Omar Al-Bashir and Africa's Longest War Page 7

  Sudanese military activity on the eastern front was over except for occupation and border duties. Gideon and Gazelle Forces were disbanded in the early summer of 1941. They had proved their worth and many Sudanese soldiers went on to fight with even more famous units in the main front in North Africa. Wingate continued to develop his original theories of guerrilla war by leading much bigger formations of Chindits in Burma. Many of his colleagues thought him quite mad, but he proved a very effective guerrilla leader in Palestine, Sudan and, finally, Burma, where, as a major general, he died in a plane crash in March 1944. Meanwhile, his small-unit adherents in the SDF had worked closely with the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) – among the forerunners of the Special Air Service – in south-eastern Libya. The SDF was used to supply the LRDG and Free French outposts in the Italian colony of Libya. French forces under Colonel Phillipe Leclerc had advanced over almost inaccessible desert from Chad in French Equatorial Africa. Anglo-French units took oases and a fort during the battle of Kufra in March 1941. Re-supply was very challenging because of local Italian air superiority. The Libyan-Sudanese border area, largely desert or scrub, was used by the SDF to run supply trucks; later they took over garrison duties at the Kufra oasis. The SDF also engaged in highly secret operations to prevent German commandos infiltrating into Egypt. SDF personnel also worked with British military intelligence to interdict German secret agents hoping to encourage an Egyptian uprising against the British rule.

  By the end of the world conflict in 1945 the SDF could boast of ‘a good war’. Its seventy Sudanese officers had shown distinguished service in conventional and irregular warfare throughout north and east Africa. As independence hovered on the horizon, more and more local officers replaced their British counterparts. By March 1954 British troops in the Sudan comprised one battalion stationed in Khartoum. The SDF was under British command, but the deputy commander was Ibrahim Abboud. Born in Suakin in 1900, the future Sudanese general served in Egypt and Iraq, as well as in operations in north and east Africa. General Abboud took over as commander in chief of the SDF at independence. Initially, he remained aloof from politics, but he headed the only disciplined and centrally controlled institution in the country. The most enduring legacy of the British was not constitutional democracy, English education or the rule of law, but an effective, battle-hardened national army’s pivotal role in Sudanese life.

  Moves towards independence

  The same could not be said of any of the burgeoning political parties. In June 1947 the British and Sudanese from north and south met in Juba where they agreed on a unified Sudanese state and a future joint assembly in Khartoum. Southerners at the time felt that their lack of educational and political experience left them at a severe disadvantage in these negotiations; later southern historians claimed the Juba meeting was a complete fix. Nevertheless, in December 1948, the British set up the first legislative assembly, comprising seventy-five members – some were elected and others nominated, with thirteen seats reserved for southerners. Encouraged by the British, the dominant Umma party in the Sudanese assembly rejected strong Egyptian pressure for union. In 1951 the Egyptians unveiled a new constitution for a unified Egypt and Sudan, without consulting the Sudanese, which naturally irritated many Khartoum leaders. By 1952 the majority in the Legislative Assembly was pushing for independence.

  Enter a new player. The US government deployed its fresh status as a post-war superpower to persuade an exhausted and near-bankrupt Britain to resolve the ‘Sudan Question’ with a formula that would not antagonize the Egyptian Crown and government. Washington was regularly to intervene against British interests in the Middle East, arguing that the USA had not fought the Second World War to maintain the British Empire.

  The international debate on the Sudan Question was dramatically interrupted on 23 July 1952 when the Revolutionary Command Council overthrew King Faruk. The overthrow of the King shook up the Middle East, including Sudan. The revolution was forged by young Egyptian army officers, led by General Mohammed Naguib. He was half-Sudanese and had been educated in Sudan. General Naguib became Egyptian prime minister in September and changed the policy on Sudan. The leading Sudanese parties were consulted and encouraged to demand immediate selfgovernment from the British. Elections were held in Sudan in which the National Unionist Party (NUP), led by Ismael al-Azhari, won a majority of fifty-one seats in the ninety-seven-seat House of Representatives, with the Umma party trailing with twenty-two seats. The Southern Party won ten seats. In the new senate, the NUP did even better. The pattern of voting was strictly along sectarian lines, reflecting age-old disputes about Islam and politics. In the south this did not apply, but the NUP had taken three seats there, partly because of the lack of educated candidates, as well as the generous distribution of cash and hyperbolic but worthless promises. This was to set a template for future north-south relations.

  On the surface the NUP victory meant a popular vote for union with Egypt. In reality, however, it reflected the widespread desire for the British to quit as soon as possible, whatever the name of the party that could achieve that goal in the shortest time. Lingering hostility to Egypt was demonstrated in March 1953 during a state visit by General Naguib. Sayyid Abdel Rahman, who led the opposition to the NUP, organized over 50,000 rural Ansar to come to Khartoum. They tried to storm the Governor General’s palace. Ten policemen were killed including their British commander, who was hacked to death. Troops were called out and more demonstrators were killed. The British authorities persuaded Sayyid Rahman to order the Ansar to go home; the forthcoming ceremonial opening of parliament was cancelled and General Naguib quickly flew back to Cairo.

  The riots surrounding Naguib’s visit forced most Sudanese leaders to accept the need for independence. Naguib’s local origins prompted support from some Sudanese, but he was displaced in a coup, led by Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was far less popular in Khartoum, despite his own (brief) military service in the country. Nasser consolidated his position by ruthless suppression of the communists as well as his erstwhile allies, the Muslim Brotherhood, establishing a pattern of army-Brotherhood antagonism which was to fester for decades and erupt once more in the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011, and lead to mass killings and executions by the army in 2013/14.

  The revolutionary turmoil in Egypt in the early 1950s heralded the hasty imperial recessional in the region. At the start of 1954 British officials in Sudan were rapidly pensioned off with generous payments, which the Sudanese leadership accepted as much cheaper than an armed insurrection and more peaceful than the chaos in Egypt. Hundreds of civil service posts were Sudanized, but only a handful went to southern officials working in the south. The northerners now parroted the well-worn colonial argument about the lack of qualified southerners. This was true, but racist and religious bigotry underlined the northern domination of the Sudanization process. The future prime minister, Ismael al-Azhari, dismissed the ‘childish complaints’ of the southerners. Gregoria Denk Kir, a southern businessman, aptly summarized the bitterness felt in the south: ‘As it appears, it means our fellow Northerners want to colonize us for another hundred years.’3 The reluctant and meagre inclusion of southerners in the quick march to independence implied not only northern colonization, it was also a portent of decades of warfare.

  Northerners, alien in terms of religion and language, came south to run the ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’. Too late, southern political leaders started agitating for a federal system to protect their interests. In July 1955 a dissident southern MP was arbitrarily sentenced to a long prison term. His followers rebelled and troops had to be called in. At Nazara, a centre of the local textile industry, police killed eight protestors. Widespread revolt in the south appeared imminent and the army was the ultimate guarantor of security. Would the southern troops remain loyal to Khartoum?

  Rumours of northern retaliation spread throughout the south. The garrison of the Equatorial Corps, renamed the Southern Corps, based at Torit, was particularly agitated.
No. 2 Company was about to be posted to Khartoum in preparation for the independence celebrations, but word spread that on arrival they would be enslaved or massacred. The southern soldiers broke into the armoury on 18 August 1955 and used their weapons to kill northerners in the area – their officers, merchants and women and children. The rebellion spread like a bush fire to Juba, Yei and Mandi. Northern officials were killed indiscriminately. Northern administrators fled from Wau, leaving southern police in control. The British, with hardly any military forces remaining, kept out of the fray. Hundreds of Sudanese were killed in the south, most of them northerners. It took over two weeks for northern troops to be flown in to restore some order. Most of the mutineers fled into the bush, the first nucleus of a guerrilla army. A few surrendered, were tried and executed.

  The knee-jerk northern bitterness at the indiscriminate killings soon hardened into a concerted policy of military control in the south, rather than political reconciliation. To southerners the revolt in Torit on 18 August 1955 became D-Day of the southern Sudanese armed struggle. The small town of Torit became the popular focus of the southern cry for freedom. The last British troops, the 1st Battalion Royal Leicestershire Regiment, had left the country on 16 August 1955. In the British military vacuum, the minority of pro-Egyptian politicians in Khartoum debated whether they should ask for Cairo to intervene during the so-called ‘Southern Sudan Disturbances’. Such an option was anathema to nearly all members of the House of Representatives. On 19 December 1955 they voted unanimously to declare Sudan independent. On 1 January 1956, at a hastily organized ceremony, the flags of Egypt and Great Britain were lowered and the flag of the new Republic of Sudan – three horizontal stripes of red, white and black – was raised.

  On New Year’s Day 1956 the Sudanese took over political and military control (although a few British Army instructors and advisors would remain). Foreign rule was over. In order to maintain unity Sudan would now have to solve its southern problem on its own. Whether this was to be done peacefully or via war depended on the quality of the new rulers in Khartoum. Decolonization was starting to electrify the whole of the continent. So what would independence bring to one of the first African states to assert its freedom?

  Chapter 3

  Failed Democracy – Failed Coups (1956–1989)

  First years of independence

  Independent Sudan began with much optimism. The new government was dominated by the National Unionist Party, led by Prime Minister Ismael al-Azhari. Khartoum could now unify the country, not least by ending the conflict in the south, and economic reforms would bring prosperity to a Sudan that could be a beacon in the Arab world and a decolonizing Africa. A similar pattern emerged in many African and Middle Eastern states after their independence. Foreign oppressors had been driven out and, almost by definition, it was believed, the nascent nations could achieve their true potential. Sadly, the soaring rhetoric of freedom, democracy and financial development soon degenerated into military intervention and economic stagnation.

  Sudan faced two primary challenges: internal ones which required good governance, and external ones which demanded sound diplomacy. Revolutionary rule under Colonel Nasser in Cairo bolstered the position of the Egyptian army, and enhanced military authoritarianism throughout the Middle East, although Nasser did also flirt with multi-party-democracy, as well as with the communists and the Muslim Brotherhood. His initial obstacles involved the imperial overlord, Britain. Because of disputes with American funding for the planned Aswan Dam, part of Nasser’s retaliation was his nationalization of the formerly French company which operated the French-built Suez Canal. Cairo had waited until the last British troops had left the Canal Zone months before. London portrayed Nasser as another Hitler, and Paris was incensed at Egyptian succour of the Algerian insurgency against French rule. Anglo-French forces, in secret collusion with Israel, invaded the Canal Zone in October 1956. It was a military and political fiasco, especially when the Americans threatened a run on the pound if London didn’t stop. Britain was humiliated and Nasser was lauded as a hero in the Arab world. While proclaiming non-alignment, Egypt shifted towards the Eastern camp in the cold war, especially because of Nasser’s need for Soviet weapons. Sudan could not stand entirely aloof from the cold war tensions, not least because disputes with Cairo over the Nile dams’ costs were to play into domestic political tensions in Khartoum.

  Sadly, practically anything could play into Khartoum’s political tensions. Within six months the Azhari-led government collapsed because of parliamentary defections. Considering the Azhari team too secular, more conservative parties, the Umma and the new People’s Democratic Party, formed a government which tottered along for two years. It proved almost incapable of any governance because of sectarian clashes and petty personal squabbling. Adding to the misery, the price of the main export – cotton – tumbled. The country was left with massive stocks of unsold and then unsellable cotton, created by Sudan’s rigid pricing policy. The USA made tempting offers to ease the economic crisis and to boost development programmes. The Umma party was eager to accept Western aid, but others in the coalition believed that the US, frustrated by Nasser’s tilt to the Soviet bloc, wanted to isolate Sudan from Egypt and other Arab states.

  On the international front, Sudan tried to stay aloof from Nasser’s grandiose plans for Arab unity. In early 1958 Nasser’s advocacy of unity with Syria became reality – the United Arab Republic was formed. Yemen was also brought into the fold. Nationalism, however, was always going to transcend such a flimsy construction. In particular, the Syrian military grew disaffected. The Cairo-Damascus nexus was soon to be dissolved in a delicious scandal. In a gesture of reconciliation Nasser sent Abdel Hakim Amir, his closest friend, vice president and commander of the Egyptian army, to Damascus to settle the grievances. Though popular with the Syrian military, the handsome womanizing Amir was not a natural trouble-shooter. Syrian military intelligence, of course, tracked his every movement and soon realized that he was spending more time carousing with an Algerian singer than resolving the acute Syrian-Egyptian imbroglio. Finally, military intelligence officials roused Amir from his bed in the middle of the night and, in a deliberate act of malice and public ridicule, put both Amir and his paramour, in their night clothes, on a plane for Cairo. (It is not recorded whether Syrian intelligence was malicious enough to arrange for Amir’s wife, Berlenti – a beautiful actress famed for her seductive, and fiery, film roles – to meet them at Cairo airport.) A national uprising in Syria soon followed this public humiliation and most Syrians rejoiced at the end of what they dubbed the ‘Egyptian occupation’. Nasser’s intervention in Yemen – along with 70,000 troops – also ended badly. His foolish involvement in the civil war made Israel very happy, but it emptied the Egyptian treasury. Nasser later had to withdraw his troops in another humiliating retreat. Such debacles were bound to influence negatively Sudanese leaders, especially those who still nurtured notions of re-union with Egypt.

  The first coup

  As ever, Sudanese domestic politics were in turmoil. By November 1958 the new breed of politicians had failed. People looked to the army to unpick the domestic and international tangles. On the morning of 17 November 1958, hours before the new parliament was due to meet, the commander in chief, Major General Ibrahim Abboud, ordered his men to occupy the three central and contiguous towns of Khartoum, Khartoum North and the old Mahdist capital, Omdurman. Abboud abolished the trade unions and political parties and locked up government ministers under a state of emergency. Unlike Nasser, however, Abboud was not a political animal. He had a popular fatherly image with no apparent political ambitions, except to reflect the general anger with the squabbling and corrupt political class. The country needed to be governed efficiently, but the freshly minted Supreme Council of senior officers had no ideology and no plan. The Supreme Council did, however, reflect a degree of religious and tribal cohesion. The military rulers were mostly affiliated to the Khatmiyya sect and hailed largely from the riverin
e elite of the Shayqiyya and Ja’aliyyin tribal coalitions. The rank and file, however, were mostly from the peripheral marginalized tribes: the Nuba, Dinka, Fur and Baqqara.

  Despite their discipline and smart uniforms, the members of the Supreme Council were not immune to personal squabbling. Troops from the eastern region, whose commanders had not been given a seat in the council, marched on Khartoum in March 1959. They besieged the capital and surrounded the residence of General – now President–Abboud. The chief mutineers were appeased and Brigadier Abdel Rahim Shannan, in particular, was brought into the council. Nevertheless, the dissidents still felt they were being sidetracked. On 22 May Brigadier Shannan led another march on Khartoum. This time, the other council members had had enough of indiscipline. The eastern commanders were arrested and court-martialled for mutiny and sentenced to death; the dissident troops were sent back to barracks. The Supreme Council was unsure of its supremacy or popularity in the country, and it was even more uneasy about its backing in the professional officer corps. In November, Colonel Ali Hamid led a rebellion of radical junior officers, supported by an infantry battalion in Omdurman. This was different. Throughout Sudan’s history the peripheral regions had rebelled – sometimes almost in a ceremonial fashion. Appeasement or punishment might be expected. Mutiny in the centre was much more dangerous. The revolt of junior officers was brutally suppressed: they were summarily tried and hanged in public. That was not customary in the Sudanese tradition. On the contrary, Sudanese have always prided themselves on bloodless revolutions. It has become a popular myth, extolled with much gusto, and historical inaccuracy, even today.