Time To Lift Sanctions Against Sudan To Battle Terrorism And Improve Human Rights

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On his way out of Washington President Barack Obama provisionally lifted economic sanctions against Sudan. The action was long overdue. Newly inaugurated President Donald Trump should complete the process of bringing Khartoum back in from the cold.

Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir took power in a coup in 1989. His rule has been autocratic and Islamist, under which political opponents and religious minorities alike suffered. Worst has been the internal conflict. A brutal civil war long raged in the south, leading to creation of a separate nation. Bloody strife still afflicts other areas.

In 1993 the Clinton administration cited Khartoum as a state sponsor of terrorism. President Bill Clinton added more restrictions four years later to punish Sudan for other issues. In 1998 the administration bombed a pharmaceutical factory, mistaking it as a chemical weapons plant tied to Osama bin Laden. The Bush administration tightened economic restrictions still further because of ethnic fighting.

Washington prohibited most business with Sudan—financial transactions as well as exports and imports. The former restriction has been particularly severe, since no foreign bank doing business in America can handle Sudanese business. The potential for substantial penalties has deterred many foreign firms even from engaging in deals exempted for humanitarian reasons.

Unsurprisingly, then, “Sanctions create many obstacles to the development process,” as one Sudanese economics official observed when we met last year. The result is less foreign investment, higher interest rates, reduced trade, less debt relief, and no access to the international financial system. Khartoum officials told me that the agriculture, health, information, and transportation sectors were particularly hard hit.

While flying internally I could see the impact on the latter. I interviewed Abdelmagid Abdel Gadir, Secretary General of the Gum Arabic Board, which oversees the Gum Arabic industry, important for soft drink production. He noted farmers were “using old tools back” going back in time since new American technologies were not available. Sanctions also had damaged the rail system and limited production of Gum Arabic, he added.

Overall the economy is strangely devoid of American products, advertising, and people, as well as influence. But money from the Mideast, Russia, and increasingly China helps fill the investment gap. In October Khartoum inked an agreement with Egypt for a “comprehensive strategic partnership agreement.” Last year the Europeans initiated a large, well-funded project to deal with “the root causes of irregular migration and forced displacement.”

Some American products show up via third party purchase, but more often Sudanese find foreign substitutes. A businessman told me that he imported goods from Europe: In Sudan, he noted, you “find cars from around the world.” The airlines turned to Antonov and Illuyshin aircraft, one Sudanese official pointed out. Some Sudanese go abroad when necessary: one said he sent his iPhone with a friend to Dubai to get it repaired.

Something more personal also is lost. Older Sudanese proudly describe studying or working in America. Even many government “ministers had U.S. PhDs, had lived in America and had friends there,” noted Ahmed Amin Addellatiff, president of the CTC Group. In contrast, younger Sudanese, under 40 or so, typically have little contact with the U.S. Addellatiff added:  “U.S. universities don’t come to Sudan” and Sudanese students go elsewhere. Indeed, El Fatih Ali Siddig, ex-minister of finance, who was educated at the University of Wisconsin, warned that Sudanese are not exposed to many Americans, even though “personal contact can change attitudes,” as it did for him.

While there has been much to dislike in Khartoum’s behavior over the years, sanctions have done little to change it or otherwise promote American ends. Economic penalties are Washington’s coercive tool of choice, but rarely succeed in forcing governments to act against their perceived interests. Although the threat of hitting firms from allied nations in effect turned Washington’s unilateral into multilateral penalties, Sudan has steadfastly pursued its own course. Yet circumstances have changed involving many of the policies of greatest offense to the U.S. Argued Ahmed Badawi, head of the Sudan Centre for Strategic Communications in Khartoum: “All of the issues that brought Sudan to the activists’ table have been addressed.”

Bashir remains in power. An indictment by the International Criminal Court has had no effect other than to limit his travel. Whatever the virtues of the so-called “National Dialogue,” which is intended to promote political reconciliation, the government remains ever-ready to employ the big stick of repression. In November it arrested opposition activists, shuttered four newspapers, and closed a television station to prevent reporting on a general strike and civil disobedience.

However, the government’s dalliance with Islamic extremism, including hosting Osama bin Laden at one point, ended with 9/11; today Khartoum actively works to disrupt groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS, which threaten it and other Sunni Muslim states. One Sudanese official told me last year that “Sudanese are equally worried about terrorism, especially Daesh,” or ISIS.

Even the Obama administration admitted in its report on terrorism: “Sudan remained a generally cooperative partner of the United States on counterterrorism,”  “appeared to oppose the financing of extremist elements,” and combatted “money laundering and terrorist financing.” American diplomats with whom I spoke had little complaint with Khartoum’s behavior in this regard. Moreover, the regime had shifted away from Iran and Hamas, support about which Washington complained, and toward U.S. ally Saudi Arabia.

Sudanese Christians and other religious minorities continue to live with the sort of abuses and disabilities common in majority-Muslim nations, but unlike elsewhere Christians worship openly. The Catholic cathedral sits next to the foreign ministry. Problems are real but are most likely to come, one Sudanese Christian told me, for those who get into politics or otherwise cause the government “trouble.” Moreover, Muslims also are victims of repressive laws: in late 2015 the state charged 25 Muslims with apostasy, punishable by death, for rejecting the authority of the Hadith.

Some who work with the Sudanese government admit that it is its own worst enemy. For instance, two pastors, Hassan Abduraheem and Kuwa Shamal, Christian convert Abdulmonem Abdumawla, and Czech aid worker Petr Jasek, were jailed and accused of espionage and warring against Sudan for helping with a Darfur refugee’s medical expenses. Shamal recently was acquitted by a Sudanese court, but the others remain in custody. There have been other similar cases in recent years.

The government also deserves abundant blame for years of conflict which took a tremendous human toll, but ethnic strife has substantially diminished. Creation of the nation of South Sudan resolved the worst of the civil war, though the latter subsequently dissolved into its own fratricidal fight. The conflicts always were more complicated than commonly presented. For instance, though the fighting in the south typically was seen as Muslim versus Christian, in practice it was more ethnic and tribal. When I visited Sudan in 2015, Isaiah Kanani of the Presbyterian Nile Theological College told me “What you see going on in the south has nothing to do with religion. It is about tribal conflict.”

The collapse of South Sudan into civil war in December 2013 demonstrated that the insurgents were no angels. The United Nations has detailed human rights abuses on “a massive scale” and last year warned that South Sudan “is on the brink of catastrophe.” In November Katherine Almquist Knopf of the Council of Foreign Relations said the country risked genocide, something Sudan long had been blamed for. Washington should feel chastened by the disastrous collapse of its independence project.

The Darfur insurgency to the west was separate and particularly horrid. Moreover, that fighting was, if anything, even more complex: One Sudanese said the imbroglio was an “inter-communal conflict due to migration and crop destruction, plus an insurgency and military movements.” Local fighters as well as government forces were accused of human rights abuses. Jerome Tubiana of the International Crisis Group observed: “The government, the rebels, and all the other players need to work together to stop the violence in all Sudan’s peripheries.” Thankfully “Darfur today is a long way away from Darfur 2003,” observed Badawi. A high-level U.S. diplomat admitted to me that “it used to be a full-on civil war and a full-on insurgency,” but no longer.

That doesn’t mean there is peace, of course. Today some combat continues, but mostly along the new border in the provinces of Blue Nile and South Kordofan (which contains the Nuba Mountains). Again, Khartoum deserves substantial blame, but so does South Sudan, which also has been involved, as well insurgent groups. A ceasefire has been reached, though it also has been oft violated.

In citing intransigence by the opposition Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North, Donald Booth, U.S. envoy to both Sudan and South Sudan, observed that “Just as there are hardliners within the Sudanese government who hold on to false notions that military victory can be achieved, so too there are leaders of the armed groups who believe they are right to fight on no matter what the cost to their people.” Thus, he added, “Even though we hold the government to its commitments to peace, we must also demand that the opposition set aside personal political ambitions and put their people first.”