|
 THE post-colonial history of Sudan has been pathological, marred by a succession of military coups, repressive dictatorships, famine, bankruptcy, genocidal tribal massacres and, above all, the longest, bloodiest civil war in the Islamic world.
The ethnic and religious cleavage was between the Arab, Muslim north and the Christian, animist south, the lands of the Dinka and the Nuer. Africa's most tragic recent province of black gold, pitted successive governments in Kabul against the secessionists of the Sudanese Liberation Peoples Movement. While the killing fields of Darfur have become a media cause celebre for a world shamed by Rwanda and Bosnia in the past decade, an issue with the worldwide impact of the 1980's movement against apartheid South Africa, the real shame is that 2 million lives were lost, 4 million refugees displaced in Sudan's 22-year bush war against the rebel south. The atrocities in Darfur are repulsive enough, though not on the scale of the mass slaughter meted out by Sudanese armies to the Dinka and southern tribes since the 1950's. Khartoum has unleashed the Janjaweed militia against the nomads and cattle grazers of the western desert Zhgawa, Masalit and Far tribes who revolted in Darfur, while government helicopter gunships bombed their mud-thatch villages. Sudan is sub-Saharan Africa's largest country by land mass, a nation of colossal strategic importance because it borders Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Congo, CAR, Chad and Libya. Its size and location alone is critical to the geopolitics of the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa and, therefore to the national security of both Egypt and Saudi Arabia, America's most important allies in the Arab world. The recent ICC prosecutor's indictment of President Omar Al Beshir, paradoxically, increases the risk of Sudan's eventual disintegration because it emboldens the Darfur and southern Sudanese rebels to resume their struggle to overthrow the military regime in Khartoum their people view as repressive, illegitimate and genocidal. An international arrest warrant for General Beshir will also make the regime lash out against the UN peace-keepers in Darfur, the humanitarian NGO's who feed millions of Sudanese living on food aid. It could also end the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) with the south, which calls for national elections and a democratic Sudan by 2009. Beshir's power could also be threatened by a palace coup by Islamist officers in a military regime whose corporate culture and past is punctuated by barracks plots, coup attempts, purges, summary executions of generals and colonels and rival intelligence agencies, conspirator cabals and troop mutinies. After all, Brigadier Al Beshir himself seized power in a military coup against the civilian government of Sadiq Al Mahdi in June 1989. The current Sudanese military regime personifies Dr. Kissinger's observation that even paranoid leaders have real enemies. President Beshir has now ruled Sudan for even longer than General Jafar Numeiry, who relied on the Soviet Union, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and, above all, the US to finance Khartoum's wars against the Dinka. Al Beshir's regime is based on a coterie of generals from the Shendi area north of Khartoum allied to fundamentalist Islamists officers from the Muslim Brotherhood. Sudanese politics has a DNA rooted in anti-colonial, Islamist violence ever since the Mahdi's dervishes faced the Victorian British Empire at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, where the redcoat list included a young Lt Winston Spencer Churchill. Beshir did not hesitate to purge thousands of military officers, civil servants and professors for being insufficiently Islamic and hundreds of executions. Like General Zia in Pakistan or Iranian Ayatollahs, Beshir has sought his regime's political legitimacy by seeking to impose Shariah rule in Sudan, despite its multi-religious population. The Clinton's White House shunned Sudan as a pariah regime after Beshir hosted Osama bin Laden, launched raids against the Southern tribes that outraged both evangelical Christians and the black caucus in Washington DC and allied with Saddam Hussein in his invasion of Kuwait. This was a dramatic policy U-turn from the 1970's and 1980's, when Sudan received $2 billion in military aid from the United States. In fact, while Sudanese intelligence persuaded Beshir to expel Osama to Afghanistan in 1996 and give up Carlos the Jackal, the terrorist who had stormed the Opec secretariat in Vienna, to France, Khartoum still remains on the State Department list of countries that sponsor terrorism and under US sanctions. In fact, President Clinton ordered cruise missile attacks against the Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan after Al Qaeda bombed American embassies in Nairobi and Dar El Salaam. President Bush termed Darfur genocide but the CIA continues to co-operate with Sudan's secret police to monitor and exterminate Al Qaeda terrorist cells. The geopolitical stakes in Sudan are complicated by the discovery of oil in Abyei in 1999. While Chevron and Canada's Talisman Energy initiated the exploration and drilling war and the global divestment campaign after Darfur forced them out. Sudanese proven reserves are still less then1 billion barrels and its production only 500,000 but the entire infrastructure of pipelines, storage tanks and refineries is dominated by China's Petro-China, with smaller concessions for India's ONGC and Malaysia's Petronas. The Chinese have supplied the Khartoum government with warplanes, tanks and ballistic missiles since the collapse of the Beshir regime will be catastrophic for Beijing as it would enable Western oil companies to compete with Petro China. This is the reason China, along with the Arab League and the African Union, have protested the ICC indictments. Yet Sudan's oil could well be the cause of its eventual disintegration as a nation state because the SPLA does not want to share the South's oil wealth with the northern Arab Islamic military elite it views as its oppressors. The mistrust and hatred between the two rival governments in Khartoum and Juba last escalated into violence in Abyei only last month. In any case, the 2006 peace deal included a cause on Southern independence, a highly probable prospect given the nature of the Khartoum regime and the ICC indictment. In Darfur, in the Nuba Mountain, in the bush of the Dinka ancestral homeland, the death rattle of federal Sudan promise its inevitable denouement. Like Iraq, Palestine and Somalia, Sudan could be the next Arab state destined to disintegrate. Matein Khalid is a Dubai-based investment banker and economic analyst
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
