Sudan, South Sudan, and Darfur by Natsios Andrew S

Author:Natsios, Andrew S.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2012-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

How did U.S. policy change toward Sudan during the 1990s?

On August 7, 1998, suicide truck bombers blew up the American embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya, killing 224 people, of whom twelve were Americans, and wounding 4,000 others. (A third attack planned on the U.S. embassy in Kampala, Uganda, failed because of operational problems.) Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda orchestrated the attacks, though he had been expelled from Sudan two years earlier and was then operating out of Afghanistan. Some of the operatives who had planned the bombings had Sudanese passports, and others had regularly passed in and out of Sudan. Thus Turabi’s policies, if not his overt operational involvement, had put Sudan not only in a direct collision course with Egypt—with the assassination attempt against President Mubarak—but also with the United States. Under international law, embassies are sovereign territory of the states to which they are posted. Sudan had just cooperated on a direct attack against U.S. sovereignty.

In response, the United States decided on retaliatory strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan. President Clinton himself made the targeting decisions. Intelligence agencies suspected that al-Shifa, a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, was manufacturing VX, a nerve gas, for use in the South (the owner of the plant had rented a home to Osama bin Laden in Khartoum), and so the U.S. military bombed the plant on August 20, 1998, in what they named Operation Infinite Reach. This facility turned out to be the largest pharmaceutical factory in the city, with more than 300 employees, who produced malaria and veterinary medication. One employee was killed and eleven wounded. Although never confirmed, Garang had told me in 1994 that he had evidence of poison gas use by the Sudanese military against the SPLA and southern villages, but he suspected that the gas itself was coming from Iraq; the SPLA had captured an Iraqi army major during one of their operations. The Clinton administration later came under severe criticism for the bombing raid because officials could not produce any evidence that nerve gas was being produced at the plant. It appeared that the decision to bomb may have been based on faulty intelligence. In addition, President Clinton was facing a pending impeachment motion before Congress just as he ordered the bombing raids, leading critics to argue that his decision was an attempt to divert public attention. This was the one and only military action taken by any U.S. administration against the Bashir government.

On October 12, 2000, two al-Qaeda operatives drove a small boat loaded with 400–700 pounds of explosives into the USS Cole, a U.S. naval guided missile destroyer, while it was anchored in Aden Harbor, Yemen, killing seventeen people (including themselves) and injuring thirty-nine. Three days later, related operatives attempted to assassinate the British ambassador to Yemen. Seven years later, in March 2007, a U.S. judge ruled that the Sudan government had been involved in the attack on the Cole, making it liable in a lawsuit by victims’ relatives.

The Clinton administration’s Sudan policy could be summarized in one word: confrontation.

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