Sudan Wrestles With Its Pariah Image. War-Torn Nation Seen by Some as Complex Portrait
Washington Post, May 19
By Karl Vick
KHARTOUM, Sudan -- As chairman of the Public Relations Society of Sudan, Omar Suleiman glowed with the hospitality of his country and the indulgence of his profession. It was when a visitor mentioned current events that the wide, white smile stiffened into a rictus.
"Yes, the image of Sudan -- " Suleiman said, beginning a sentence that would go unfinished.
What can be said for a pariah nation accused of extreme brutality in its prosecution of an 18-year-old civil war, of harboring terrorists, of supporting slavery? In Khartoum, where the ambient obscurity can be blamed only partly on dust storms, no answer comes easily. But interviews with both moderates and hard-liners in the government, local human rights advocates and a divided diplomatic community reveal a more nuanced portrait of power than the one painted by Sudan's ever-more-vocal critics.
"Almost any vice in the world has been lumped on Sudan, any accusation," said Mahdi Ibrahim Mohamed, a presidential adviser whose office stands near the spot where Islamic zealots a century ago decapitated the British envoy, effectively establishing the base line Western perception of Sudan.
"What I'm saying is we are victims," Mohamed insisted. "We are being terrorized all the time."
Once one of Washington's principal African allies, this country began to fall out of favor with the West in 1983, when the people of southern Sudan, black Africans who practice Christianity or traditional religion, renewed a dormant rebellion against the government here in the Muslim, Arab-populated north. The war, waged over the southerners' demands for self-determination and the government's attempts to bring the entire country under its control -- and, from time to time, under Islamic law -- has claimed an estimated 2 million lives, almost all in the south. Visitors to the south routinely emerge with accounts of government planes bombing civilian sites, including churches and hospitals, and of government-supported militias burning village after village to the ground.
Sudan's estrangement hardened in 1989, when the current government came to power in a military coup and proclaimed an Islamic state. During the 1990s, Western governments said, Sudan not only intensified the war but actively supported international terrorist groups.
In Khartoum, senior officials complain that the West is looking at Sudan through the wrong end of the telescope. By visiting only the country's war-ravaged south, they say, journalists and advocates make the worst of a situation the officials acknowledge is bad enough already.
"Don't tell me there are human rights violations," said Mustafa Osman Ismail, Sudan's foreign minister. "I know there are human rights violations. There is a war."
Independent observers here concur, at least in part. Diplomats, aid workers and human rights activists suggest that focusing solely on the government's sins -- often committed not by the army but by loosely controlled militias -- not only overlooks the heavily checkered record of the main southern rebel movement, the Sudan People's Liberation Army. It also, they say, ignores the relative softening of a Khartoum government once invariably described as hard-line.
"The south generates so much publicity, it's very easy to make black Christian leaders believe what a horrible government this is," said Wim van der Kevie, the Dutch ambassador to Khartoum. "I'm not going to say it's not a horrible government, but it's very much exaggerated."
'Basic Change' in Policy
Whatever the current regime may be, it is not the same National Islamic Front as that which came to power 12 years ago. The 1989 coup was led by Gen. Omar Hassan Bashir, who is still Sudan's president, but it was engineered by a Muslim ideologue, Hassan Turabi. Now, however, Turabi languishes in Kober prison, nursing fruit juice, praying with his guards and striving to remain relevant.
The current government defies easy classification, an unpredictable assortment of hard-liners, moderates and those in between who contradict even themselves. In the most recent confabulation, the government approved a permit for a massive Easter service in a Khartoum square, revoked it a few days later, then dispatched police to tear-gas a cathedral.
Such episodes reinforce the impression that Sudan's civil war, deeply rooted in the economic and political marginalization of the south, is simply a religious war. Sectarian divisions do play a large role in the conflict, as evinced by state television's regular broadcast of "Saha el Fidaa," or "The Field of Sacrifice," which bids Muslim youths to sign on in the holy war against the "pagan" south.
Yet, in a noticeably more relaxed Khartoum, it has been years since Islamic morals police lashed schoolgirls for wearing short skirts under their robes.
"There is a basic change in Sudan policy from the early '90s," said Mustafa, the foreign minister, who was once a Turabi disciple. "Ideology now, I think it is clear, is part of history."
Gone, too, is the exiled Saudi extremist Osama bin Laden and other militants whose presence prompted U.N. and U.S. sanctions in the mid-1990s.
Officials expect the U.N. penalties, relatively loose and already widely ignored, to be removed this year.
Now that the Clinton administration -- which imposed an economic embargo on Sudan, declared it a "rogue state" and fired cruise missiles at a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum that supposedly was linked to bin Laden -- has given way to the Bush team, the hard-liners of Khartoum have been looking for a break. But as President Bush weighs his own Sudan policy, White House advisers are listening intently to Christian groups that speak of Islamic holy war, rights advocates who accuse the Sudanese government of genocide and black activists returning from southern Sudan with accounts of black Africans enslaved by Arab militias.
The new administration commenced with an inauguration prayer from evangelist Franklin Graham, whose missionary hospital staff in the southern town of Lui five times last year scrambled to avoid bombs dropped from the Sudanese army's Russian-made Antonov planes.
"Unfortunately, these interest groups have a very high level of influence on the decision-makers, and they make their own agenda the nation's agenda," said Mohamed, Bashir's adviser.
Signs of Hope
The regime found no encouragement in Bush's May 4 speech calling their country "a disaster area for all human rights." But it sees hope in a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. The report, whose signatories include the chief National Security Council adviser on Africa and Bush's nominee for top African diplomat at the State Department, recommends shifting U.S. strategy from support for the southern rebels to a new quest for peace. That presumably would mean reopening the U.S. Embassy here, which has stood largely empty for security reasons since 1996, and naming a high-profile special envoy to bring the two sides together.
The idea would be to move beyond the enforced isolation that even senior Sudanese officials acknowledge pushed Khartoum toward what observers here call modest but promising changes: Political parties are now allowed, though a handful of their senior operatives remain jailed. Currency and visa regulations have been loosened. An independent newspaper, the Khartoum Monitor, comes out daily.
The European Union, which two years ago established a policy of constructive engagement, has been broadly encouraged.
"Yes, we feel it is working, though much slower than we would like to see," said van der Kevie, current head of the EU delegation. "We think it's very important to support the moderate voices in this government, and there are moderates. The American policy seems to see this government as a bunch of fundamentalist hard-liners that need to be opposed."
Senior Sudanese officials worry that even such mixed reviews may not reach American policymakers. (Indeed, a Western diplomat visiting Khartoum began a briefing on the regime by saying, "They know they're doing the nasty.") At the same time, critics observe that Khartoum has fueled its own bad press by failing to effectively address its two main sources: the 152 civilian sites that aid groups say were bombed by government planes last year in the south, and reports by aid workers, religious groups and journalists that the government is arming Arab militias that routinely enslave southern women and children.
Mohamed maintained that "most of this so-called slavery is a practice within rebel-controlled areas. How do you hold the government of Sudan responsible?" The government has, however, established a committee to deal with "abductions," the term it prefers.
"The other factor, yes, the government can stop aerial bombing," Mohamed said. President Bashir announced a moratorium on bombings the day Bush took office, as a show of good faith to the new president, but the airstrikes later resumed.
Sudanese officials insist that these issues would recede if the Bush administration forsakes support for the southern rebels in favor of a neutral effort to negotiate peace. It is the rebels, they note, who have consistently refused offers of a cease-fire.
"If there is a new policy of the Bush administration, a policy of engagement, a policy of helping to stop the fighting, then there is no country in the world at this juncture that is more in need of the intervention and help of the United States of America than Sudan," Ismail said. "It will be most welcome."
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