and link up with Kordofan [a neighbouring province], then Khartoum becomes the place where people are fighting,” says Mr Adwok. The regime “can’t be sustainable if there is a real alliance between marginalised people”.
Around Mr Bashir, however, is a coterie unperturbed by the prospect of Sudan disintegrating, as long as the ethnically homogenous northern region, or Shamaliya, remains intact. It is where the regime has invested its oil wealth in building roads and spy networks and at its centre is Shendi, the presidential home town. Shamaliya is envisaged as the regime’s final bastion, says the western diplomat. “But if it lost the south and Darfur it would probably be so discredited it would lose power anyway.”