PROFILE: Turabi, Islamist veteran and friend-turned-foe of Sudan’s president

KHARTOUM, March 31 (AFP) — Islamist veteran Hassan al-Turabi, detained on Wednesday five months after being freed from house arrest, is a key opponent of a Sudanese regime in which he was once seen as the power behind the throne.

Sudanese authorities arrested the 72-year-old Turabi, chief of the Popular Congress (PC), at his Khartoum home, following reports of a coup plot, his family said.

A former leading light of President Omar al-Beshir’s regime, Turabi had been freed in October 2003 after spending nearly three years under house arrest.

A number of Sudanese army officers were arrested Sunday on suspicion of involvement in a military coup attempt apparently related to an ongoing conflict in west Sudan’s Darfur region.

They were thought to belong to the PC but Turabi’s son Issameddin, who put their number at more than 27, denied it, saying the coup was invented to provide a pretext to crack down on the party and purge the army of Darfuris and other westerners.

Turabi himself has linked the crackdown to government charges that his party supported the year-old rebel movement among Darfur’s indigenous non-Arab minorities, an allegation he vigorously denied.

Last month, Turabi criticised government policy in Darfur and said the conflict should not have been separated from the efforts to end the long-running civil war in south Sudan.

Turabi’s release last October was part of what the government called reconciliatory efforts to “prepare for the coming peace era” as Khartoum nears a settlement with southern rebels.

An Islamist ideologue with influence beyond Sudan’s borders, Turabi backed the 1989 military coup which brought Beshir to power but was removed from key political posts after losing a power struggle with the president in 1999.

He was arrested along with many of his followers in February 2001 after the PC signed a memorandum of understanding in Switzerland with southern rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA).

Though born in 1932 in the northeastern town of Kassala near the Eritrean border, Turabi and his family originate from a village around 70 kilometers (32 miles) south of Khartoum.

The son of moderately religious parents, Turabi learned his first Koranic lessons from his grandfather, the head of a Sufi movement, a minority Muslim mystical sect.

A law graduate from the University of Khartoum, Turabi later earned a master’s degree from a British university in 1957 and then a doctorate from Paris’s Sorbonne University in 1964.

He speaks German, English and French fluently in addition to Arabic, which helped him gain access to the foreign news media over which he often announced calls for an international Islamic revolution.

Wooed by the Islamists after returning from studies abroad, he became secretary of the Charter Front (Gabhat al-Mithak), a forerunner of the Muslim Brotherhood in Sudan.

Arrested three times in the 1970s under the government of Gaafar Nimeiri, he nevertheless became state prosecutor in 1979.

He approved Nimeiri’s decision to impose Sharia, or Islamic law, in 1983, which sparked a rebellion in the mainly animist and Christian south which has endured to this day.

After the Nimeiri dictatorship fell in 1986, he formed the National Islamic Front and ran unsuccessfully in presidential elections.

In 1989, he rallied behind Beshir, an obscure military man who had just been promoted to general, to overthrow the democractically-elected government of his brother-in-law, Sadeq al-Mahdi, head of the Umma Party.

As senior statesman, he became what many considered to be the real power behind the throne of a country which he directed towards rigorous Islamic practices, particularly affecting the rights of women.

His moves also earned Sudan a place on the international blacklist, from the United States to Egypt, which accused Khartoum of harboring Islamic “terrorism.”

Turabi also left his mark on Sudan’s foreign policy, which moved toward an Arab and Islamist nationalism which called for liberation from “American-Zionist hegemony.”