WASHINGTON, June 14,
2001-Secretary of State Colin Powell is right to call for an
end to Sudan's 18-year-old civil war, but the United States must do
more to help transform that country into a stable, peaceful state
that does not use terrorism and subversion as instruments of
foreign policy, a new Heritage Foundation paper says.
Sudan's civil war, the longest-running conflict on Earth today,
has claimed 2 million lives, displaced 5 million people inside the
country and sent another half-million into exile, notes James
Phillips, a Heritage research fellow in Middle East studies. But,
he says, the sides are not morally equivalent, as Secretary Powell
seemed to suggest during his recent tour of Africa.
In the course of imposing sharia-strict Islamic law-on
Christians and animists in the southern part of the nation,
Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir has bombed civilians, starved his
countrymen, turned a blind eye to a thriving slave trade and
engaged in other human rights abuses, Phillips says.
Moreover, Sudan-its government bolstered by oil revenues-has
become a leading exporter of terrorism. The al-Bashir regime
harbors members of such virulently anti-American organizations as
Egypt's Islamic Group and Egyptian Islamic Jihad, HAMAS, the
Palestine Islamic Jihad and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda group.
Believed to responsible for terrorist attacks that include the
Kobar Towers attack on U.S. servicemen in Saudi Arabia and the
bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, bin Laden lived in Sudan from
1991 to 1996.
The Sudanese resistance-a coalition of Christians, animists and
Muslims frustrated by the brutal repression of the al-Bashir
government-is concentrated in the oil-rich south, although oil
revenues go to the government in the capital city of Khartoum. The
rebels have sought to build a broad coalition inside Sudan.
Phillips says the United States should support the resistance
with food outside of the United Nations' Operation Lifeline Sudan
(OLS) program to feed Sudan because the government intercepts or
manipulates much of that. It also should lend military aid, but not
soldiers, if al-Bashir's troops go on the attack again.
In addition, he says, President Bush should appoint a special
envoy to coordinate U.S. policy on Sudan, launch a high-profile
campaign to expose the regime's inhumane policies and strengthen
international pressure against Khartoum.
"U.S. policy in Sudan should focus on bringing an end to
Khartoum's militant brand of Islam," Phillips says. "Were it not
for the al-Bashir government's attempt to impose its religious laws
on the non-Muslim south, there would be no war."