INTERVIEW: Sudan Islamist leader doubts Qaeda’s global reach
By Jonathan Wright
KHARTOUM, March 18 (Reuters) – Islamist leader Hassan al-Turabi, who knew Osama bin Laden and once organised an international Islamist alliance, said in an interview on Thursday that Washington was exaggerating the reach of al Qaeda to frighten people.
“I don’t think he (bin Laden) has a worldwide network of Qaeda. The Americans are looking for ghosts. Whenever they are fighting or they are hit (they say) ‘Ah, Qaeda is there’,” Turabi told Reuters in his Khartoum home, where he has lived quietly since his release from jail last October.
“The word Qaeda has become just like in the old days when you try to frighten the children. There is a ghost they are fighting,” he added.
The United States has blamed al Qaeda for the attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001 and for a string of operations since then, including suicide attacks in Iraq and the bombings which killed 201 people on Madrid commuter trains last week.
Turabi knew bin Laden when the Saudi exile lived in the Sudanese capital in the early 1990s, and Sudanese Islamists say bin Laden saw Turabi as a spiritual mentor, despite ideological differences between them.
“I understand whatever he is doing,” said Turabi, but added that he and bin Laden were not on the same wavelength because of their different backgrounds.
The Sudanese government expelled bin Laden under U.S. pressure and closed down Turabi’s Popular Islamic Conference Organisation, which hosted regular gatherings of militant Islamist groups in Khartoum, including organisations such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which Washington calls terrorists.
Washington saw Turabi as an intellectual leader of the international Islamist movement opposed to U.S. interests and cited his organisation’s activities when it put Sudan on its list of “state sponsors of terrorism”.
But three years in jail appear to have mellowed Turabi, who said the Bush administration was advocating democracy in the Arab world in the genuine belief that autocratic government in the region gives rise to extremism.
Most Arab intellectuals say they are sceptical about Bush’s campaign for democracy, seeing it as a retroactive justification for the invasion of Iraq a year ago or as a distraction from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“Before, they preferred an autocracy. But now they realise that there is an upsurging spirit in Saudi Arabia and Egypt and every country and if you suppress them too much then you develop a spirit of extremism. So they are opening up a little bit now. They think democracy is better,” Turabi said.
But he added “They are campaigning also for oil and this confuses their thought.”
Turabi declined to endorse the concept of a U.S. campaign against Islam itself and attributed U.S. policy to ignorance rather than malice.
He recalled that when he went to Washington in an official delegation in the early 1980s, U.S. President Ronald Reagan was under the impression that Sudan was in Latin America.
“They (the Americans) don’t know much about issues. They are learning but not fast enough,” he added.
The Sudanese government, which remains broadly Islamist despite the rift with Turabi, has restricted the politician’s activities but Turabi said he keeps in touch with like-minded people around the world by using other people’s telephones.
He has acted as informal political adviser to the Islamic Party of Iraq, part of the U.S.-appointed Governing Council.
A delegation from the Iraqi party, which represents Sunni orthodoxy in what the United States calls the Sunni triangle, wanted his advice on how to deal with the Kurds and the Shi’ites and on drafting the recently approved interim constitution.
Turabi said the exaggeration of al Qaeda’s reach was part of a pattern of using Arabic words to instil a fear of the alien among Westerners.
“Even the word jihad, they don’t translate it into English as ‘struggle’. Because it’s foreign, it frightens everybody. It’s alien. Anything that refers to God, they call it Allah, as though Allah is a foreign god. But it is just God,” he said.