Rumble in the Desert
Karl, Jonathan
Rumble in the Desert Sudan’s Darfur-style diplomacy. BY JONATHAN KARL Khartoum, Sudan CONDOLEEZZA RICE realized something was wrong when she rushed into Sudan’s presidential residence and...
...No meek foreign servant, Helal is the veteran of years of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and has translated for presidents...
...Wilkinson is a senior adviser, but Lineberry wasn’t even supposed to be in the meeting...
...Garang may be the most fascinating political figure in Africa today...
...Instead of sending an ambassador back to Khartoum, Powell accused the government of genocide...
...President Bashir’s security guards were just getting warmed up...
...It’s Diplomacy 101: You don’t rough up your guests...
...In the absence of her usual entourage, Rice told Lineberry to stay...
...This initial scuffle especially irritated senior Rice adviser Jim Wilkinson...
...Jonathan Karl is senior foreign affairs correspondent for ABC News...
...The rumble in Khartoum was widely portrayed as an incident involving Andrea Mitchell of NBC News, but long before the guards got around to roughing up Mitchell, they pushed around Rice’s senior staff and several other reporters traveling with Rice...
...Rice speaks no Arabic...
...Sitting next to the president of a country you have accused of genocide is awkward under any circumstances...
...When Andrea Mitchell tried to ask a question, she got roughed up and Bashir got a lesson in Public Relations 101: Don’t go pushing around a high-profile correspondent when the television cameras are rolling...
...The bloodshed horrified the world and made it impossible for the United States to lift sanctions...
...The North-South peace deal was signed last year, but in the meantime the government of Sudan started fighting a rebel insurgency in the western Darfur region by arming the so-called Janjaweed militias...
...Instead of fighting the rebels, he joined them, organizing a more formidable force to challenge Khartoum...
...in economics from Iowa State University...
...But imagine sitting there in silence because his people have detained your translator and most of your staff...
...Bashir’s strongmen had also blocked Rice’s translator...
...relations seemed to be on a fast track toward normalization...
...Wilkinson managed to get inside, but he had been roughed up on his way...
...The guards relented and jammed Gemal into one of Bashir’s cars, rushing him inside the gate and to the meeting...
...On July 9, that peace agreement brought rebel leader John Garang and his people into the Sudanese government...
...This was not how things were supposed to go...
...Instead of her translator and her policy advisers on Africa, the only people with Rice were the two aides who had been riding in the spare limousine: Jim Wilkinson and Liz Lineberry...
...Bashir speaks no English...
...Rice, with a look of stunned disbelief on her face, watched Bashir’s men push the American reporters out of the room...
...Finally, Helal started to walk away, directing a profanity at the guards (in Arabic, of course) and telling them that their president would have to meet with the secretary of state without a translator...
...He was part of Sudan’s government until 1983, when he was dispatched to quell a rebel insurgency in the mostly Christian and animist south...
...The diplomat, John Limbert, is one of the 52 Americans who were held hostage for 444 days in Tehran...
...And, bizarrely, Sudan’s president did not have his own translator...
...Rice—before her illfated meeting with Bashir—was even talking about a “new day” in U.S.Sudan relations...
...He passed on the message and, sure enough, a call came to Rice on her airplane 15 minutes before she landed in Darfur...
...At the end of the meeting, President Bashir’s security detail agreed to let American reporters in for a quick photo opportunity with a strict “no questions” rule...
...A 1969 graduate of Grinnell College, Garang has a Ph.D...
...To the Sudanese, the request seems perfectly reasonable...
...It was Sudan’s foreign minister calling to say sorry—something no Sudanese official has ever said about the killing in Darfur...
...But Rice’s ill-fated meeting with Bashir shows the “changing regime” isn’t changing too fast...
...Garang is now the first vice president of Sudan, a shift in power the United States believes offers the best chance to end the killing in Darfur...
...He didn’t stay in the meeting long, coming out to give the guard who shoved him a dose of Texas diplomacy, telling him, “If you touch me again, I’ll knock you on your ass...
...he’s one of Rice’s key advisers on Israeli-Palestinian issues...
...As she was leaving for Darfur, she told the senior American diplomat in Sudan, “I want an apology by the time I land in Darfur...
...BY JONATHAN KARL Khartoum, Sudan CONDOLEEZZA RICE realized something was wrong when she rushed into Sudan’s presidential residence and found herself sitting virtually alone next to President Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir...
...In fact, just two years ago, Sudan-U.S...
...She usually waits outside, guarding the secretary’s “baseball”—that is, her purse...
...We frankly don’t appreciate being manhandled at the door,” Wilkinson said...
...This is not quite regime change, but Rice called the government “a changing regime...
...Because of the North-South peace deal, however, signs of progress slowly became visible...
...Inside the meeting, the silence stretched on for several minutes, while outside Rice’s translator, Gemal Helal, was growing irate...
...Ray Odierno—the formidable sixfoot, five-inch, three-star Army general who orchestrated the capture of Saddam Hussein—had to power his way into the meeting, clearing a path for the two women in Rice’s party (Constance Newman, assistant secretary of state, and Cindy Courville, an NSC official...
...In the 1980s, he allied himself with Ethiopia’s Communist government, but for the last decade and a half, he has had strong support from the United States...
...Her senior staff—including two assistant secretaries of state, Rice’s top policy adviser, and the three-star general who travels with her—had been held at the gate...
...The United States was brokering a historic peace agreement to end the country’s two-decade civil war between the North and the South, and Colin Powell was talking about finally getting an ambassador back to Khartoum...
...And he’s more than a translator...
...Wilkinson usually doesn’t speak on the record, but this time he couldn’t resist...
...President Bashir used his meeting with Secretary Rice to urge the United States to lift sanctions on Sudan and to reestablish full diplomatic relations (we haven’t had an ambassador in Khartoum since 1997...
Vol. 10 • August 2005 • No. 43
