Sudan and the heart of American life
When fighting broke out in Sudan in April I was transported back to the Hotel Acropole in Khartoum, where I showed up in the summer of 1990 to cover my first war, when I was 26. At the time I could not have been engaged in a pursuit that was more remote from the concerns of my countrymen, chasing a remote African conflict. Yet without knowing it, I was entering an environment that a little over a decade later was going to violently thrust itself into the heart of American life.
In every war there is a “cool” hotel, where the most colorful writers, journalists, soldiers, mercenaries and humanitarians schmooze, booze, and sometimes brawl with each other and the locals, and in Khartoum it was the Acropole. It joined the storied ranks of the Pasaje in Havana during the Spanish-american War, where Stephen Crane wrote brilliant dispatches, the Hotel Florida in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, and the Scribe in Paris after the Liberation, both immortalized by Ernest Hemingway.
In Kabul after 9/11 we actually had two, the frat house-like one run by the Afghan American soft-hearted tough guy Wais Faizi, and the more elegant Gandamack Lodge, run by the romantic Englishman Peter Jouvenal, best known as the cameraman for the CNN team that interviewed Osama bin Laden in 1997.
For all the craziness, a lot of solid work gets done in these places, and much is learned about the country in chaos, the intersecting fault lines of an era’s different crises, and, for the most perceptive, in which direction history is heading.
That was the era of the great Horn of Africa famines, starting with the Ethiopian
in 1984 and extending to the Somali in 1992, with considerable starvation in Sudan as well. “A hungry child knows no politics,” President Ronald Reagan famously declared when justifying his administration’s engagement in famine relief in then-communist Ethiopia. Yet, as Robert Kaplan pointed out in his insightful book Surrender or Starve: The Wars Behind The Famine, in these hot and dusty places children are hungry to the point of death because of politics, and that stark fact illuminates the reciprocal interaction of war, human suffering, and terrorism in these lands, and the significance of that harsh dynamic for the world at large.
When I arrived in Khartoum the politics had taken an especially extremist turn. The year before the democratically elected government had been overthrown in a military coup by Gen. Omar Hassan al-bashir, who pursued a radical Islamist agenda. Not only did he unleash a wave of genocidal violence against the Christian and animist tribes in the south of the country, but he granted asylum to Osama bin Laden and other terrorists.
At the Acropole the talk was mainly about the civil wars in Sudan and neighboring Ethiopia, how they had created the famines and what could be done about it, but rumors that Bashir was turning to foreign terrorists as force multipliers for his ideologically and physically brutal policies were rife. It was my routine to walk from the hotel down Mek Nimr Street to the magnificent Blue Nile river each morning, and only years later during the East African embassy bombings trial in New York did I learn that I had been passing bin Laden’s office on that street every day.
Bashir managed to stay in power for 30 years by combining his brutality with cynical pragmatism. To appease the West and obtain concessions useful to him, he eventually allowed the south to become independent and pressured bin Laden to leave The Sudan for Afghanistan, where hungry children have been politicized into terrorists for over 40 years. For all the hopes raised by his ouster after popular demonstrations four years ago, the devastating scenes coming out of Khartoum show that he had managed to break his nation, perhaps beyond repair.
Countries become safe havens for terrorists in two ways: When the ruling regime formally gives them sanctuary, as Bashir and the Taliban did to bin Laden and others, and when they have become so chaotic, to the point of civil war and state collapse, that terrorists can thrive in ungoverned spaces, as has happened to different degrees in Somalia, Libya, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. The Sudan, which formerly was in the first category, is now rapidly sliding into the second. And despite the sanguine declarations of the Biden administration about its ability to remove terrorists from the battlefield and to address future threats anywhere, that is a vast environment that ultimately cannot be controlled by drones and targeted raids.
So, for all the seeming remoteness of the fighting in Khartoum, on top of all the other crises we are dealing with, we must also face the fact that Sudan, like all these other benighted lands, has once again the potential to thrust itself violently into the heart of American life.