INTERVIEW-Wife of Sudan Islamist says husband a scapegoat

By Nima Elbagir

KHARTOUM, June 12 (Reuters) – The wife of a jailed Sudanese Islamist leader said on Saturday the government wanted to pin its problems in war-torn west Sudan on her husband and said his detention had boosted his profile rather than sidelining him.

Hassan al-Turabi, a former ally of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, was detained at the end of March when the authorities accused him of inciting tribal tensions and said his party had funded rebels in the western Darfur area.

Turabi had previously criticised the government for neglecting the people of Darfur, where rebels took up arms in February 2003, but said he was not involved in the uprising.

“The west of Sudan is a source of trouble for them (the government) right now, so they want to pin it on the sheikh (Turabi) and rid themselves of two nuisances in one go,” Wisal al-Mahdi, Turabi’s wife, told Reuters in an interview.

“The funny thing is, he was planning on calling a general conference of the party this October to step down from his duties as secretary general. He was planning on stepping out of the public arena but now they have pushed him back into the limelight,” she said.

In Darfur, Arab militias are driving out black Africans in what U.N. officials have called a scorched-earth campaign of ethnic cleansing.

The U.N. has called the situation in Darfur the worst humanitarian crisis in the world and estimates one million people have been displaced in the fighting, with more than 158,000 refugees in Chad.

Mahdi said she visited her husband, who leads the opposition Popular Congress party, about one week ago and he was fine.

Turabi was an ally of Bashir, who set up an Islamist government after seizing power in a 1989 military coup. But Turabi was arrested in 2001 after signing a controversial deal with the southern rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM). He was released in October 2003.

Mahdi, who is also a Popular Congress official, said she hoped a final peace deal which the government is close to reaching with the SPLM could ease restrictions on her husband’s party and lead to his release.

Mahdi said the family had requested that Turabi be transferred to house arrest in a seperate wing of their home in an affluent suburb of the Sudanese capital, but had yet to receive a response from the government.