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January 30, 2006

Sudan: Islamist Leader Still Supports Terror

Today's Telegraph carries a portrait of 74-year old Hassan al-Turabi (pictured), who once was a leading figure in the Islamist regime of Omar al-Bashir. Turabi's personal ambitions and machinations caused a state of emergency to be imposed in December 1999. Since that time, Bashir has been sidelined and treated, deservedly, as a pariah, while the Islamist dictatorship of Bashir has made historic moves towards peace with with the non-Muslim south.

Bashir came to power undemocratically, staging a coup in 1989, when al-Turabi was his close ally. Hassan al-Turabi was leader of the ruling National Islamic Front and speaker of parliament, and was widely considered the "brains" of the government. In a nation of 40 million, Turabi decided that all of Islam should be modelled on 7th century Medina, from the time of Mohammed, and Sudan would be the first recreation of that model.

The fact that 10 million people, mostly from southern Sudan, were not Muslims was no hindrance on Turabi imposing harsh sharia law upon non-Muslim Christians and animists. The south was officially exempted from Sharia in 1991, but the damage from its initial brutal imposition led to an armed insurgency.

Now it is widely held that more than any other individual, Turabi stoked the injustices which fuelled the two decades of civil war between the north and south, and cost 2 million lives.

Turabi offered a sanctuary to Osama bin laden in 1991, with the terrorist staying for five years in Sudan. And of course Bin Laden was, for Turabi, a "businessman", and not a terrorist, and certainly not responsible for 9/11.

"It's just impossible. If you had known him personally, you would dismiss it right away," Turabi states. "He came as a contractor. He built a road and then he became interested in agriculture. The British used to come and see me and the Americans. All they talked about was bin Laden. I said no-one knows him here in Sudan. There are more dangerous Saudi Arabians who are in England, claiming asylum. I told them, 'Let him stay here', but they put pressure on the government to kick him out. The poor man, I saw him once or twice. He visited me here and then I met him once at his home. He's a very simple man."

Bin Laden was not the only terror fanatic supported by Turabi and offered sanctuary. Carlos the Jackal, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, lived in Khartoum from 1991 to 1996.

He also was responsible for helping to arm the notorious Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda. This group has been in existence since 1986, and since 1987 it has been led by Joseph Kony, who has abducted 20,000 children, to be used as "expendable" troops, often forcing them to massacre their own relatives. A core group of 200 lead this rebel force, all armed by Sudan.

Exploiting Islamic taqqiya (deliberately lying) to is fullest, Turabi now claims that he has always championed freedom. On the issue of arming the LRA, he states "It's natural. In all wars people do the same. If there's a state of war between you and the other side, then you arm the other side's opposition don't you?" When questioned about child captives being murdered, Turabi says "They don't kill them by the way, they don't murder."

If Turabi had stayed committed to his less-intelligent ally, al-Bashir, perhaps there would have no peace deal with John Garang and the rebels in the South. The new constitution would never have been considered. It seems that almost all of the ideas implemented by Turabi are now being ditched by the government of Sudan. In October, Sudan gave permission for Ugandan forces to attack LRA forces anywhere in the south.

Turabi had a glowing career before he entered the murky world of political coups and Islamist dictatorships. He had a Masters degree in law from Kings College, London, and a doctorate at the Sorbonne in Paris.

But his own greed for power was his undoing. In December 1999 his ambitions led to him being accused to trying to mount a coup. Bashir later said that Turabi had been running a parallel administration.. In September that year, Turabi had outwitted Bashir and gained the post of secretary-general of the ruling National Congress party.

The president reacted to a move instituted in parliament by Turabi, which would have curbed his powers. 48 hours before the parliament was due to vote on this, Bashir dissolved parliament, and initiated a state of emergency.

In January 2000 it appeared the two men were headed for a reconciliation, but by May Turabi was being accused of inciting army officers and Islamist militants against the government.

Turabi vowed to fight on, despite being sacked from his government post at the start of May 2000. He founded a new party, the Popular National Congress in June. In February of 2001, Turabi was placed under house arrest, and since then he has been in and out of prison.

He was again accused of masterminding a plot, and for this he was jailed in March 2004. He was said to have attempted a coup in September 2003. On his release he said he would probably be rearrested again soon.

But still Turabi tries to get into the limelight. On New Year's Day this year, he complained that the country was too full of foreigners (mainly aid workers trying to assist the human disasters created by the government he once belonged to).

The Islamist regime in the north is still an authoritarian environment, but since Turabi was ejected from government, the peace talks with the south have flourished. Turabi's lies and deception were valuable assets at the start of the Bashir coup in 1989. Since then, they have only been proved to be liabilities. The government of Sudan is far from perfect, but without Turabi's meddling and power-grabbing, the nation is slowly moving out of the darkness and back into international relations with its neighbours and the outside world. Such progress could never have happened with Turabi in the government, and his backwards vision of a 7th century Medina, rebuilt in the soil of the African continent.

But Turabi, who founded the Sudanese wing of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s, paints himself as the godfather of Islamism, a man whose pioneering work is now being realised around the world. "There is now an awakening all over the Muslim world, from Indonesia to Sudan and even in the northern hemisphere," he states. "The Muslims in London or Paris, once they were just working to earn a living, now their identity is reawakened."

Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at January 30, 2006 5:26 PM

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