Sudan's fledgling democratic process is being stunted with the detention of a leading oppositionist and a flare in violence, warns Gamal Nkrumah When the Sudanese public voted for incumbent President Omar Hassan Al-Bashir last month, its main objective was presumably to end the state of political instability. They did not, I suppose, particularly wish to end Al-Bashir's 21-year grip on power and to give opposition Sudanese political parties the chance to get the sprawling country, Africa's largest, out of a rut. If that really was the aim, then it does not seem to be panning out. The detention this week of one of the few political leaders whose party did freely participate in the presidential poll points to matters going back to the iron- fisted rule of yesteryear. The one-party hegemony that characterised Sudanese politics before the January 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) between the ruling National Congress Party of Al-Bashir and the southern-based Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) has returned. Sudan may be ill suited to the sort of ideological clarity that some opposition parties had hoped for. The man arrested this week is none other than Sheikh Hassan Al-Turabi, leader of the militant Islamist Popular Congress Party (PCP). The irony is that the ruling NCP and the PCP are closely aligned ideologically even though they are miles apart politically. Al-Turabi, the leading Islamist ideologue of Sudan, is venerated as a political guru by many throughout Sudan. Even though he is a professed Islamist, he is widely seen as having had a change of heart and become a democrat who nevertheless still espouses the cause of Islam. That is fine so far as it goes for Al-Turabi. But the fact that he is both an Islamist ideologue and a democrat presents problems for the Sudanese government. Worse, he was on record as having said that last month's elections were fraudulent. He openly accused the Sudanese authorities of rigging the elections. According to Al-Turabi's wife, Wissal Al-Mahdi, a sister of Sadig Al-Mahdi the leader of another of Sudan's main opposition parties, the Umma Party, her husband was incarcerated because he accused the government of duplicitous dealings in the PCP paper Rai Al-Shaab (The People's Viewpoint). Wisal Al-Mahdi claims that the paper was closed down soon after her husband's arrest. "The state security forces knocked at the gate of our residence late Saturday evening and took him to a prison in Khartoum Bahry. He did not resist his arrest," Wisal Al-Mahdi told Al-Ahram Weekly. "This is the fifth time he has been arrested since his fallout with his former allies," she explained. She was referring to Al-Bashir when he was the political affiliate of Al-Turabi in the now defunct National Islamic Front (NIF). Al-Turabi was Al-Bashir's onetime mentor. Together they engineered the coup d'état that toppled the popularly elected government of Al-Mahdi. The NIF did not last long in power and was soon ousted when it broke up into rival factions, the most influential of which was Al-Bashir's NCP and Al-Turabi's PCP. The legacy of the NIF, however, lives on in the fact that the Sudanese electorate in the northern part of the country is sympathetic to the Islamists even if the politicians are deprived of a unifying force and are in constant danger of disintegrating. Meanwhile, the arrest of Al-Turabi coincided with an escalation of violence in the war-torn western region of Darfur. Fighting erupted between the armed Darfur opposition group the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudanese armed forces. The Sudanese government and JEM signed a ceasefire agreement in Qatar two months ago, but tensions remain high in the region. JEM which did not participate in the Sudanese presidential poll is closely aligned to Al-Turabi's PCP. Sudanese Interior Minister Ibrahim Mahmoud said that government forces clashed with JEM militias in the Jebel Moon area of West Darfur. Peacekeepers from the United Nations-African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) were also embroiled in the disturbances. There are an estimated 17,304 UNAMID peacekeeping troops in Sudan. JEM leaders warned that they would be stepping up attacks on government strongholds in Darfur; however, it is not clear if the fighting is directly connected with the arrest and detention of Al-Turabi.
