Deborah Scroggins - Emma’s War - Love, Betrayal and Death in the Sudan

The old siren song of treasure in the south spelled the beginning of the end. Following the 1973 oil crisis in the West, George Bush, US president Richard Nixon’s ambassador to the UN, visited Khartoum at the invitation of Nimeiri’s foreign minister. Nimeiri had started out as a socialist, and the United States had kept its distance from him during his first few years in power. Now Bush, a former oil man from Texas, advised the Sudanese government that satellite remote-sensing intelligence available to the US government showed that oil might be found in the south-eastern part of the country, especially the triangle of land located in the Sudd region between Bentiu, Nasir and Malakal. Bush named some American companies he said might be willing to undertake such a venture. In 1974 the American oil company Chevron was granted a licence to look for oil in parts of the south and south-west. Chevron also signed a secret agreement to explore the Kafi-Kengi region in northern Bahr el-Ghazal, where uranium deposits that could be refined for use in nuclear weapons had been found near the border with Darfur.

The Middle East was just beginning to churn with what the followers of political Islam call ‘the Islamic awakening’. Disappointed with the failures of independence, young Muslims were turning to Islam in search of a more natural and authentic system of governance than the secular nationalism imported from the West. Political Islam found especially fertile ground in northern Sudan, where the biggest political parties were already associated with religious brotherhoods. After Nimeiri’s communist allies attempted to overthrow him, the president drew closer to these Islamic parties. They had opposed his peace agreement with the south on the grounds that it gave what the agreement called the south’s ‘noble spiritual beliefs’ and Christianity equal place with Islam in Sudan’s constitution. They also thought the agreement gave the south too much autonomy. They had mounted three armed uprisings against Nimeiri, in 1970, 1975 and 1976, the last two with the backing of Libya. The president did not have the strength to resist them forever. In 1977 he invited their leaders to come back from exile.

The Islamic politicians pressed Nimeiri to make Sudanese law - until now a colonial hybrid of customary, Islamic and Western law - conform with classical sharia, or Islamic law. In their view, the purpose of a Muslim government was to enforce sharia. But southerners bitterly resisted any proposals to make sharia the source of all the country’s legislation. Islamic law provides for harsh punishments such as amputation, stoning and flogging. More important, under sharia law, unbelievers may not rule over believers, so that the imposition of sharia law would effectively close off the highest political offices to non-Muslims. Christians and Jews, as ‘Peoples of the Book’, have fewer civil rights under sharia than Muslims; followers of Africa’s traditional religions have virtually none at all. Nevertheless Nimeiri continued his drift to the right. Naming Hassan al-Turabi, the leader of the Muslim brotherhood, as his attorney general, he embarked on a programme of making Sudan’s laws more Islamic. He set aside his safari suit and began appearing at Friday prayers in the mosque in the skullcap and jallabiya of a Muslim scholar.

Then in 1978 Chevron struck oil just north of the town of Bentiu, in a mixed Nuer-Dinka area a little south of the north-south border. The oil well was located on a spot known as Pan Thou, or ‘thorn tree’, in the Nuer language. In a move suspicious southerners saw as a clue to Arab plans to seize the southern oil, Chevron and the government insisted on changing the Dinka name of the spot to Heglig, the Arabic name for the same tree. Extracting Heglig’s oil was to prove thornier than the company ever realized. Chevron had confined most of its dealings to the central government. But under the terms of the Addis Ababa agreement, the southern regional government was to receive the revenues from any minerals or other deposits found on southern land. Rather than see that happen, Nimeiri and his Islamist attorney general in 1980 tried to change the boundaries between north and south so that the land under which the oil and uranium lay would belong to a new northern province that the government named Unity. The south erupted in riots, and the president backed down. But the tension and mutual distrust kept mounting.

In the Bentiu area near the oil fields, angry Nuer men formed themselves into a militia they called Anyanya II; small clashes broke out in various parts of the south. In 1983 a battalion of southern soldiers stationed in the town of Bor mutinied over a pay dispute with their commanders. Colonel John Garang, a taciturn Dinka army officer with a PhD from Iowa State University, was sent to mediate. Instead, Garang fled with the men of the 105th Battalion across the border into Ethiopia. From there he urged the Sudanese to rise up against Nimeiri’s government as part of his newly formed Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). This time, Garang said, the south and its allies would fight not for independence but for a secular, socialist Sudan. A few months later Nimeiri imposed an unusually harsh version of sharia law on all of Sudan. The civil war was on again.

Ethiopia welcomed Garang and his mutineers, just as it had embraced the southern Sudanese rebels of the 1960s. Ethiopia’s wars and famines were a mirror image of those in Sudan; the same whirring cycle of disaster had rekindled that country’s civil war. For a short while after the signing of the Addis Ababa agreement, the Ethiopian government had gained the upper hand in its battles with the Eritrean rebels. Then famine struck northern Ethiopia in 1973. A widely publicized BBC broadcast accused Emperor Haile Selassie of having ignored the famine. The United States and Europe withdrew the aid that had propped up his regime. A Marxist military regime seized power, and Sudan resumed its support for Eritrea. With Sudanese support, a variety of new Eritrean and Tigrean groups opposed to Ethiopia’s government sprang up in the refugee camps on the border.

Like most Africans, Emma’s friend Karadawi took it as obvious that to feed and house people on one side of a conflict was to help that side. He considered the UN agencies’ pretensions to neutrality a laughable bit of Western hypocrisy. In Sudan he had been one of the first to suggest that the government recognize the humanitarian wings of the rebel armies fighting in Eritrea and neighbouring Tigre province, allowing them to raise funds and import materials just like every other foreign relief organization. In Oxford, Karadawi had gained a certain fame for his willingness to criticize all sides involved with aiding Sudan. When he and Emma met in 1985, President Nimeiri was refusing to ask for international assistance even though thousands of people in western Sudan were starving. A BBC journalist asked Karadawi where the fault lay, and he did not hesitate. ‘With the government,’ he replied. At the same time, he was engaged in writing a doctoral dissertation arguing that the West had turned refugee aid into a self-perpetuating industry that often did more harm than good in Sudan. His colleague Barbara Harrell-Bond ultimately incorporated many of his insights in her book, Imposing Aid. Alex de Waal, a fellow student at Oxford with Karadawi, is today Britain’s best-known critic of humanitarian aid. De Waal credits Karadawi with inspiring him. He dedicated his 1997 book Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa to Karadawi.

Karadawi could go on for hours brilliantly analysing the Islamic concept of barakat, or ‘blessings’ - the wealth and power that naturally flow to the pious - always with cigarette in hand. In 1985 a group of army officers overthrew Nimeiri but refused to dismantle the sharia law he had enacted. It was going to be much harder to get rid of Islamic law than it had been to get rid of Nimeiri, Karadawi predicted. Islam, he said, was a genie that would not go back into the lamp. He explained that Islamist politicians would accuse any Muslim who tried to revoke Islamic law of being an apostate, a crime punishable by death under sharia. Meanwhile the abolition of Islamic law remained the key demand of the southern rebels. The officers who had seized power wanted to hold elections, but Garang and his SPLA refused to participate unless a constitutional conference was held to decide the place of religion and ‘nationalities’ in Sudan. The officers, mostly conservative Muslims, refused. When a vote was held in 1986, the Islamic parties were the winners. Karadawi told Emma that this probably spelled the end of any peace talks for a while. ‘Malesh,’ he would exclaim, using the half-amused, half-bitter Arabic expression that means something like ‘What a pity!’ but can also mean ‘So sorry’ and ‘Too bad’.