IF OMAR al-Bashir is still Sudan’s president in June, he will have survived 20 turbulent years as the head of one of Africa’s most brutal and destructive regimes.
But in spite of his reputation overseas as a bloodthirsty dictator – one burnished by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court – his motivations and the degree of his authority are often misunderstood.
The son of a farm labourer, Bashir was a paratroop brigadier in 1989 when he was propelled into the presidency by an Islamist coup.
His regime, like others in Khartoum before it, has gone on to hoard power and wealth while using rape, torture and mass murder to subdue people on the peripheries of one of Africa’s most diverse societies.
Alex de Waal, a Sudan expert and programme director at the New York-based Social Science Research Council, calls the phenomenon “atrocity by force of habit”, and says Darfur is only the latest region where it has been put into action.
But International Criminal Court prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo’s case against Bashir has been criticised by some experts and Sudanese opposition activists who are in no way apologists for the president, who say the case is founded on misconceptions of the regime’s nature. They point to the statement about the president in the prosecutor’s application for an arrest warrant: “He has absolute control.”
In the judgment of Moreno-Ocampo, Bashir “sits at the apex of, and personally directs, the state’s hierarchical structure of authority and the integration of the militia/ Janjaweed within such structure”.
However, Sudan analysts and dissident insiders say that is not, and has never been, true.
Bashir did not himself orchestrate the 1989 coup.
As a relatively unknown soldier, he was the figurehead chosen by Hassan al-Turabi, an Islamist ideologue and leader of the National Islamic Front, the body that instigated the takeover.
For the next decade, Turabi and his coterie ran politics and created parallel security agencies, while Bashir ensured the army’s loyalty.
A power struggle erupted between the two in 1999 and, to widespread surprise, it was Bashir who survived.
Since then, multiple centres of power have developed within the regime, which is divided between Islamists and secularists, soldiers, intelligence officers and civilians.
The three men most frequently linked with the Darfur file are Ali Osman Taha, one of Sudan’s two vice-presidents; Salah Abdalla Gosh, the director of the national security and intelligence service, and Awad Ibn Ouf, head of military intelligence.
“Senior figures,” de Waal has said, “exercise executive powers independently of the president.”
The second alleged misconception in Moreno- Ocampo’s case emerged in his decision to file charges on three counts of genocide.
Without belittling the horrors unleashed on the people of Darfur, or challenging the charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, analysts say that there is no irrefutable evidence of a genocidal plan beyond extinguishing the Darfur insurgency.
The judges struck out the genocide charges. – (Financial Times service)