Khartoum Violence
LAKE, ELI J.
Khartoum Violence With friends like Sudan . . . BY ELI J. LAKE Khartoum WHEN CIA AGENTS landed here in June 2000 to begin what Washington assumed would be secret counterterrorism cooperation...
...The possibility of senior members of Bashir's government being implicated is a real one...
...Many members of the recently splintered National Islamic Front, the group that steered Khartoum toward embracing terror as state policy in the early 1990s, remain in power, including Vice President Ali Uthman Muhammad Taha...
...Children miss school, sick people are afraid to go to clinics...
...More important to Bashir, he may finger members of the present cabinet if he is questioned away from Khartoum...
...Danforth's report to the president, due this spring, will offer recommendations on whether Washington can help end the civil war...
...Suleiman, who has been arrested several times himself, said, "The government is pragmatic...
...The Sudanese air force, not to mention the government-sponsored paramilitary groups, makes no distinction in practice between civilians and rebel soldiers...
...He represents Hassan al-Turabi, a former speaker of the parliament currently under house arrest and the man who invited Osama bin Laden to Sudan, where he lived from 1991 to 1996...
...At a press conference before leaving Khartoum, he said he had made no progress on this issue...
...What I'm saying is there is no deliberate policy by the Sudanese government to target civilian installations or civilian populations...
...American interrogators, according to these sources, were invited to question them...
...Turabi was arrested in February 2001 for attempting to undermine the government when he signed a memo pledging to cooperate with the leader of the Sudan People's Liberation Army, John Garang...
...Ghazi Suleiman, a former economics minister for Sudan, now a human rights lawyer in Khartoum, told me (and U.S...
...On his way back from the SPLA rebel compound in the south, President Bush's special envoy for peace in Sudan, former senator John Danforth, saw the Antonovs being loaded at El Obeid...
...The Sudanese refused...
...officials...
...That's a possibility, that happens all over the world...
...engagement in Sudan is likely to hinge on whether Khartoum's security forces cooperate with CIA agents like those outed by the foreign minister two Junes past...
...Ghazi Salah el-Din Atabani, an adviser to President Omar Hassan al-Bashir on the civil war...
...The path of counterterror cooperation may end up implicating leading members of the government...
...If terrorism is the deliberate targeting of noncombatants, then a strong case can be made that Sudan's military is itself a terrorist entity...
...seen the bomb damage himself in the south in a hospital his organization helped found in Lui...
...The effect of the bombing is not so much the damage of the bombs themselves, but the terror it causes in the area...
...If a government is unwilling to stop terrorism against its own people, how can it possibly be a reliable ally against the international variety...
...The media here is fully free," he maintains...
...They were caterers and small business people," the lawyer said...
...How far will Bashir go in cooperating against terrorism if it threatens the survival of his regime...
...officials also caution not to read too much into this...
...On this score, the jury is still out...
...Khartoum Violence With friends like Sudan . . . BY ELI J. LAKE Khartoum WHEN CIA AGENTS landed here in June 2000 to begin what Washington assumed would be secret counterterrorism cooperation with Sudan, the Sudanese foreign minister held a press conference announcing their arrival...
...It is quite possible that when you bombard a certain area, bombs stray into attacking civilian installations," explained Dr...
...officials say Sudanese authorities have arrested between 28 and 30 members of the al Qaeda terrorist network since the September 11 attacks in New York and northern Virginia...
...Scott Hughett, the Africa director for Rev...
...But U.S...
...The government predictably denies its culpability...
...But U.S...
...But he told them that would be impossible...
...Mustafa Osman Ismail says American officials asked him to conceal the CIA's presence from the public...
...Danforth may have heard the answer to this question on his peace mission...
...As long as the Americans do not touch its sovereignty, it will give them anything they want, provided [the present leaders] stay in power...
...Despite recent incursions into the area by the Sudan People's Liberation Army, Khartoum had approved this food drop ahead of time, making it highly unlikely that the bombardment was accidental...
...In his four-day tour of the country, Danforth had hoped to convince the government to allow outside monitors into Sudan to verify whether civilian areas were being targeted...
...But therein lies Sudan's dilemma...
...That's why I went on the TV and said, 'You have to know that there is an American security team and they are here, moving freely, exchanging information and cooperating with our security people.'" Leaving aside Ismail's assertion that his country's press is free (on January 16, the editor of the largest English language opposition paper was fined approximately 1,500,000 Sudanese dinars, about $6,000, for printing an article on slave raids in the south), the notion that Sudan's government is fighting terrorism is peculiar...
...Franklin Graham's relief organization Samaritan's Purse, said in an interview from Nairobi earlier this month that he had Eli J. Lake, State Department correspondent for UPI, accompanied John Danforth on his recent trip to Sudan...
...Government forces have bombed marketplaces, hospitals, churches, and schools in their nearly 19-year civil war with the Sudan People's Liberation Army...
...officials confirm) that those arrested in September were low or mid-level members of an organization that kept most of its operatives in the dark about the scope of the 9/11 mission...
...Indeed, the El Obeid airstrip where the World Food Program loads its single-propeller planes with food is also where the military packs Russian-made Antonovs with 500-pound iron gravity bombs for missions in the surrounding areas...
...While Dan-forth was in Khartoum, Bashir was deciding whether a key suspect behind the 1995 assassination attempt on Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak should be sent to Cairo for questioning at the request of the Egyptians...
...In October, Sudanese fighters accompanying World Food Program planes to the western Bahr Ghazel region dropped bombs on villagers as they approached sacks of food dropped only minutes before, according to western aid workers and U.S...
...The man, according to diplomatic sources, may also have information regarding the 1998 bombing of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania...
...And Suleiman is in a position to know...
...But the adviser's words do not square with facts on the ground...
Vol. 7 • February 2002 • No. 20
