Sudan and United States relations: Lies and deception

By Ahmed Elzobier

March 26, 2013 – Diplomatic relations between United States and the Sudan were as normal as could be following Sudan’s independence in 1956, the only time they were severed was in 1967 – as result of the war between Egypt and Israel. Relations were restored in 1972 but have steadily deteriorated since June 1989. So it’s accurate to say that U.S. and Sudan relations in the last twenty years have been through turbulent times, starting with a premature “sigh of relief” and continuing on a rollercoaster trajectory. Sudan was included in the U.S. list of states sponsoring terrorism in 1993, resulting in the suspension of U.S. embassy operations in Khartoum in 1996. In October 1997, the U.S. imposed comprehensive economic, trade, and financial sanctions against Sudan. In August 1998, in the wake of the East Africa embassy bombings, the U.S. launched cruise missile strikes against Khartoum. Relations were partially restored in 2002. Following 9/11, the new administration in Washington followed what they called a “behaviour changing” mode of diplomacy, primarily to end the war in South Sudan. In 2001, the Secretary of State Colin Powell said about the war in Sudan, “There is perhaps no greater tragedy on the face of the earth today.” Following the crisis in Darfur, President Bush imposed new economic sanctions on Sudan in May 2007.

But how did we get to this point?

In reaction to the military coup of 30th June 1989 in Sudan, Herman Cohen, who served as the United States Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs from 1989 to 1993, wrote in his book, Intervening in Africa: Superpower Peacemaking in a Troubled Continent, that “An audible sigh of relief rippled through the Africanist community in the US government, welcoming the departure of Sadiq’s hopelessly inept regime.” The author’s statement revealed a very interesting take on democracy by the U.S. administration, taking their cue from their trusted allies north of the border. The Egyptian head of intelligence, General Amin Namr, assured the Americans that the political change in Sudan “would be good for Sudan, for Egypt, and for Western interests”, and they believed him. Less than six weeks later, following the dramatic political change in Sudan, Herman Cohen arrived in Khartoum and met with Bashir, on 6 August 1989. He reflected on that meeting and wrote: “My meeting with Bashir was friendly. As he sat manipulating his Muslim prayer beads, he told me (in Arabic through an interpreter) that the RCC’s [The Revolutionary Command Council] highest priority was to end the war in the south.” Bashir told him that the regime “did not intend to force any Sudanese to accept Islam against their will,” that he would restore democracy, and he would allow humanitarian assistance through Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS). “In short, he told me everything I wanted to hear,” added Cohen. He also noted that Bashir was surrounded by advisors who obviously tell him what to say. The “highest priority to end the war” in the south dragged on for another sixteen years, and visited untold tragedy on millions of people in Sudan.

During his visit, however, Cohen also met some Sudanese who warned him that the new regime was “bad news” they were “extremists determined to Islamicize and Arabize the south and impose a theocratic regime on Sudan”. Cohen discussed the issue with American Embassy staff in Khartoum and told them: “Let’s assume the new regime is fundamentalist. Does that automatically mean we could not work with it to achieve our two main objectives – implementation of OLS and the beginning of a peace process in the south?” They responded that we “should not assume a fundamentalist regime would automatically be uncooperative.” They were proven to be wrong; the coup main objective is to abort the peace process.
Despite the warnings Cohen received in Khartoum, and the growing reports of human rights violations, Cohen insisted on pursuing what he had described as the policy of “constructive engagement” and to “maintain a useful dialogue.” He also argued that we had faced a “classic dilemma of US policy”, the balance between U.S. interests and human rights violations. Then he asked, “Can we deal with a foreign leader on issues of interest to the United States while ignoring the nasty things that same leader is perpetrating in his own country?” But nonetheless the U.S. followed their interests and the usual pragmatism, relations were so good that even president Bashir made the following statement in early 1990, “The American administration is now convinced that the present regime in Sudan is better than its predecessor.”

However, Iraq’s August 1990 conquest of Kuwait was the catalyst that brought Sudan’s radical Islamism fully to the surface for the first time. Peter Woodward, in his book U. S. Foreign Policy and the Horn of Africa, noted that: “If Sudan’s Islamist regime had been content to confine its activities to the domestic scene it would have been disliked by the US but not seen as a significant danger.” For some unknown reasons Hassan Al Turabi, the leader of the National Islamic Front at the time, saw the collapse of the Soviet Union as an opportunity to create a counter-narrative to the United States’ dominance. A chance to replace communism by Islamism. Apparently he was serious and no sense of irony was involved, the unreasonable is reasonable in Turabis’s Orwellian world. The ideological centre of such a replacement would be Sudan, headed by none other than Turabi himself. Woodward observed: “For the first time since independence in 1956, Sudan had sought to set itself up as a major actor in regional and international politics.” Following the Iraq war, Sudan, isolated for its unrealistic position on the invasion of Kuwait, initiated in April 1991 the Popular Arab and Islamic Conference (PAIC), headed by Hassan Al Turabi. To achieve his dreams of an “Islamic State” he opened up the country to a variety of groups, admitting them without visas, and distributing Sudanese diplomatic passports, among them: Hizbollah, Islamic Jihad from Egypt, Hamas, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) from Algeria, al-Nahda from Tunisia, and groups from Eritrea, Yemen, Libya and Saudi Arabia. There were also freelance groups and individuals such as Abu Nidal and Ilich Ramirez Sanchez (Carlos the Jackal), and of course Osama Bin Laden.
Meanwhile, despite the disingenuous anti-colonialism/imperialism rhetoric that emanated from Khartoum, there lurked the regime’s mini-imperial ambition or “Civilising Project” in Sudan and the region. The mini-imperial project revealed itself when Dr Ghazi Atabani, the advisor to the Sudanese president, shocked the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) at an Eastern Africa meeting in 1994 when he told the bewildered African leaders that their [Sudan’s] Islamization mission will not just stop in Sudan but will reach into the heart of Africa. The late historian William Appleman Williams described such a political position as: “Imperial anti-colonialism”. Such a lack of realism from the new rulers of Sudan stemmed from their, to put it mildly, unrealistic regional ambition at the time, which presented a real threat to U.S. interests in both the Middle East and Africa. To enter the list of states sponsoring terrorism was an academic question after that, despite the repeated warnings that Khartoum received and ignored. In reaction, Khartoum argued that the problem of Sudan was not the Sudanese but the United States, for “leading a world campaign against Islam” and spreading anti-Sudanese propaganda.

Former United States ambassador Donald Patterson’s tenure in Sudan, 1992¬–1995, is an important chapter in American relations with Sudan. In his book Inside Sudan: Political Islam, Conflict, And Catastrophe, Patterson noted seven factors behind the tense relationship: 1) U.S. suspended all forms of aid to Sudan, except humanitarian assistance, based on the Act of Congress in case of overthrow of a democratically elected government; 2) excessive human rights violations; 3) the absolute control the government exerted over the political process and lack of freedom of expression and of assembly; 4) the conduct of the war in the South and the killing of civilians; 5) the inhumane treatment of IDPs in Khartoum; 6) siding with Iraq during the Gulf War and the extreme rhetoric which accompanied that position and ; 7) giving refuge and help to terrorist organisations.
Peterson noted that: “No single one of these factors by itself would account for the full array of steps Washington took to demonstrate its disapproval of the Sudanese government’s behaviour. But taken together, that government’s words and deeds depicted, in Washington’s opinion, an exceptionally bad actor on the international scene.” It is interesting to note that most of the factors mentioned by Peterson behind the tense relations were domestic, only two, the terrorist connections and siding with Iraq, have some external dimensions. The United States, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, desperately tried to recalibrate its foreign policy. In the past its foreign policy tended to ignore human rights abuses in favour of cold war alliances. But Sudan presented a new challenge, a weak state assuming an unrealistic regional role, perceived in Washington as “bad”, as well as Sudan’s conduct of its domestic politics. The former in particular outraged and mobilised a passionate constituency in Western countries, which politicians cannot ignore.

The U.S. used an endless list of special envoys, what the State Department calls “A Flexible Tool”, to tackle the Sudan’s problem. According to the United States Institute of Peace the use of special envoys “permitted more effort, focus and attention to be placed on a given issue than would have been the case had the position not existed.” As Sudan’s internal difficulties continued, the list of special envoys was also extended: Melissa Wells (1994), Harry Johnson (1999), John Danforth (2001), Andrew Natsios (2006), Richard Williamson (2007), Scott Gration (2008), and Princeton Lyman (2012). When Washington appointed their first special envoy to Sudan in 1994, some government officials in Khartoum were delighted that now they had direct access to the White house, but as usual they were deluded. For the last 20 years the constant line from Washington has never changed and it has centred around four issues: human rights, humanitarian access, war and peace (Implementation of the Peace agreement of 2005) and terrorism. The UN has also sent a long list of Special Rapporteurs for Human Rights since 1993.
Domestically such tragedies, for different reasons, always mobilise influential groups in the U.S. and other western countries, where they put political pressure on politicians to act. Historically, at least in the last 20 years, U.S. policy towards Sudan was largely influenced by a diverse array of groups with opinions and demands that were sometimes impossible to capture in a single theme. These ranged from regime change and tougher economic sanctions, to some form of engagement to change behaviour (which is the current official line of the U.S. administration). These groups includes, among others, Christian and anti-slavery groups, human rights organisations, Congressional Black Caucus members, and a number of influential think tanks in Washington. They all urged the U.S. administration to do something about Sudan. Now a newly formed body named “Act for Sudan”, an alliance of some 66 organisations or more, including American citizen activists and Sudanese U.S. residents, has stated that its objective is to “advocate for an end to genocide and mass atrocities in Sudan,” they insist in continuing the legacy of previous pressure groups.

Meanwhile in Khartoum, following the elections of Obama, Ghazi Al Atabani, the last remaining intellectual among the ruling elites in Khartoum, wrote an article published in Al sharq Al Awsat newspaper on 30 April 2009. Writing about Obama’s new policy toward Sudan, he says: “If this extrapolation is correct, it contributes to strengthening the belief that the U.S. president, in terms of the will and the desire, at least, will exert a serious change. But, of course, it is not so simple, because the American political system and its internal mechanisms are complex.” He even bizarrely offered an equation to describe a successful approach to Sudanese-American relations “A”: A = X + Y + Z. Where “X” is the political will of America, “Y” is the political will of the Sudanese, and “Z” is the process by which a set of procedures on both sides could be taken. However, in 2011, addressing an SOAS event in London, Al Atabani seemed to have lost hope in any changes in the relationship. He stressed that: “On the international scene, there are no signs of an imminent rapprochement with the United States, primarily because of a lack of will on its part and a tendency to renege on promises and commitments it has repeatedly made in the past.” Similarly, in Khartoum on 2 October 2012, a think tank named, Rakaiz Al Marfa Centre for Research and Studies, in Khartoum organised a symposium on the future of Sudanese–US relations. The participants agreed unanimously that the United States is disinterested in Sudan, as it has more important issues in the region, such as Iran and the countries of the Arab Spring. They agreed that U.S. foreign policies are based on self-interest and preoccupied with security. They also ruled out any change in U.S. policy towards Sudan. Many indulged in hopeless conspiracy theories.

Now, in the United States one of the most significant current discussions is how to formulate a coherent policy towards Sudan – perceived as a nuisance with endless internal problems, extending from Darfur in the west to the Blue Nile in the east and conflict with its neighbour in the South, and with leadership prone to unpredictable behaviour. Although, Sudan was overwhelmingly supported, regionally and internationally, to end the 22 years of war in 2005, but following the secession of South Sudan in 2011, Sudan’s leadership proved incapable of resolving conflicts either peacefully or militarily. Such incompetence in the persecution of both war and peace has resulted in the prolonging of the wars and a tragic humanitarian crisis. Finally, foreign policy recalibration had led the U.S. to miscalculate the nature of the regime in 1989. Internal factors in Sudan remain the main issue in the nature of relations between Sudan and the U.S. The role of pressure groups within the United States should not be underestimated; they are influential in shaping many aspects of the relationship between the two countries. In short, the solution, is to simplify Al Atabani’s equation, to A = Y, where “Y” is the political will of the Sudanese to solve their own problems peacefully. Because the regime has proved a failure in war, why not try peace for God’s sake? – develop a good relationship with your own people first, feed them second, clothe them third, and protect them from harm fourth. In addition to huge dose of modesty, the rest will be easy.

The author is a Sudan Tribune journalist he can be reached at [email protected]

SOURCES:

Books:
Burr, Millard; Collins, Robert (2003). Revolutionary Sudan : Hasan Al-Turabi and the Islamist State, 1989-2000. Leiden, NLD: Brill Academic Publishers, 2003.
Cohen, Herman J. (2000). Intervening in Africa: Superpower Peacemaking in a Troubled Continent.
Gordonsville, VA, USA: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.
Kh?lid, M. (2003). War and peace in Sudan : A tale of two countries / Mansour khalid London ; New York : Kegan Paul ; New York : Distributed by Columbia University Press, 2003.
Peterson, D. (2003). Inside Sudan : Political Islam, conflict, and catastrophe / Don Peterson Boulder, Colo. : Westview Press, 2003; Pbk. ed
Woodward, P., (2006). U. S. Foreign Policy and the Horn of Africa. Abingdon, Oxon, GBR: Ashgate Publishing Group, 2006.
Websites:
Act for Sudan: http://actforsudan.org/
Ghazi Al Atabani. (2009, April 30). Obama’s new policy toward Sudan: Chances of success. Asharq Alawsat newspaper: Retrieved from http://aspx.aawsat.com/leader.aspx?article=517256&issueno=11111
Rakaiz Al Marfa Centre for Research and Studies: Symposium on the future of Sudanese–US relations retrieved from :http://rakaiz.org/index.php/2012-11-05-22-44-02/523-2012-10-03-08-33-44
Post-Secession Sudan: Challenges And Opportunities – By Dr Ghazi Al Atabani (17 December 2011): http://africanarguments.org/2012/01/04/post-secession-sudan-challenges-and-opportunities-by-dr-ghazi-salahuddin-atabani/
U.S. department of State: http://www.state.gov/p/af/ci/su/index.htm
U.S. Special Envoys: A Flexible Tool: retrieved from http://www.usip.org/publications/us-special-envoys-flexible-tool