Khartoum cracks down on the Islamist opposition as the bloodshed in Darfur shows little sign of abating, writes Gamal Nkrumah There is no love lost between Hassan Al- Turabi, Sudan's chief Islamist ideologue and leader of the opposition Popular Congress Party (PCP), and the Sudanese government. Al-Turabi, the former speaker of the Sudanese parliament and a one-time ideological mentor of Sudanese President Omar Hassan Al-Beshir, was unexpectedly freed from three years of house arrest last October. Since then, he has been a thorn in the flesh of the Sudanese government. Not only does Al-Turabi preach democratisation, albeit Islamist-style, but he is now allegedly supporting insurrectionist groups in the war- torn province of Darfur, western Sudan. On Tuesday, the Sudanese authorities summoned Al-Turabi's deputy Abdullah Hassan Ahmed for questioning. Sudanese security forces launched a wave of arrests in which several PCP leaders were detained. Sudanese security forces said they were implicated in the uprising in Darfur. The Sudanese authorities claim that several Sudanese army officers were plotting a coup d'état to oust President Al-Beshir. Ten officers with strong political connections to Al-Turabi were arrested. These officers reportedly hail from Darfur and other parts of western Sudan, and the Sudanese government considered their loyalty suspect. On Wednesday, the crisis escalated and Al-Turabi's family announced that he has been arrested by security forces. It also transpired that 30 officers were in detention. The former mayor of Khartoum Badruddin Taha and a close Al-Turabi political associate went into hiding. Apparently, he is accused by the Sudanese authorities of supporting the insurrectionists in Darfur. News of the Sudanese coup attempt came with peace talks scheduled to take place in Chad between the Sudanese government and representatives of the Darfur insurrectionist groups on Tuesday in the Chadian capital Ndjamena. Rival warring factions in Darfur have resorted to kidnapping foreigners in order to publicise their causes. A Chinese hydraulic engineer was released this week after being held captive for four weeks in Darfur. The Sudanese authorities have periodically launched pogroms in the army to weed out officers who are not considered loyal to the Sudanese government. The ethnic composition of the Sudanese army has come under closer scrutiny lately. Westerners, including those from Darfur, constitute roughly between 60-65 per cent of the Sudanese armed forces, but usually are restricted to the lower ranks. Westerners make up some 30-35 per cent of Sudanese cadet officers. The number of southerners in the Sudanese armed forces is also increasing quickly. Al-Turabi wields powerful influence among certain segments of Darfur society. Darfur, a traditional Islamist stronghold, is composed of different ethnic groups and its politics are characterised by fierce ideological competition between various Islamist and secularist factions. An estimated 670,000 people have been rendered homeless since the outbreak of hostilities in Darfur in February 2003, while 10,000 have died. The UN has described Darfur as currently "the world's greatest humanitarian and human rights catastrophe". Furthermore, the UN has identified Sudanese government-linked paramilitary groups as being responsible for the worst atrocities and human rights violations in Darfur. Unlike southern Sudan, whose people are mainly animist and Christian, Darfur is a staunchly Muslim region. There are many different ethnic groups in Darfur -- the largest being the indigenous Fur, followed by the Zaghawa, who are militarily supported by their kin across the border in Chad, and a number of Arabised tribes. The Sudanese government is especially concerned about the involvement of elements sympathetic to Al-Turabi in the Darfur conflict, but the latter insists that the Darfur insurrectionist groups are up in arms because of their region's political marginalisation and economic underdevelopment. The Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) has recently joined the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). The NDA is the umbrella opposition organisation grouping the southern-based Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) and other, mainly northern, Sudanese opposition parties. The SLA, the chief armed opposition group in Darfur, signed a cease-fire deal with the Sudanese government two months ago that raised hopes of a peaceful resolution to the armed uprisings in Darfur. But tensions resurfaced soon after the SLA joined the NDA. Meanwhile, the other main Darfur rebel organisation, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), has so far refused to conclude a peace deal with the Sudanese government. Unlike the secularist and leftist SLA, JEM is a militant Islamist organisation reputedly linked to the PCP. JEM also is suspected of having links with several militant Islamist groups in Africa and around the world. Al-Turabi hotly denies charges that he aided and abetted the Darfur rebellion, accusing the Sudanese government of creating the problem by politically marginalising Darfur. He believes that the mounting social problems and economic woes of the region left its long-suffering people with only one option: to fight the Sudanese government forces. The NDA dispatched a delegation to Paris headed by Al-Shefie Khedr to discuss the latest political and military developments with representatives of Darfur groups including the SLA and JEM. "There is no evidence of a coup plot. The Sudanese government conjured this coup up in order to deflect attention from its planned military campaign against the people of Darfur," Farouk Abu Eissa, former head of the Cairo- based Arab Lawyers Union and official spokesman for the NDA told Al-Ahram Weekly. "The coup is a pretext to unleash the full force of the government in Darfur," he added. Meanwhile, in Naivasha, 80 kilometres northwest of the Kenyan capital Nairobi, peace talks between Sudanese Vice President Ali Othman Taha and John Garang the leader of the SPLA, the country's largest armed opposition group, have reached an advanced state. However, the two sides are making little progress in the prickly question of power-sharing in Sudan. The Sudanese peace talks are taking place under the auspices of the Inter-Governmental Authority for Development (IGAD), a regional organisation of seven East African countries, including Sudan. The fighting in Darfur is not included in the agenda at Naivasha. The Kenya talks are strictly restricted to the 21-year conflict between the SPLA and the Sudanese government forces. In a separate development, the United States released two Sudanese nationals who had been detained at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The US State Department notified the Sudanese embassy in Washington that it was flying the two detainees back to Sudan on a US military warplane. The US authorities also plan to release nine more Sudanese nationals detained in Guantanamo Bay. The Sudanese authorities stressed that no charges were brought against the Sudanese nationals incarcerated at Guantanamo.
