If Prague can be free, why not Sudan?
BY BRET STEPHENS
Tuesday, June 12, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
PRAGUE--In 1991, Mudawi Ibrahim Adam, a professor of engineering at the University of Khartoum, was arrested by security agents and detained for seven months in what the Sudanese called "the ghost house." In 1997, he was detained again for five months. From 2003 to 2004, he was imprisoned for eight months, and again for five months in 2005. The reason? "The regime knew my views were against fundamentalism."
Mr. Mudawi speaks matter-of-factly about his experiences in the dungeons of Islamist dictator Omar Bashir. "You are taken in blindfolded," he says. "You go into a cell. Sometimes it's very dark. There's nothing in it except the floor. Sometimes you are placed in a small, crowded room; sometimes in a large, empty one. It all depends on the situation they want to put you in. They keep you up all night and cuff you to the door, forcing you to stand. Beating is the normal thing."
Mr. Mudawi, who heads the nongovernmental Sudan Social Development Organization, or SUDO, is in Prague to attend what is being billed in the press as a "dissidents' conference." Russia's Garry Kasparov is here, as is Egyptian academic Saad Eddin Ibrahim, former Syrian parliamentarian Mamoun Homsy and others from Iran, Palestine, Belarus, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and China. They mix easily with a half-dozen Israelis led by Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident who, with the Czech Republic's Václav Havel and Spain's José María Aznar, is chairing the event. The idea is to put together what Mr. Sharansky describes as "a trade union for dissidents," which can do to the various tyrannies of our day what Poland's Solidarity movement did to the great tyranny of its time.
Also making appearances are Sen. Joe Lieberman and George W. Bush, who in his speech Wednesday described himself as a "dissident president." Mr. Mudawi does not begrudge him the label. "I have a different view of Bush," he says, having twice met the president privately. "People say he's crap. I see him as a very intelligent person. Not that I'm in favor of his positions, but he's focused and he knows what he's talking about. It's his advisers who are the problem." Reportedly, it took Mr. Sharansky's personal intercession to get Mr. Bush to come to Prague against the advice of the State Department, a depressing indication of where things stand with what used to be called "the freedom agenda."
That's bad news for Mr. Mudawi, whose personal jeopardy waxes and wanes depending in part on the amount of scrutiny the regime feels itself under from the U.S. SUDO was founded in 1999, while Mr. Bashir, following a long dalliance with Osama bin Laden, was seeking favor with the Clinton Administration by improving intelligence ties and relaxing domestic repression. Over time, however, the relationship grew too comfortable, Mr. Bashir relaxed, and the repression returned. In April 2005, the CIA received Sudanese intelligence chief Salah Abdullah in Washington. At the time, Mr. Mudawi was being prosecuted on espionage charges, which carry the death penalty. The case was suspended thanks to an international outcry, but the charges stand.
"If you are saying you are for democracy, well then, OK," he says. "This is the most brutal person in this government and you are rewarding him for helping you on terrorism. But you are doing it at the expense of the people of Sudan."
At the conference, the formal title of which is "Democracy and Security," there is a debate about whether a policy that promotes the former in places like Iraq is inversely correlated with the latter. Mr. Mudawi's experience in Sudan suggests democracy and security are, in fact, mutually reinforcing. He observes that Mr. Bashir's dictatorship has from the first been sustained by Islamic radicals such as al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, which used their influence with Mr. Bashir to infiltrate the security services and the army, and from there to sow chaos throughout the country.
Hence the situation in Darfur. As with Sudanese generally, most Darfuris practice a Sufi version of Islam that eschews extremism and is therefore hostile to Mr. Bashir's government. "From the beginning the Islamic fundamentalists were having a problem with the people of Darfur because they wouldn't support them," he says. "Some people say the problem is tribal. That's wrong. It's the central government waging war against its own people."
Through SODU, Mr. Mudawi has been calling attention to the plight of Darfur since 2001, two years before the killing began in earnest. With each return to the region he has witnessed new lows in chaos, pillage, rape and murder--not to mention new lows in the failure of the international community to do much about it. The presence of African Union troops, he says, has made no difference, and the United Nations is even worse.
"Sudan said it didn't want [U.N. special envoy Jan] Pronk, and the U.N. removed him. At El Fasher [a town in north Darfur] a human-rights monitor was doing good work protecting people, so the government said, 'We don't want him here,' and the U.N. caved in. When I asked the U.N., 'Why don't you protect your own staff?' they gave me irrelevant excuses."
What would work? Mr. Mudawi's answer is an international embargo on Sudan's oil exports--the government's main source of income--enforced by the credible threat of an international boycott of next year's Olympics in Beijing if China (the principal producer and customer of that oil) persists in doing Khartoum's bidding at the U.N. Security Council. His goal isn't to moderate the behavior of the regime, but to replace it with a secular, democratic, federal state, something he believes is doable. "[The fundamentalists] don't have the support of even 10% of the people," he says. "The first free election would be the downfall of them."
If that sounds like a pipe dream, in Prague it can almost be believed. The conference takes place at the Czernin Palace, where in 1948 Czechoslovakia's freedom died with the (probable) murder of Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk and where, 43 years later, its freedom was reborn with the formal dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. When it comes to ghost houses, at least some have been exorcised of their demons.
Mr. Stephens is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. His column appears in the Journal Tuesdays.
opinionjournal.com |
