Tyrant of the Month

  President Omar al-Bashir

Since February 2003, Bashir’s campaign of ethnic and religious persecution has killed at least 180,000 civilians in Darfur in western Sudan and driven 2 million people from their homes. The good news is that Bashir’s army and the Janjaweed militia that he supports have all but stopped burning down villages in Darfur. The bad news is why they’ve stopped: There are few villages left to burn. The attacks now are aimed at refugee camps. While the media have called these actions “a humanitarian tragedy,” Bashir himself has escaped major condemnation. In 2005, Bashir signed a peace agreement with the largest rebel group in non-Islamic southern Sudan and allowed its leader, John Garang, to become the nation’s vice president. But Garang died in July in a helicopter crash, and Bashir’s troops still occupy the south.

Even the most loathsome tyrants are occasionally admired for their charm, their guile or perhaps their intellect. The same cannot be said for Sudan’s Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir who heads one of Africa’s biggest and potentially richest nations. Part blowhard, part thug, al-Bashir is a graduate of the ‘Idi Amin School of Dictators’.

When General al-Bashir seized power in a sudden military coup on 30 June 1989 there were nagging doubts about his ability to take charge of the mammoth war-torn nation. A youthful 42 at the time, he had been one of the key figures in the Sudanese military assault on black southerners.

Sudan is a country divided between mostly Muslim Arabs in the north and Christian or animist black Africans in the south. The southern Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) launched its drive for secular democracy and self-determination in 1983. Since then, the Government (even before al-Bashir became leader) has conducted an all-out war against southern dissidents. Amnesty International estimates ~ million people have died in the carnage while 4.5 million have become internal exiles and another 4.5 million have fled the country.

AI-Bashir was an eager, early player in this mayhem. He was born into a peasant family in the small village of Hosh Bannaga, 150 kilometres north of the capital Khartoum. As a young man he later joined the army and quickly vaulted to the top of the command structure. He studied at military college in Cairo where he also became a crack paratrooper, later serving with the Egyptian army in the 1973 war against Israel. Back in Sudan, al-Bashir led a series of successful assaults on the SPLA in the early 19805 and soon was appointed General - scant 20 years after leaving military college.

Al-Bashir toppled Sadeq al-Mahdi’s democratically elected government in 1989 -’to save the country from rotten political parties’ as he said later. With the backing of Hassan al-Turabi, the fundamentalist leader of the National Islamic Front (NIF), the General immediately took steps to ‘islamicize’ the state. Al-Bashir dissolved parliament, banned all political parties and shut down the press. He also stepped up scorched-earth campaign in the south while courting his fundamentalist supporters. All opponents were dismissed as ‘agents imperialism and Zionism’.

Like his fellow Middle-Eastern demogogues, al Bashir loves nothing better than a good anti-Semitic rant. He once claimed that ‘Jews control all decision-making centres in the US. The Secretary of State, the Defence Secretary, the National Security Advisor and the CIA are all [controlled by] Jews’. In March 1991 al-Bashir reinstated strict Islamic . religious law (sharia), pleasing al-Turabi who was appointed speaker of the country’s jerry-rigged parliament.

But not for long. Jealous of the influential cleric’s growing power in the NIF, al-Bashir declared a state of emergency in December 1999 and ousted al-Turabi from the party.

He followed this with showcase elections a year later which he won easily. Not that difficult a feat given that all major opposition parties were in hiding and SPLA-controlled areas in the south didn’t take part at all.

Meanwhile, both international outrage and the death toll in the civil war continues to mount. The General’s regime has been buoyed by infusions of cash from the petroleum industry which has refused to bow to international pressure and continues to pump oil along a 2,200 kilometre pipeline to Port Sudan on the Red Sea. Al-Bashir shrugs off UN sanctions and the loss of World Bank aid, secure in his new-found oil wealth. Sudan, he crows, has entered ‘a new stage. We have learned to rely on ourselves.’

Not quite. There would be no oil money to grease the war machine without the co-operation of a consortium of foreign oil companies led, shamefully, by Canada’s Talisman Energy. Arms imports have skyrocketed with the new oil money - as has Government bombing of southern civilians. President al Bashir has openly declared his intention of using petrodollars to win the war. One press report noted that ‘troops backed by tanks, helicopter gunships and aerial bombardments are torturing, slaughtering and burning men, women and children in a drive to evict all non-Arabs from oil-producing areas.’ To add to Sudan’s misery, food shortages, rooted in war and exacerbated by drought, are widespread and a deadly, biblical-style famine now threatens millions.

But never mind. Omar al-Bashir seems unperturbed. While he was bombing his fellow Sudanese citizens in the south he decided to honour his own success. On the tenth anniversary of the coup that brought him to power he decorated himself with a national medal.

Sudan – mass rape, abduction and murder

"You, the black women, we will exterminate you, you have no God."

These were the terrifying words of Janjawid militiamen to a woman they abducted and raped. Khadija (not her real name) was 20 years old and two months’ pregnant when the government-backed militia attacked her village.

"They took dozens of other girls and made us walk for three hours. During the day, we were beaten… At night we were raped several times. The Janjawid guarded us with arms and we were not given food for three days."

Thousands of men and women in Sudan's western Darfur region have been killed and injured since early 2003. The armed forces have carried out indiscriminate bombings and government-backed militia have raided villages in their conflict with two insurgent groups in the region. Hundreds of thousands of people have fled their homes.

Women have been particularly hard hit. Caring for their families keeps women close to their villages, making them easy targets for attack. Janjawid militiamen have raped and sexually abused thousands of women and girls as young as eight years old. They have carried out gang rapes, abducted women as sex slaves, and beaten or killed women who resisted. Abducted women have had their arms and legs broken to stop them escaping. In camps of displaced people around towns and villages in Darfur, the Janjawid have patrolled the periphery, raping women who venture out for food and water.

Rape in war, in particular when committed on a large scale or as a matter of policy, is a war crime. Witnesses and refugees have testified to the deliberate use of rape in Darfur to humiliate and punish entire communities, and ultimately to drive them from their land. Many women have been publicly raped in front of their husbands, relatives and neighbours.

"Five to six men raped us, one after the other, for hours over six days, every night. My husband could not forgive me after this; he disowned me."

Raped women suffer long-term as well as immediate psychological and medical consequences. They have to live with the threat of HIV/AIDS, with access to only minimal medical care in Darfur and in refugee camps in neighbouring Chad.

The social and economic effects can be equally lethal. The destructive effect on family ties and community relations is frequently devastating. Women who have suffered sexual violence are also made to bear the community's sense of shame. The survivors of rape and their children are sometimes shunned. Husbands may reject wives, and unmarried women may never be able to marry. Such women, forced to provide for themselves in a society that traditionally has no place for a woman to live independently of a man, face destitution and increasing vulnerability to further human rights abuses.