Robert Fisk - The Great War for Civilisation - The Conquest of the Middle East

A month earlier, I had been on assignment in the Bosnian war and I told bin Laden that Bosnian Muslim fighters in the town of Travnik had mentioned his name to me. This awoke his interest. Each time I saw bin Laden, he was fascinated to hear not what his enemies thought of him but of what Muslim ulema and militants said of him. ‘I feel the same about Bosnia,’ he said. ‘But the situation there does not provide the same opportunities as Afghanistan. A small number of mujahedin have gone to fight in Bosnia-Hercegovina but the Croats won’t allow the mujahedin in through Croatia as the Pakistanis did with Afghanistan.’ But wasn’t it a bit of an anticlimax to be fighting for Islam and God in Afghanistan and end up road-building in Sudan? Bin Laden was now more studied in his use of words. ‘They like this work and so do I. This is a great project which we are achieving for the people here; it helps the Muslims and improves their lives.’

This was the moment when I noticed that other men, Sudanese who were very definitely not among bin Laden’s former comrades, had gathered to listen to our conversation. Bin Laden, of course, had been aware of their presence long before me. What did he think about the war in Algeria, I asked? But a man in a green suit calling himself Mohamed Moussa – he claimed to be Nigerian although he was a Sudanese government security agent – tapped me on the arm. ‘You have asked more than enough questions,’ he announced. So how about a picture? Bin Laden hesitated – something he rarely did – and I sensed that prudence was fighting with vanity. In the end, he stood on the new road in his gold-fringed robe and smiled wanly at my camera for two pictures, then raised his left hand like a president telling the press when their time was up. At which point Osama bin Laden went off to inspect his highway.

But what was the nature of the latest ‘Islamic Republic’ to capture bin Laden’s imagination? He maintained a home in Khartoum – he would keep a small apartment in the Saudi city of Jeddah until the Saudis themselves deprived him of his citizenship – and lived in Sudan with his four wives, one of them only a teenager. His bin Laden company – not to be confused with the larger construction business run by his cousins – was paid in Sudanese currency which was then used to purchase sesame, corn and sunflower seeds for export. Profits did not seem to be bin Laden’s top priority. Was Sudan?

Certainly it boasted another potential Islamic ‘monster’ for the West. Hassan Abdullah Turabi, the enemy of Western ‘tyranny’, a ‘devil’ according to the Egyptian newspapers, was supposedly the Ayatollah of Khartoum, the scholarly leader of the National Islamic Front which provided the nervous system for General Omar Bashir’s military government. Indeed, Bashir’s palace boasted the very staircase upon which General Charles Gordon had been cut down in 1885 by followers of Mohamed Ahmed ibn Abdullah, the Mahdi, who like bin Laden also demanded a return to Islamic ‘purity’. But when I went to talk to Turabi in his old English office, he sat birdlike on a chair, perched partly on his left leg that was hooked beneath him, his white robe adorned with a tiny patterned scarf, hands fluttering in front of a black beard that was now flecked with white. He it was who had organised the ‘Popular Arab and Islamic Conference’ which I had ostensibly arrived to cover, and within the vast conference centre in Khartoum I found gathered every shade of mutually hostile Islamist, Christian, nationalist and intégriste , all bound by Turabi’s plea of moderation. Shias, Sunnis, Arabs, non-Arabs, Yassir Arafat’s Fatah movement and all of his Arab enemies – Hamas, Hizballah, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front, the FIS as they called themselves under their French acronym – the whole shebang, along with representatives of the Pakistan People’s Party, the an-Nahda party of Tunisia, Afghans of all persuasions and an envoy from Mohamed Aideed of Somalia who was himself ‘too busy to come’ – as a conference official discreetly put it – because he was being hunted by the American military in Mogadishu.

They represented every contradiction of the Arab world in a city whose British colonial architecture – of low-roofed arched villas amid bougainvillea, of tired, hot government offices and mouldering police stations – existed alongside equally dated revolutionary slogans. The waters of the Blue and White Niles joined here, the permanent way-station between the Arab world and tropical Africa, and Sudan’s transition through thirteen years of nationalist rule – the mahdiya – sixty years of British-dominated government from Cairo and almost forty years of fractious independence gave the country a debilitated, exhausted, unresolved identity. Was it Islamic – after independence, the umma party was run by the son and grandsons of the Mahdi – or did the military regimes that took over after 1969 mean that Sudan was for ever socialist?

Turabi was trying to act as intermediary between Arafat, who had just signed the Oslo accord with Israel, and his antagonists in the Arab world – which meant just about everybody – and might have been making an unsubtle attempt to wipe Sudan off Washington’s ‘state terrorism’ list by persuading Hamas and Islamic Jihad to support Arafat. ‘I personally know Arafat very well,’ Turabi insisted. ‘He is a close friend of mine. He was an Islamist once, you know, and then slowly moved into the Arab “club”… He spoke to me before he signed [the accord with Israel]. He came here to Sudan. And I am now putting his case to the others – not as something that is right, but as something of necessity. What could Arafat do? He ran out of money. His army stopped. There were the refugees, the 10,000 prisoners in Israeli jails. Even a municipality is better than nothing.’

But if ‘Palestine’ was to be a municipality, where did that leave the Arabs? In need, surely, of a leader who did not speak in this language of surrender; in need of a warrior leader, someone who had proved he could defeat a superpower. Was this not what the Mahdi had believed himself to be? Did the Mahdi not ask his fighters on the eve of their attack on Khartoum whether they would advance against General Gordon even if two-thirds of them should perish? But like almost every other Arab state, Sudan recreated itself in a looking glass for the benefit of its own leaders. Khartoum was the ‘capital city of virtues’, or so the large street banners claimed it to be that December. Sometimes the word ‘virtues’ was substituted with the word ‘values’, which was not quite the same thing.

But then nothing in Sudan was what it seemed. The railhead, broiling in the midday heat, did not suggest an Islamic Republic in the making. Nor did the squads of soldiers in jungle green drowsing in the shade of a broken station building while two big artillery pieces stood on a freight platform, waiting to be loaded onto a near-derelict train for the civil war in the south. Britain had long favoured the separate development of the Christian south of Sudan from which the Arabic language and Muslim religion were largely excluded – until independence, when London suddenly decided that Sudan’s territorial integrity was more important than the separate development which they had so long encouraged. The minority in the south rebelled and their insurrection was now the central and defining feature of Sudanese life.

The authorities in Khartoum would one day have to explain a detailed list of civil war atrocities which had been handed to the United Nations in 1993 and which were to form the subject of a UN report the following year. Eyewitness testimonies spoke of rape, pillage and murder in the southern province of Bahr al-Gazal as well as the continuing abduction of thousands of southern children on the capital’s streets. According to the documents, the most recent atrocities occurred the previous July when the Sudanese army drove a railway train loaded with locally hired militiamen through territory held by the rebel Sudanese People’s Liberation Army. Under the orders of an officer referred to in the papers as Captain Ginat – commander of the People’s Defence Force camp in the town of Muglad in southern Kordofan and a member of the Sudanese government council in the southern city of Wo – the militias were let loose on Dinka tribal villages along the length of the railway, destroying every village to a depth of ten miles on each side of the track, killing the men, raping the women and stealing thousands of head of cattle. Evidence taken from tribesmen who fled the village without their families included details of the slaughter of a Christian wedding party of 300 people near the Lol river. The documents the UN had obtained also alleged that government troops, along with loyal tribal militias, massacred large numbers of southern Dinkas in a displaced persons’ camp at Meiran the previous February.