Meeting those `monsters' of Sudan

Did this fundamentalist leader of Sudan really expect me to believe his denials?

ONE SUMMER night in 1992, I interviewed Sudan's President Omar el-Bashir in the mud fortress in Khartoum that passes for a "presidential palace". It was guarded by dozens of Islamic boy-soldiers with automatic weapons and faulty walkie-talkies. One was so defective that it almost got my Sudanese escort and I shot on the spot.

When their officer couldn't raise the security staff inside, two soldiers suddenly dropped to their knees in the glare of our headlamps. I stared through the windscreen for minutes at their knuckles on the triggers, until my Sudanese friend persuaded them to borrow his own mobile phone. Finally, we were waved through the gate into a dark medieval casbah.

On Saturday, after the cruise missiles hit Khartoum, Sandy Berger, Clinton's National Security Advisor, said that the destroyed factory was part of Sudan's military-industrial complex. That's an audacious piece of spin.

I spent a week in the heart of Sudan's "military-industrial complex", with its malarial mosquitoes, streets covered in sand and relics of Britain's colonial rule. Sudan is the largest country in Africa and one of the poorest, paralysed by years of civil war and corruption. When Brigadier el-Bashir staged his military coup in 1989, the country was in total chaos and the central bank had just $25,000 in reserve.

I met President el-Bashir in a lounge full of old sofas where he sat surrounded by half a dozen men. The president is a tall, fiercely dignified man. He was dressed, like all his aides, in the flowing white desert robes and turbans that the stylish hog farmers of Arkasas disdain. In short, el-Bashir and his men were all "towel heads". One, a ferocious-looking young Nubian, told me that he'd recently graduated from Harvard. Considering how he was dressed, I figured he must be a liar.

Sudan is one of the few modern republics where the legal and economic system is based on Islamic sharia law. Knowing this, you'd imagine that its president is a dangerous lunatic, wouldn't you?

"I would like to emphasize that terrorism is something completely alien to Islam," President el-Bashir told me, in a deep rolling voice. "Islam does not condone it, does not approve of it. Human life is sacred to Islam." Did this fundamentalist leader of Sudan's "military-industrial" complex really expect me to believe him?

A year after my visit to Khartoum, the State Department put Sudan on its list of nations who support international terrorism. The justification? "There is no evidence that the Government of Sudan conducted or sponsored a specific terrorist attack in the past year, and the Government denies supporting any form of terrorism activity," said the State Department report at the time. Confused? Not me, I was convinced.

But former president Jimmy Carter was not. He criticized the listing of Sudan at the time, saying there was no evidence to support it. "I think there is too much of an inclination in this country to look on Muslims as inherently terrorist or inherently against the West," Carter said in this newspaper in 1993.

The State Department said that Sudan showed "a disturbing pattern of relationships with international terrorist groups". That means, as one Hamas official said in 1995, that Sudan is where you come when you've got nowhere else to go."

Until 1996, Sudan naively allowed any Arabs to enter without a visa, seeing itself as an oasis of pure Islamic faith, unlike neighbour Saudi Arabia, which they regarded as too close to the non-Muslim Western nations.

President el-Bashir ended Sudan's non-visa entry policy in May 1996. At the same time, notorious Saudi terrorist Usama bin-Laden was booted out of Sudan. (That didn't fool me.) His expulsion came a year after the Sudanese government had arrested and extradited Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as the terrorist "Carlos the Jackal", to France. (I wasn't impressed by that either.)

"I talked to a man from the US State Department," el-Bashir told me. "I said if you know of any terrorist training camps, then bring your elite forces and we'll bring our special forces and we'll go together to eliminate these camps, if they really exist." You'd expect a towel-head to say something like that.

According to reports in yesterday's Observer, US intelligence told the President that there were no traces of nerve gas production in the factory his missiles were going to hit. He fired them anyway. Sandy Berger explained that Clinton acted in order to enhance "the psychological dimension of power" against terrorists. I believe Bill Clinton is a good and courageous leader, not a liar and a bully. I mean, look at what nice ties he wears.