guardian.co.uk
Strike One
In 1998, America destroyed Osama bin Laden's
'chemical weapons' factory in Sudan. It turned out that
the factory made medicine. So how did the attack
affect this war-ravaged nation? With the west poised
to strike again elsewhere, James Astill reports from
Khartoum
Tuesday October 2, 2001
The Guardian
The first thing Amin Mohamed knew about America's last war on
international terrorism was when the roof caved in. "Allah Akbar!
It's the end of the world!" he screamed as 14 cruise missiles
landed next door to the sweet factory he was guarding. The
40-year-old ran with a broken leg for three miles to the Nile,
before realising that al-Shifa, Sudan's main pharmaceutical
factory, was the only building that had been hit. "The walls just
disappeared," he says. "One moment I was lying down, listening
to the sound of planes. The next, everything was smoke and fire.
I didn't know there were such weapons."
Three years on, the sweet factory has a new roof and Amin's leg
has mended. Fadil Reheima, also on duty that night, squats
nodding and smiling beside him. Fadil, 32, cannot tell me what
he remembers, however, because he has been deaf and dumb
since the attack.
The missiles that flattened al-Shifa were launched from a
submarine in the Red Sea two weeks after 224 people were
killed by bomb blasts at the American embassies in Nairobi and
Dar es Salaam. Al-Shifa was part-owned by Osama bin Laden,
the main suspect for the attacks, and was producing nerve gas,
Bill Clinton said. Against the advice of appalled British
diplomats, Tony Blair backed him to the hilt.
But by the time the first TV crews arrived in protective clothing, it
was already clear that something was wrong. The fallout of
aspirins, carpeting the sandy ground all around, gave it away.
So did the fact, overlooked by American intelligence, that the
factory was privately owned, though part-financed, by a
Kenya-based development bank.
"The evidence was not conclusive and was not enough to justify
an act of war," concedes Donald Petterson, former American
ambassador to Sudan. With a £35m compensation claim
working its way through the American courts, that is as much
as any official will say on the record. The evidence was
supposed to consist of incriminating soil samples; they have
never been produced. Sudan's proposal that the UN should
investigate was vetoed by America. And Washington is currently
trying to fight the case by pleading sovereign immunity. But
shortly after filing his suit, the factory's owner, Salah Idris, had
his American bank accounts quietly unfrozen.
Idris probably did have dealings with Bin Laden. As one of
Sudan's richest businessmen, it would have been difficult not to.
Bin Laden was based in Khartoum for five years, building
bridges, roads and farms (and, of course, his al-Qaida terrorist
group). But he was ushered out of Sudan a good two years
before al-Shifa was flattened with such brilliant precision.
Dr Idris Eltayeb, one of Sudan's handful of pharmacologists and
chairman of al-Shifa's board, is still impressed by the
mathematics of it. "To be able to pinpoint this little factory from
thousands of miles away - it's incredible," he says, walking
around the mounds of rubble, left lying as it fell, littered with
thousands of vials of livestock antibiotic and strips of malaria
tablets.
But if Eltayeb is alive to the absurdity of American hi-tech pitted
against "a simple factory in one of the poorest countries in the
third world", he can also count the cost. Al-Shifa was one of
only three medium-sized pharmaceutical factories in Sudan, and
the only one producing TB drugs - for more than 100,000
patients, at about £1 a month. Costlier imported versions are not
an option for most of them - or for their husbands, wives and
children, who will have been infected since. Al-Shifa was also
the only factory making veterinary drugs in this vast, mostly
pastoralist, country. Its speciality was drugs to kill the parasites
which pass from herds to herders, one of Sudan's principal
causes of infant mortality. Since the bombing, "people have
gone back to doing without," says Eltayeb, with a shrug.
Nobody was killed outright. "But this was just as much an act of
terrorism as at the twin towers - the only difference is we know
who did it," Eltayeb says. "I feel very sad about the loss of life
there, but in terms of numbers, and the relative cost to a poor
country, this was worse."
Still worse than the cost to Sudan's fragile medical services was
the political cost to a country struggling to emerge from
totalitarian military dictatorship, ruinous Islamism and
long-running civil war. Ten years after President Omar al-Bashir
seized power, a defiant policy of offering refuge to Muslim
brothers had turned Sudan into a pariah state. Ethiopia, Eritrea,
Kenya and Uganda were backing Christian rebels in the south.
The economy was in ruins. And so Khartoum was being forced
to open up. The terrorists - famously, Bin Laden and Carlos the
Jackal - had been kicked out. The government was talking to its
neighbours. Then al-Shifa was bombed, and overnight Khartoum
was plunged into the nightmare of impotent extremism it had
been trying to escape.
Sudan is still struggling to purge itself of the diehards. It has
more or less convinced its neighbours to stop backing the
rebels, opposition parties have been restored, and oil contracts
are now awarded on the basis of tender rather than religious
fervour. At the same time, arbitrary police powers have been
beefed up, trade unions and political rallies remain effectively
banned, floggings and amputations are routine, and so farcical
were last year's presidential elections that all except stooge
opposition parties boycotted them.
At the very best, these contradictions are embarrassing, but
further missile strikes - Sudan remains on America's hitlist of
states sponsoring terrorism - will not coax it along any quicker.
"The way to eradicate international terrorism is not to throw
cruise missiles around. It is to get rid of ruthless dictatorship
and promote democracy," says Ghazi Suleiman, a human rights
lawyer who has been arrested by his own government
"countless times", but who is also, not coincidentally, suing
America on behalf of Idris. Bad politics, not bad religion,
produces terrorism, says Suleiman. And it is this that America
must attack. "Bush tells us he will smoke Bin Laden out of his
cave. But truly the caves he is talking of do not exist only in
Afghanistan. These caves are all over Africa and the developing
world." |
