Tyrants: The World's Worst Dictators

(George Mulala/Reuters/Corbis)

1.

OMAR AL-BASHIR—SUDAN

THE NATION—Sudan, by size, is the largest nation in Africa and the tenth-largest nation in the world. It shares borders with nine different nations; only China, Russia, and Brazil have more neighbors than Sudan. Since achieving independence from the British in 1956, the nation has experienced only ten years of peace. The rest of the time it has been plagued by a series of overlapping civil wars. Since 1983, an estimated two million Sudanese have died of war-related causes, while five million have been forced from their homes. Since 1993, Sudan has been the world’s leading debtor to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Sudan’s population of about 38 million is deeply divided ethnically and religiously. Although 52 percent of the population is black, the nation has always been ruled by the minority, who are Arabs. Seventy percent of Sudanese are Sunni Muslims, 25 percent follow traditional religions—referred to as animism or primitive religion by Westerners—and 5 percent are Christians, mostly Catholic. A census taken at the time of independence identified 50 ethnic groups, 570 distinct peoples, and the use of 114 languages, although more than half the population speaks Arabic.

SLAVERY—In recent years, the media have devoted a good deal of attention to the killings in Darfur in western Sudan. One of the most disturbing aspects of this tragedy is that the exploitation of black people by Arabs in the Sudan has been going on for more than 1,400 years. The word Sudani in Arabic means black. This term, along with the words Nuba and Nubia, which relate to one of the areas in southern Sudan populated by black Africans, have all entered colloquial Arabic with the meaning of slave.

Christian missionaries arrived in the region in the 6th century from Constantinople and Islamic missionaries in the seventh century. As early as 652 a treaty was signed in which Muslim Egypt would provide goods to Christian Nubia in exchange for Nubian slaves. Slave raids in southern Sudan continued almost without a break for the next 1,300 years, no matter who ruled the region—Egyptians, Turks, or local sultans. Muhammad Ali, the Albanian-born ruler of Egypt, invaded Sudan in 1821, leading to sixty years of Turco-Egyptian rule. During this period, which saw the introduction of domestic slavery and the development of slave soldiers, an average of 30,000 southerners a year were seized in slave raids.

Muhammad Ali also founded the city of Khartoum at the confluence of the White Nile and the Blue Nile. In 1885, the forces of Mohammad Ahmed al-Mahdi (Mohammad the Messiah) captured Khartoum and overthrew the Turco-Egyptian regime. Al-Mahdi died the same year and was replaced by Abdullahi ibn Muhammad, known as the Khalifa. The Mahdists expanded the practice of slavery, driving millions from their homes. They also set an unfortunate precedent by demanding that citizens take a personal, religious oath of loyalty to Mahdi and the Khalifa and condemning nonfollowers, even fellow Muslims, as unbelievers. When British and Egyptian troops invaded Sudan, these rejected Muslims were glad to help overthrow the Mahdists.

The Anglo-Egyptian forces, led by General Horatio Herbert Kitchener, defeated the Mahdist army at the Battle of Omdurman on September 2, 1898, and the Sudan became a possession of the king of England. The British abolished slavery, outraging the Arabs in northern Sudan, who considered the practice not a question of human rights, but a cultural tradition that was being disrupted by foreign invaders. The British also halted the spread of Islam to new areas and assigned separate zones to Catholic and Protestant missionaries, most of whom arrived from Austria, Italy, and the United States. The Americans distinguished themselves by their obsession with clothing the natives.

The Mahdists had never established control over southern Sudan, and it took the British a long time to deal with it themselves. As part of their pacification campaign, the British-led army occasionally burned down villages in the south, just as the Egyptians and Mahdists had done, and they were even known to seize cattle just to prove they had the power to do so. In 1930, the British declared a Southern Policy that stated that the region was African rather than Arab, but because there were few hereditary rulers in the south, it remained difficult for the British to establish consistent authority. In the north, meanwhile, tensions developed between the British and their junior partners, the Egyptians. In the 1920s, the British expelled Egyptian soldiers and administrators and, to counter the growing influence of Egypt in Sudan, they brought back the posthumously born son of the anti-Egyptian Mahdi. The grand qadi (judge) of the religious courts was always an Egyptian, but the British ended this monopoly in 1947. After World War II, the British came up with a novel tactic for stemming the threat of Egyptian power in Sudan: they proposed that the Sudan be granted independence, even though few Sudanese themselves had demanded it. When formal negotiations for independence began in 1952, Egypt was included, but the black Sudanese in the south were not.

Sudan’s first election, held in 1953, was generally fair, although women were not allowed to vote. (Women’s suffrage finally occurred in 1967.) The National Unionist Party, which advocated political union with Egypt, emerged as the largest single party, but it failed to gain a majority of the votes, and a coalition of anti-unionist parties turned union into a dead issue. The new, pre-independence government also showed no interest in sharing power with the black Sudanese and appointed northerners to all leadership positions in the south. This continuation of the Arab view that the southern tribes were not fit to be partners led to a shocking incident in the summer of 1955. When the northern government ordered southern soldiers in the state of Equatoria to transfer north, they refused. In what became known as the Torit Mutiny, the soldiers went on a rampage against the administrators from the north, killing 450 people, including women and children. The northern authorities were outraged, but not enough to ask themselves what could be done to mitigate southern anger.

Great Britain practically forced Sudan to declare independence on January 1, 1956, before a constitution had been written and before the achievement of anything that could be even remotely considered a national consensus. The southern Sudanese were understandably wary of the northerners’ intentions toward them. Southern leaders pushed for a federal system that would allow them some regional control, but the northerners took the position that giving the south any power at all would lead eventually to secession or that it would, at the very least, threaten the master–servant relationship that they considered part of their traditional culture.

Less than two months after independence, an incident took place that would serve as an awful harbinger of the violence that has cursed Sudan ever since. Police in Kosti locked 281 striking tenant farmers in a room. By morning, 192 of them were dead.

The first post-independence election, in 1958, exposed Sudan’s deep divisions, as the ruling alliance fractured and the southerners established their own party. A nationwide strike, led by labor unions, the tenant farmers’ union, students, and the Communist Party, brought the country to a standstill. On November 17, 1958, the military, led by General Ibrahim Abbud, seized power and declared a state of emergency. This came as a relief to both the Western powers and the USSR, who found a democratic Sudan difficult to deal with. The new government set out to Arabize and Islamicize the south, using Arab traders and Muslim missionaries as a vanguard and then sending in the army to burn villages and to arrest and torture civilians. They also ordered that the day of Sabbath be changed from Sunday to Friday.

THE FIRST CIVIL WAR—In 1962, southern Sudanese living in exile, including students and ex-mutineers, formed the Sudan African Nationalist Union (SANU), which eventually included a guerrilla wing known as Anyanya, which is a type of poison. SANU appealed to the West for support, but the Europeans and Americans were not interested. SANU also received little help from fellow Africans because the Organization of African Unity had pledged to retain all colonial boundaries and SANU’S call for self-determination was judged counter to this pledge. Anyanya managed to acquire weapons by hijacking Sudanese government convoys that were transporting arms to pro-Arab rebels in the Congo. Fighting between the southern rebel forces and Sudanese government forces began slowly. The first major rebel attacks started in September 1963. Both sides were ruthless in their tactics. However, along the way, Anyanya discovered the Maoist strategy that guerrillas can survive by befriending the locals and becoming fish in a sea of people.

Meanwhile, back in Khartoum, things were not going well for General Abboud, who was not the most competent of leaders. Student protests, street demonstrations, and a general strike finally led to a popular uprising that overthrew Abboud in October 1964. A transitional government was formed by Communists and unions of tenants, workers, and farmers, which allowed women to obtain some political rights. Six months later an election was held, but only in the north. The newly elected government made clear its intentions in the south by approving the first large-scale massacres of civilians. When war broke out between Israel and its Arab neighbors, Sudan supported the Arabs, broke relations with the United States, and turned to the Soviet Union, which led to a drastic decline in foreign aid. As the war in the south grew to eat up one-third of the national budget, Sudan’s foreign debt doubled between 1964 and 1969, putting great pressure on the northern poor.

Another election was held in 1968, but few in the south were able to vote. By this time the rebel movement had grown large enough to develop bickering factions. They did find it easier to acquire weapons and training because enemies of the Sudanese government, such as Israel, Ethiopia, and Uganda, were happy to supply the rebels.

In March 1972, the government and the rebels signed a settlement, the Addis Ababa Agreement, that ended the civil war. This was the first negotiated settlement in postcolonial Africa, but eventually the southerners would come to regret it and consider it a failure. The agreement provided for the gradual absorption of the Anyanya guerrillas into the national army, but northern troops did not leave the south and many guerrillas chose to go into exile in Ethiopia. Economically and politically, the promises of the Addis Ababa Agreement would turn out to be illusory.

NIMEIRI AND THE INTERLUDE OF PEACE—On May 24, 1969, Colonel Jaafar Nimeiri overthrew the elected government of Sudan by bringing together the military and the Communist and Socialist parties. Nimeiri would prove to be a completely self-serving politician who would make or break an alliance with any group, so long as it helped him stay in power. For example, by 1970 he had booted out of office all of the Communist ministers who had helped him with his coup d’état. Nimeiri civilianized himself by staging a phony election in September 1971, in which he won 99 percent of the votes. Not surprisingly, the traditional political parties turned against him, so he countered their potential strength by reaching out to the southern rebels and negotiating the Addis Ababa Agreement. Nimeiri then shoved through a new constitution in April 1973 that created a one-party state. That party was Nimeiri’s Sudan Socialist Union. He put himself in command of the armed forces and made the judiciary completely answerable to the president (Nimeiri). He also gave the security services broad powers of search and arrest and set up a large network of informers.

Another group of growing influence whom Nimeiri chose to co-opt was the Islamists; religious radicals led by Hassan al-Turabi, a man who would rise to great power after Omar al-Bashir took over as dictator of Sudan. To appease the Islamists, Nimeiri released Turabi from the prison where he had been languishing for seven years. Nimeiri began incorporating the Islamist agenda into his own. He supported Arab Iraq in its war against non-Arab Iran and, in September 1983, he imposed Shari’a, or Islamic, law on Sudan. He also sold out the southern rebels, supporting the 1978 Camp David Accords so that Israel would stop supplying the southern guerrillas. In 1983 he abolished the system of regional councils that had provided the southern Sudanese a modicum of power.

Nimeiri made friends with the U.S. government, which viewed him as a counterweight to pro-Soviet regimes in Ethiopia and Libya. Fully aware that U.S. president Ronald Reagan would support any government that was anti-Communist, Nimeiri convinced the Reagan administration that the southern rebel forces were Communists. This earned him $1.4 billion in aid, including U.S.-made aircraft that he used to attack southern troops. In exchange, Reagan was able to use the defense of Sudan as his excuse for bombing Libya in 1986. Vice President George H.W. Bush visited Nimeiri in Khartoum in 1985 while accompanied, rather bizarrely, by American televangelists Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. It was during a return trip to the United States in April 1985 that, after sixteen years in power, Nimeiri’s luck finally ran out. After a government-imposed rise in food prices, a popular uprising led to a coup that overthrew him. It was little realized at the time, but the most horrible aspect of Nimeiri’s legacy was his creation of the practice of supplying tribal militias to fight as surrogates so that he could deny that the Sudanese army was fighting antigovernment forces. The current Sudanese government is still employing the same tactic in Darfur.

One year after the 1985 coup, Sudan held another election, although only half of the south took part. Sadiq al-Mahdi, the leader of the UMMA party, emerged as the prime minister. Sadiq committed Sudan to becoming an Islamic state. Upon his election in April 1986, he put it bluntly: Non-Muslims can ask us to protect their rights—and we will do that—but that’s all they can ask. We wish to establish Islam as the source of law in Sudan because Sudan has a Muslim majority. This was an unusually bold, or one might say, rash statement, considering that the non-Muslim rebel groups in the south were dramatically gaining strength. In fact, the civil war, which had recommenced, was turning horrifically ugly.

The largest of the rebel groups was the SPLA, led by John Garang, who had earned a doctorate in agricultural economics at Iowa State University and had also attended a U.S. Army infantry officer’s course at Fort Benning, Georgia. The SPLA represented the largest of the southern ethnic groups, the Dinka. In 1985 and 1986, the SPLA, desperate for supplies, staged a series of vicious attacks against civilians. But then the SPLA learned a miraculous lesson: if you treat civilians well, they might actually support you. As obvious as this may seem, it is a fact that continues to escape the Sudanese government. In 1987, the SPLA changed tactics. Instead of attacking villages and seizing food and other goods, it imposed a food tax that, once paid, protected villagers from seizures. Since the Sudanese army continued to attack people’s homes, the popularity of the SPLA grew and, in 1988, for the first time, it was no longer viewed by other tribes as a purely Dinka army.

The government-supported Murahalin militia, on the other hand, was engaging in grotesque tactics, burning to the ground Dinka villages and killing civilians. It regularly abducted Dinka and sent them north to be kept in slavery or traded, while children, who had been raised non-Muslim, were forced to attend Islamic schools and adopt new names. Captured women were forced to endure genital mutilation.

One particularly infamous atrocity, the Ed-Da’ein Massacre, was carried out on March 28, 1987. Two thousand Dinka villagers, fearing an attack by a Muslim tribe, the Baggara, asked for police protection. The police told them to take shelter in nearby railway freight cars. That night, the police stood by and watched as the Baggara set fire to the railway cars, killing at least a thousand people.

In 1987, the SPLA scored a stunning defeat of the Murahalin and the Sudanese army, which responded to the humiliation by attacking unarmed Dinka refugees in Southern Darfur. Sadiq al-Mahdi had never had the full support of the army, and he further alienated them with his dependency on tribal militias. As the military situation deteriorated and the SPLA took the fighting north to areas previously controlled by the government, the army demanded that Sadiq meet with John Garang and try to negotiate a ceasefire. Sadiq finally agreed. This decision infuriated one of the parties in his ruling coalition, Hassan al-Turabi’s National Islamic Front (NIF), which withdrew from the coalition. On June 30, 1989, before Sadiq could meet with Garang, a group of Muslim army officers, led by Brigadier General Omar al-Bashir and supported by the NIF, staged a coup. The coup leaders called themselves the National Movement for Correcting the Situation.

THE MAN—Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir was born in 1944 in Hoshe Bannaga, 100 kilometers northeast of Khartoum. A member of the Ja’aliya tribe, he came from a rural working-class family and attended Ahlia Middle School in the town of Shendi. Bashir’s family moved to Khartoum, where he attended secondary school and worked in a garage. Bashir found his niche in the military world. Admitted to a military academy for training as a pilot, he graduated from Sudan Military College at the age of twenty-two and then earned two master’s degrees in military science, one from the Sudanese College of Commanders and the second in Malaysia. By 1973, he was serving as a paratrooper in the Arab-Israeli War. Bashir was jovial and well-liked, and his natural affinity with fellow officers would serve him well in the decades to come. He was particularly friendly with those officers who were sympathetic to the National Islamic Front. In late 1985, military intelligence identified Bashir as a potential leader of an NIF coup and he was transferred to remote garrisons, including Muglad, which was used as a base for operations against rebel forces in the south and the Nuba Mountains. As a sign of his solidarity with his own forces, Bashir would choose as his second wife the widow of a fellow officer killed in the fighting.

In 1988, Bashir was promoted to brigadier and put in command of the 8th Infantry Brigade that was fighting the SPLA. He was one of the few senior officers who did not oppose Sadiq al-Mahdi’s use of tribal militias and he even proposed formally incorporating them into the regular army. However, he was critical of Sadiq’s conduct of the civil war, as well as his decision to negotiate with John Garang. In the middle of June 1989, Bashir returned to Khartoum, supposedly on his way to a training course in Cairo. Two weeks later, he was the leader of Sudan.

TAKING POWER—At first, the 1989 coup in Sudan appeared to be just another power grab by a group of junior officers, the sort of event that happened all the time in Africa. The Egyptian government, mindful that Egypt had given Bashir a military decoration for his services against Israel in 1973, praised Bashir and offered its support. Likewise, Saddam Hussein, within hours of the coup, rushed off a shipment of weapons as a gesture of thanks for Sudan’s support of Iraq during its war against Iran. Libya sent 60,000 barrels of oil, enough to last Sudan the rest of the year, while Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Iraq threw in some oil for good measure. The United States was required by law to suspend nonhumanitarian aid to Sudan because an unelected government had overthrown an elected one. However, the United States was reassured by Bashir’s personal pledge to U.S. assistant secretary of state Herman Cohen that he hoped to emulate secular Turkey.

For his own part, Bashir acted like a typical leader of a successful bloodless coup. He immediately promoted himself to general and appointed himself premier and defense minister. He promised to fight corruption and embezzlement and he offered amnesty to SPLA members if they turned in their weapons. In his first public appearance, Bashir spoke in favor of pan-Arabism and expressed solidarity with Sudan’s Arab neighbors, Egypt and Libya. In a surprising gesture of diplomacy, Bashir visited non-Arab Iran and secured aid for a road-building program in exchange for cooperation with security and intelligence.

Domestically, Bashir pursued policies that were also typical of newly installed military dictators. He suspended the constitution, banned all political parties and trade unions, and closed down the formerly free press. When the presidents of eight labor unions and professional associations submitted a petition for the democratic election of union officials, Bashir had them all arrested. He banned the Sudanese Bar Association, took charge of the appointment of judges (who had previously been chosen by sitting judges), and imposed an Islamic judicial system on the entire country.

To the outside world, the change of government in Sudan was hardly worth noting, and few, if any, observers could have predicted that Omar al-Bashir would still be in power more than fifteen years later. For the people of Sudan, however, particularly those in the south, it soon dawned on them that this was not a typical military coup. Bashir decreed that Arabic should replace all other languages and that although Christians would still be allowed to practice their religion because they were people of the book, Sudanese who followed traditional religions would be forced to convert to Islam.

Bashir set up a three-part government. The first part, the Revolutionary Command Council, was made up of the fifteen officers who carried out the coup, with Bashir as their chairman. The second part was a more formal national government with twenty ministers, who were either anticorruption technocrats or members of the National Islamic Front. Over the next four years, NIF members would replace each of the technocrats. But the real power was held by the third part of the government, the semisecret Council of Defenders, also known as the Committee of 40, which consisted of NIF members and young military officers. Chaired first by Bashir’s old friend from military school, Ali Osman Muhammad Taha, and then by Hassan al-Turabi, the Council members served as advisors to Bashir.

This fusion of the Sudanese military with the radical NIF gave Bashir and Turabi the ability to carry out an aggressive Islamist agenda. Students, teachers, and professors of all ages, along with civil servants, were forced to undergo six weeks of military training, during which they were subjected to endless lectures on Islam. In March 1991, Bashir’s government issued the Public Order Act of 1991, which set forth an Islamic Penal Code. He restored flogging and amputation and formalized the death penalty for a wide range of offenses, including adultery, embezzlement, dealing on the black market, the vague charge of corruption and organizing strikes, not to mention apostasy, the giving up of Islam. Emergency courts were authorized to seize illegal vendors and flog them in public on the spot. Bashir declared that God supervised his judiciary system because He is all-knowing and all-seeing. The new laws were not kind to women. They prohibited social gatherings in which men and women danced together or mixed freely. In Khartoum State, police broke up wedding parties. Women were excluded from public life and had dress codes imposed upon them. Bashir issued a presidential decree that forbade women to wear perfume or trousers and required them to wear veils and dresses down to the ankles. Some women tried to continue wearing colorful traditional dresses called thobe, but the NIF’s Guardians of Morality and Advocates of Good began flogging women in the streets. Women who defied other rules were arrested, jailed, and tortured. The government also banned the teaching of art and music, because it spread Western and African culture, and closed down the Institute of Music and Drama at Khartoum University because the NIF objected to classical Arabic music. Needless to say, Bashir’s government banned alcohol. But in February 1995, the ministry of health took this restriction even further, forbidding the importation of medicines containing alcohol, including the antimalarial drug chloroquine, which led to a widespread epidemic of malaria. Eighty percent of pharmacies shut their doors and so many doctors left the country that the government banned all travel by medical personnel.

THE MAN BEHIND THE THRONE—To most Sudan watchers, it was difficult to imagine that the thuggish Omar al-Bashir could create on his own the principles of a new rigid Islamic state. Many found it easier to categorize Bashir as a mere front man for the better-educated and more sophisticated leader of the National Islamic Front, Hassan al-Turabi. Although Bashir would prove to be wilier than he at first appeared, Turabi’s influence on Sudanese politics is undeniable.

Born in 1932, Turabi was the son of an Islamic judge and grew up in an orthodox family that opposed the more tolerant Sufi branch of Islam that was then popular in Sudan. He graduated with a B.A. in law from Khartoum University, and went on to earn a master’s degree in law from the London School of Economics and a doctorate in law from the Sorbonne in Paris. When Turabi returned to Sudan in 1965, he was appointed Dean of the Law School at the University of Khartoum. He was also the secretary-general of the Sudanese branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, an activist orthodox group founded in Egypt in 1928, and to whose ideas he was first exposed in London. At the university, Turabi taught students to give up Sufi mysticism, reject the formalism of Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei, and instead interpret Islam and their own behavior according to Shari’a law. Turabi was particularly popular with foreigners, who enjoyed his lively good humor. In 1970, Jaafar Nimeiri had Turabi thrown into prison, where he remained for the next seven years until Nimeiri decided that he needed the support of the Islamists. Turabi immersed himself in the creation of an Islamic banking system in which depositors are given a partnership rather than interest. Three months after Nimeiri’s fall in 1985, Turabi founded the National Islamic Front. He led the party in the 1986 elections, campaigning for Shari’a and universal conscription. This platform did not appeal to the Sudanese majority and the NIF did so poorly that Turabi himself lost in his own constituency in Omdurman. Two years after the election, the victor, Sadiq al-Mahdi, who happened to be Turabi’s brother-in-law, appointed Turabi attorney general. In this position, Turabi was able to institute a law that outlawed apostasy, in other words, being a Muslim who gives up Islam. However, the wording of the bill was sufficiently vague to be interpreted to include opposition to the current Islamic government. He also banned public demonstrations by the populist National Alliance, a party that advocated peace negotiations with John Garang and the SPLA. In February 1989, Sadiq promoted Turabi to deputy prime minister and foreign minister.

When Bashir took charge in the 1989 coup, the Revolutionary Command Council had Turabi put under house arrest. However, this was merely an empty gesture of false impartiality, as Turabi’s followers continued to operate the bureaucracy for the Revolutionary Command Council. He was released the following year. Turabi tried to promote Shura, Islamic democracy, which he described as government by consultation with learned males who come to a consensus, thus eliminating the need for passing written laws. He and his wife, Wisal al-Mahdi, founded the International Organization of Islamic Women. According to their interpretation of Islamic feminism, female subservience has no place in Islam and women can own property, attend public meetings, and take part in political affairs. Non-Muslim women, on the other hand, are nothing more than the spoils of war, property to be owned and disposed of.

The presence of the troops of the United States and other Western nations on the soil (or sand) of Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Gulf War served as a great marketing tool for Islamist leaders, who distributed tapes of their speeches throughout the Arabic-speaking world. Turabi’s tapes did not achieve the widespread popularity of the scion of a wealthy Saudi business family named Osama bin Laden, but Turabi did develop a substantial following. In December 1990, he visited Chicago, where he attended a conference of the Islamic Committee for Palestine and spoke on Islam: The Road to Victory. One of Turabi’s protégés was Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and future lieutenant to Osama bin Laden in al-Qaeda.

In April 1991, Turabi, with some financial backing from bin Laden, organized the first general assembly of the Popular Arab and Islamic Congress (PAIC), which brought together delegates from forty-five nations. Although the PAIC would soon gain infamy as a meeting place for terrorists, at the 1991 congress Turabi pulled off a diplomatic coup by bringing together intelligence officers from Iran and Iraq for the first time since the two nations had fought a horrific war, and Iran announced that it would end its ten-year blockade of Iraq.

HASSAN AL-TURABI IN AMERICA—In May 1992, Turabi arrived in North America for a tour that would highlight his position as an important intellectual power broker. Little suspecting that his life was about to take a dramatic turn, he began by attending a scholarly roundtable at the University of South Florida. Lecturing on Islam, Democracy, the State and the West, some of his statements seemed so divorced from reality that they left many participants speechless. Completely ignoring the ongoing civil war, he declared, In Sudanese society ethnic minorities tend to disappear, and added the Sudanese are Arab in culture…. There is no Arab–African divide anywhere in the Sudan. He called the worldwide Islamist movement highly democratic…. Islam shuns absolute government, absolute authority, dynastic authority and individual authority. He called the 1991 Gulf War a blessing in disguise because Islamist movements around the world were turned into mass movements and were radicalized. Confronted with accusations that the Sudanese government practiced torture, Turabi, rather than deny the charge, shrugged it off and stated that This behavior is typical of police around the world."

Turabi moved on to Washington, D.C., where he appeared before the Africa Subcommittee of the House of Representatives and repeated his opinions, leaving many committee members bewildered. In an interview with New Perspectives Quarterly, he again contradicted reality by intoning, We have no interest in terrorism…. Islam can have nothing to do with terrorism. Flushed with his rhetorical successes, Turabi flew to Toronto, where he was scheduled to have meetings with government officials and representatives of the oil industry.

HASSAN AL-TURABI’S UNFORTUNATE ENCOUNTER—On the morning of May 25, 1992, Turabi flew to Ottawa to meet with functionaries in the Department of External Affairs. His appearance was met by a demonstration of Sudanese exiles protesting the policies of Turabi and Bashir. That evening, one of the protesters, thirty-five-year-old Hashim Badr el Din Mohammad, was dropping off a friend at the airport when he noticed Turabi sipping coffee with two companions. A Sufi who was infuriated by the impositions of Turabi’s intolerant brand of Islam, Hashim rushed toward Turabi yelling, in English, Murderer, murderer, slavemaster! Terrorist in Canada! Fascist in Canada! Slavemaster in Canada! And in Arabic, Stop. Where are you going to? I will never let you go. Unfortunately for Turabi, Hashim was not just another oppressed Sudanese; he was a six-foot-eight-inch karate coach with a seventh-degree black belt. One of Turabi’s companions, a Muslim minister from Chicago named Ahmed Osman Makki, lunged at Hashim, who knocked him to the floor. Turabi tried to hold off Hashim, but the latter smashed him in the side of the head and sent him flying through the air. Turabi spent the next four weeks in an Ottawa hospital and could not speak or control his movements. Although Turabi eventually made a full recovery, the second PAIC General Assembly, scheduled for the autumn, had to be cancelled. As for Hashim, a sympathetic jury acquitted him on the charge of assault on the basis that Makki and Turabi had struck him first.

CARLOS THE JACKAL—Illich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, was an anti-Israeli Venezuelan Marxist who became the most notorious terrorist of the 1970s and mid-1980s. His most famous act was a 1975 attack on OPEC headquarters in Vienna, during which he and five accomplices took more than sixty hostages. Sometimes working on a for-hire basis, Carlos organized a variety of bomb attacks, most of them in France. He also shot to death an informer and two Parisian policemen who had come to arrest him. By 1990, Carlos was considered over-the-hill and inactive. However, he was still wanted for the crimes he had committed when he was younger. After being expelled from Syria, he was given refuge, in August 1993, in Sudan, where he was welcomed by Bashir and Turabi. However, as he settled into life in Khartoum, it became clear that Carlos did not exactly pursue a lifestyle that was consistent with Islamist ideals. In fact, he was an alcoholic and a womanizer; but he had an even worse strike against him: he was being tracked by the Western world’s leading spy agencies. The CIA informed French intelligence that it had pinpointed Carlos’ location in Sudan. The French confirmed the identification at the PAIC General Assembly in December 1993. Initially, Bashir’s government refused to acknowledge that Carlos was in the country. However, the French produced photographs of Carlos engaged in behavior that did not reflect the regime’s values and threatened to reveal to the Islamic world that Sudan was harboring a debauched Marxist terrorist. Bashir capitulated and turned over negotiations to Turabi, who agreed to hand over Carlos to the French. In exchange, France gave Sudan military equipment, police training, a desalination plant, a grant to Sudan Airways, and access to aerial photographs of SPLA troop positions in the south. The French also agreed to publicly praise Hassan al-Turabi for his role as a mediator with Algerian Islamists.

In August 1994, Carlos checked into Ibn Khalmud hospital for minor surgery relating to a low sperm count. While he was recovering, security personnel informed Carlos and his wife that his life was in danger and he had to be transferred to a military hospital. From there he was moved to a private villa and then, in the middle of the night, he was snatched by French agents and flown to Paris, where he was tried for the murder of the French policemen, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment; and it is in prison that he remains today.

The success of this deal would inspire Bashir and Turabi to offer for trade another terrorist to whom they had granted sanctuary: Osama bin Laden.

OSAMA BIN LADEN IN SUDAN—It would appear that bin Laden first met Hassan al-Turabi during a visit to Sudan in 1984. Four years later he opened an air charter company in Khartoum and in late 1989, after the coup that brought Omar al-Bashir to power, bin Laden established the Wadi al-Aqiq holding company and deposited $50 million in a previously minor bank in Khartoum. Before long, bin Laden started investing that money. He opened thirty businesses, including a trucking company, a furniture manufacturer, and a bakery. He also exported from Sudan fruits, vegetables, sesame, wheat and cotton, and imported into Sudan honey, sweets, farm equipment and, oh yes, arms. He arranged to send Sudanese cotton to the Taliban in Afghanistan in exchange for weapons that were supposedly captured from Soviet troops. Coming from a family that made its fortune in the construction business, it was not surprising that he also received the contract to build an airport at Port Sudan and to construct the road from Port Sudan to Khartoum. Some of the deals between Bashir and bin Laden may have helped the Sudanese government, but they were damaging to the people. When the government could no longer pay for the roadwork bin Laden’s company was doing, it gave him instead a million acres of farmland in the Gash River Delta on the Eritrean border. Bin Laden then hurt the area’s poor farmers by overplanting watermelons and driving down the price, and hurt the rich farmers by gaining a monopoly on sesame exports. In fact, he brokered a deal that sent the entire Sudanese sesame crop to Russia in exchange for arms. Bashir also granted bin Laden tax exemptions on all his businesses. And bin Laden took Hassan al-Turabi’s niece as his third wife in exchange for duty-free importation of construction equipment and vehicles.

Of course, Osama bin Laden had other interests besides making money. After Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, bin Laden wrote a ten-page letter to Saudi defense minister Prince Sultan offering to use the skills he learned fighting the Communists in Afghanistan to train Saudis to defend themselves. He even offered the use of his family’s construction equipment to dig trenches along Saudi Arabia’s border with Iraq. The Saudi royal family, wary of giving the popular bin Laden too much power, instead hired the United States and its allies to defend the country. By 1991, Osama bin Laden was no longer welcome in his native Saudi Arabia. After sojourning in Pakistan, he arrived, at the invitation of Turabi, in Sudan, assuring himself the best of Sudanese hospitality by donating $5 million to Turabi’s National Islamic Front.

In March 1990, Bashir announced that all Arab brothers could enter Sudan without a visa. Bin Laden knew how to exploit this ruling. He established a farm on the Blue Nile south of Khartoum that was actually a group of training camps to teach the use of weapons and explosives. There were twenty-three camps for Islamists who had fought in Afghanistan; three camps for al-Qaeda; and training courses for terrorist groups from Egypt and Algeria, insurgents from Yemen and Eritrea, Palestinian fighters for Hamas and Hezbollah, and anti-Qaddafi Libyans. Bin Laden donated $2.5 million to operate the Port Sudan airport in exchange for the right to use it to ship arms to sympathetic groups in Somalia and Yemen. He also funded a program that, under the auspices of the NIF, provided forced military training of university and secondary students.

In 1994, bin Laden was stripped of his Saudi citizenship and settled in Sudan. By 1996, however, Bashir and Turabi concluded that bin Laden was too hot to handle. Considering how much they had gained by their betrayal of Carlos the Jackal, they decided to try to make a similar deal for Osama bin Laden. First they tried to extradite bin Laden to Saudi Arabia, but the Saudi royal family refused to take him. Then they asked the Saudis to act as go-betweens for a deal with the United States. In fact, a representative of Bashir, Al-Fatih Urwah, did meet with the CIA in Virginia. However, the Clinton administration, noting that in the United States bin Laden was only an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and distrustful of the Sudanese government, turned down the offer to negotiate for bin Laden. On May 18, 1996, bin Laden left Sudan at the request of the Sudanese government and moved to Afghanistan. A bitter bin Laden claimed that the Sudanese owed him millions of dollars, and he characterized the Bashir–Turabi leadership as a mixture of religion and organized crime.

SUPPORTING TERRORISM—It was nice to have Osama bin Laden’s money, but Hassan al-Turabi was perfectly capable of supporting terrorist groups without it. The second PAIC General Assembly, delayed because of Turabi’s Canadian injury, was finally held in December 1993 and brought together a veritable who’s who of terrorist groups. Turabi would boast, I am close to…every Islamic movement in the world, secret or public. In 1992, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri acquired funding from Iran to establish three training camps in Sudan, including one in Omar Bashir’s childhood hometown of Shendi. While people in Sudan were trying to cope with food shortages, the PAIC sent a thousand tons of food and medicine to Somalia’s Islamic Unity Party. When, in October 1994, a bus bomber killed twenty-two Israeli civilians in Tel Aviv, Turabi called it an honorable act. As a matter of record, this was a year and a half after he organized a conference on religious tolerance.

With the end of the Cold War, the U.S. government no longer saw a need to support the Sudanese extremist government. One month after the inauguration of President Bill Clinton in 1993, terrorists bombed the World Trade Center in New York, killing six people and injuring about a thousand. Four months later, U.S. authorities arrested a member of the Sudanese delegation to the UN and charged him with planning another attack. They caught red-handed bombmaker Siddiq Ibrahim Siddighli, who had been Turabi’s bodyguard during his 1992 visit. The U.S. State Department added Sudan to its list of states supporting terrorism, a group that Turabi referred to as a list of honor. In addition to supporting terror in the United States, the government cited the fact that Sudan provided sanctuary for, among others, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Islamic Jihad, the Algerian FIS, and terrorist groups from Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen.

In 1995, Bashir and Turabi almost went too far when they tried to assassinate the dictator of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak. On June 24 of that year, Mubarak was in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for a meeting of the Organization of African Unity when two Egyptian assassins based in Khartoum fired at his limousine. They were themselves shot to death, as were three accomplices. Another three were arrested and three more escaped. An Ethiopian investigation determined that the assassins were staying in a house rented by a Sudanese citizen and that their weapons were delivered by Sudan Airways. The incident led to two days of fighting between Egyptian and Sudanese forces. Eventually, the United Nations Security Council imposed sanctions on Sudan for refusing to extradite the three escapees. By this time, Bashir had alienated almost every other government in the world. Out of the entire community of nations, Sudan’s only remaining allies could be counted on the fingers of two hands: Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, China, Syria, Yemen, Qatar, and Malaysia.

On August 7, 1998, terrorists bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 263 people, including 12 Americans, and wounding 4,000. In retaliation, two weeks later, President Clinton ordered missile attacks against Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. For reasons not fully known, he also bombed the Al-Shifa Pharmaceutical Industries plant in Sudan, claiming that it was financed by bin Laden and that it produced precursor chemicals used in the manufacture of VX nerve gas. The owner of the plant, Salih Idris, denied involvement in the making of weapons, invited foreign journalists to visit his plant, and hired a U.S. firm to prove that he had no connection with Osama bin Laden. In May 1999, the U.S. government quietly released the $24 million of frozen funds that Idris had invested in U.S. accounts.

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Omar al-Bashir came to the conclusion that terrorism was the new equivalent of Communism and that one could gain the support—and money—of the United States by offering to become its ally in the War on Terrorism.

THE SECOND CIVIL WAR—For all the time and effort that Bashir and Turabi put into transforming Sudan into an extreme Islamist state, they still had to deal with a monster of a problem: the growing rebellion among non-Muslims in the south. The second civil war had broken out in 1983 and it was dissatisfaction with the conduct of the war, and with the threat of negotiations, that led to Bashir’s ascension to power in 1989. Once Bashir gained control of the nation and its military, he had to match his words with action. The southern rebel groups had