Man who harboured bin Laden is lodestar for terrorists
By David Blair
Jan 30, 2006 (KHARTOUM) — If Osama bin Laden and the radical Islamist movement embodied by Hamas possess a pantheon of heroes, a Sudanese intellectual with a British education will be among them.
Hassan al-Turabi built Africa’s first Islamist state when he dominated Sudan throughout the 1990s.
In 50 years at the forefront of radical Islam he harboured bin Laden in Khartoum and inspired a generation of followers across the Muslim world.
When fundamentalism was the preserve of a handful of intellectuals in Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Mr Turabi helped found Sudan’s wing of the Brotherhood in the 1950s.
Under his sway, Khartoum became an Islamist hub and he believes what he started back then is now bearing fruit worldwide.
“There is now an awakening all over the Muslim world, from Indonesia to Sudan and even in the northern hemisphere,” he said.
“The Muslims in London or Paris, once they were just working to earn a living, now their identity is reawakened.”
His period of greatest power came in the decade following the military coup of 1989. As leader of the ruling National Islamic Front and speaker of parliament Mr Turabi was the brains behind President Omar al-Bashir’s regime.
His great mission was to model Sudan on 7th century Medina under the Prophet’s rule.
Mr Turabi, now 74, ignored the fact that Sudan’s one million square miles span the divide between the Arab world and black Africa, embracing 40 million people, at least one quarter of whom are not Muslims.
He stands accused now of inflaming the long-running civil war with the black African south which claimed at least two million lives.
Mr Turabi arguably did more than anyone else to restart that war in 1983. As attorney-general, he drafted the notorious September Laws, imposing Sharia law across the country.
Civil war erupted after 11 years of peace. When an elected Khartoum government decided to repeal the September Laws in 1989, Mr Turabi inspired the military coup and helped install Mr Bashir. Sharia law stayed, although the South was exempted in 1991.
In the 10 years after the coup Mr Turabi turned Sudan into a haven for anti-western radicals. Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the nihilist terrorist often romanticised as Carlos the Jackal, lived in Khartoum for four years until 1994.
After being expelled from Saudi Arabia, bin Laden lived in Sudan from 1991 until 1996. Mr Turabi said he was only a businessman.
“Bin Laden lived very close by here,” he said. “He came as a contractor. He built a road and then he became interested in agriculture.
“The British used to come and see me and the Americans. All they talked about was bin Laden.”
“I said no-one knows him here in Sudan. There are more dangerous Saudi Arabians who are in England, claiming asylum.
“I told them, ‘Let him stay here’, but they put pressure on the government to kick him out. The poor man,
“I saw him once or twice. He visited me here and then I met him once at his home. He’s a very simple man.”
Mr Turabi insists that bin Laden was “not dangerous” and acquits him of the September 2001 attacks.
“It’s just impossible,” he said. “If you had known him personally, you would dismiss it right away.”
Al-Qa’eda is a figment of western imagination, he added.
“A network called al-Qa’eda? The word itself is foolish Arabic. Al-Qa’eda means a base. Building companies use this word when they mean a base for a house.”
Mr Turabi took a masters in law from King’s College London and a doctorate from the Sorbonne in Paris. Multilingual and jocular, he can find pseudo-intellectual arguments to defend almost anything.
For years, his regime sponsored terrorism in Africa. Uganda backed the rebels in southern Sudan, so Khartoum retaliated by arming the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a fanatical cult ravaging northern Uganda. It used Sudan’s weapons to abduct at least 20,000 children.
Asked whether he had approved of arming them, Mr Turabi said: “It’s natural. In all wars people do the same. If there’s a state of war between you and the other side, then you arm the other side’s opposition don’t you?”
Mr Turabi acquitted the LRA of murdering child captives. “They don’t kill them by the way, they don’t murder,” he said.
In fact, reams of first-hand evidence prove the LRA kills children.
Mr Turabi eventually fell foul of the regime’s pragmatists, losing a power struggle with Mr Bashir in 1999. He was sacked and spent the next six years in jail or under house arrest, before being freed last June.
He led a regime that jailed critics, staged sham elections and prosecuted a brutal war. But today he claims to be devoted to freedom
(daily Telegraph)