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By Michael Kevane, Dept. of Economics, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA 95053

mkevane@scu.edu

May 20, 2001

Copyright Michael Kevane

"No embassy without a policy, no embassy without apologies, and no embassy without equality." That is a slogan for American citizens concerned about the millions who have died, and who will continue to die, in the forty-five year-old civil war in the Sudan. President Bush, now agonizing over whether to re-open our embassy in Khartoum, needs to make the right decision.

The United States has no real strategic interests in the Sudan. Our policy should be guided by an urgent sense of moral despair at the scale of human suffering and violation of basic human rights, and by a real acceptance of responsibility for our own role in the Sudan’s tortured history. We need a policy that enables an expeditious and fair resolution of the war. We need to make amends for our own actions, including our cruise missile bombing of a Sudanese factory in Khartoum, which at the very least indicated a reckless disregard for innocent human lives in a misguided desire to ‘punish bad people’ or ‘send a message’. We need the military regime in Khartoum to also commit to public statements and action accounting for their own misdeeds, too numerous to mention.

The way forward is treat northern and southern Sudan on an equal footing. Past presidents have not done that; such a policy conflicts with the principle of state sovereignty, one of the sacred cows of international relations. But while mutual respect for sovereignty is proper in our dealings with normal states, it need not be the basis for relations between a democratic country and a criminal regime. The military in Khartoum does run a criminal regime: of that there can be little doubt, and one need look no further than their arbitrary arrest of their former ally, the Islamic ideologue Hassan al-Turabi. He is now held in solitary confinement without formal charge or trial date. Many of his allies are also in jail. They may have participated in regime atrocities, but until proven in a court of law that presumption of guilt does not forfeit the fundamental right to due process, nor does it legitimize their jailers, who should themselves be standing trial.

The regime in Khartoum is engaging the people of the south in a war of attrition. Khartoum will keep killing people until the south gives up any pretense of self-governance, and resigns itself to second-class citizenship and environmental and economic despoilation. The construction of an oil pipeline, by a Chinese, Malaysian and Canadian consortium, has tilted that balance towards Khartoum. The consortium is now pumping and exporting oil out of the south, and turning over a small fortune to the ruling junta. A few more years of high oil prices will see helicopter gunships effectively end the war in Khartoum’s favor.

Since a mutual respect for sovereignty is not the basis for relations between the United States and the regime in Khartoum, there should be no theoretical or even practical opposition to opening dual representations. The advantage of such a policy of equal treatment is that it will enable the United States really to engage in dialogue with the people of the Sudan. Hopefully top Bush aides Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice will have learned lessons from past mistakes. They will not involve the CIA, pollsters, and spin doctors in formulating Sudan policy. There is no need for self-aggrandizing Cold War, post- Cold War, New World Order, clash of civilizations, geopolitical doublespeak.

The way forward is to speedily implement this fundamental principle of equality: the United State government will treat the people of the southern Sudan and the human rights activists of the north, the principal victims of the current military regime, with the same (or even higher) seriousness that we accord the regime in Khartoum. Treating the people of the south equally means not opening the American embassy in Khartoum until and unless a comparable level of representation is available to the people of the south. It means making sure our embassy in Khartoum is open to southerners and northern opposition figures, from the poorest woman living in a cardboard hut on the outskirts of Khartoum, in ‘thorn villages’, to the more wealthy government fatcat temporarily on the outs with General Omer al-Beshir. It means being willing to process hundreds of thousands of asylum cases. There are an estimated several million southerners in Khartoum, many of whom have horror stories that match the saga of the recently resettled ‘Lost Boys’ who spent fifteen years in search of refuge from the war.

A representation in southern Sudan will not necessarily require a big building surrounded by a concrete wall. Nor need it be a representation solely to the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army. It can be a representation to all peoples and institutions of southern Sudan. Close dialogues would and should be fostered with church groups and traditional chiefs. An ambassador or chargé d’affaires should spend a lot of time travelling the south. Generous assistance for rehabilitation and construction of schools and hospitals should be available. Roads to Uganda and Kenya should be built. A special volunteer force, a kind of ‘Danger-Zone Peace Corps’, could be organized to supply the human capital, local management expertise, and integrity that southerners so desperately need to rebuild their local institutions and capacity for self-governance. It will be dangerous. Helping to stop one of the more frightening tragedies of the new century requires a little bit of courage and sacrifice.