From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Sat Apr 04 2009 - 04:25:03 EST
A mysterious air raid on Sudan - A battle between two long arms
Apr 4th 2009
>From The Economist print edition
The shadow-boxing between Israel and Iran moves from Gaza to Sudan
GIVEN the ferocity of Israel's onslaught on the Islamist militants of Hamas
in the Gaza Strip in the first three weeks of January, it stands to reason
that Israel would also be doing everything in its power to stop them getting
more weapons. Only now is a murky story emerging of how far (about 1,400km,
or 870 miles) Israel was prepared to go.
"Who needs to know, knows," said Ehud Olmert, Israel's outgoing prime
minister, thereby tacitly confirming a flurry of media reports that Israeli
aircraft and/or unmanned drones had destroyed a convoy of 23 lorries
carrying Iranian arms destined for Hamas in mid-January in north-east Sudan.
After some confusion, the Sudanese government admitted that such an attack,
"probably" by Israel, had indeed taken place just north of Port Sudan on the
Red Sea. Exotic but unverifiable claims in various media aver that Israel's
Mossad intelligence service got a tip that the arms were going to be
smuggled into the Gaza Strip via Sudan and Egypt; that Israel's air force
had only a few days to prepare its raid; and that 40 or so people in the
convoy, including Iranians, may have been killed.
Israel's aim is said to have been to stop Hamas acquiring Iranian Fajr
rockets, designed to be stripped down and carried in parts through the
tunnels from Egypt into Gaza, from where their range of at least 40km would
have given Hamas a longer reach than its homemade Qassam rockets or the Grad
rockets it has already smuggled in and fired at Israel. A secondary aim may
have been to remind Iran of Israel's own "long arm", and that Israel may one
day dare to use it against Iran's nuclear programme. In September 2007, in
another raid Israel confirmed only by nods and winks, it destroyed what
America said later was a secret nuclear reactor being built with North
Korean help in Syria.
Iran and Sudan have had close links ever since Sudan's Islamic revolution of
1989, which brought the present government of Omar al-Bashir to power and
was inspired by the Iranian version a decade earlier. Hassan al-Turabi, the
Islamist ideologue who organised the coup that installed Mr Bashir,
explicitly sought a Sunni version of Iran's Shia revolution, complete with
Revolutionary Guards, severe dress codes and sharia courts. Mr Turabi hoped
to cast himself as an Ayatollah Khomeini of east Africa.
Despite doctrinal differences between the two countries, Iran swiftly
recognised a useful ally in an unfriendly neighbourhood. As a token of
friendship, Iran's then president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, visited
Khartoum in 1991, along with no fewer than 157 officials. Under agreements
signed during Mr Rafsanjani's visit, Iran agreed to help train Sudan's
version of the Revolutionary Guards, the Popular Defence Forces. To this end
Hassan Azda, an Iranian who had been training Hizbullah fighters in Lebanon,
was posted to Sudan in 1992.
Iran also helped to set up Sudan's fledgling arms industry, now the
third-largest in Africa. The missiles that Israel is said to have destroyed
in the January raid were probably shipped into Port Sudan via Yemen from
Iran. But it is also possible that some of the arms were manufactured not in
Iran but in Sudan's own military-industrial complex south of Khartoum. The
Iranian defence minister spent four days in Khartoum last year, where he
signed another co-operation agreement "in the fields of military technology
and the exchange of expertise and training", according to a Sudanese
newspaper.
Apart from technical help, Iran and Sudan support each other in diplomacy.
The Sudanese have backed Iran in its confrontation with the United Nations
over its nuclear programme, and Iran has supported President Bashir in his
own confrontation with the International Criminal Court at The Hague, which
wants him arrested for alleged war crimes in Darfur. Israel's raid, however
successful in stopping the convoy bound for Gaza, will have done nothing to
weaken, and may have strengthened, the bond between these two governments.
The Arab League summit - Unity of a kind
Apr 4th 2009 | CAIRO
>From The Economist print edition
No agreement, except to express Arab solidarity for an indicted war criminal
SINCE its founding in 1945, the Arab League, now embracing 22 countries
(including Palestine), has sought to forge unity. Yet its annual summits
have tended to produce either quarrels or platitudes. The latest gathering
in the Qatari capital, Doha, followed much the same pattern but did produce
unity-of a sort. Independent Arab commentators, as opposed to the
state-controlled media, were united in calling it a waste of time.
"The only use of summits," said Salama Ahmed Salama in Egypt's daily,
al-Shorouk, "is that they sharpen trends of rejection and opposition to
these regimes." "The only novelty they bring is new divisions," chimed Abdel
Bari Atwan, editor of al-Quds al-Arabi, a daily published in London. "Rising
non-Arab powers in the region, such as Iran and Turkey, rub their hands in
glee at the spectacle," he asserted.
With 17 heads of state in attendance, the meeting did agree on one thing,
however. Fellow Arab leaders rallied around Sudan's president, Omar
al-Bashir, in a chorus of condemnation against the International Criminal
Court in The Hague, which has ordered his arrest on charges of organising
the extermination, rape and forcible transfer of a large part of the
civilian population of Darfur. Delegates denounced the court for picking on
Arab and Muslim leaders while ignoring the alleged crimes of Israel. Syria's
president, Bashar Assad, said the court had no right to interfere in
countries' sovereign affairs-an understandable complaint, as a UN tribunal
is investigating Syria's likely involvement in a series of political murders
in Lebanon.
But the summiteers skirted issues that have lately divided them. The Arab
leaders said little about Iran, the non-Arab regional heavyweight allied to
Syria but regarded with suspicion by other Arab leaders because of its
nuclear ambitions, its championing of Islam's minority Shia branch, and its
backing for non-state actors such as Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in
Palestine.
On the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Syrian president drew nods of approval by
complaining that, since offering a peace initiative in 2002, the Arabs had
yet to find an Israeli partner and may fail to find one in Israel's new
government led by Binyamin Netanyahu. They reiterated the peace offer that
calls for Israel to withdraw from all the land it has occupied since the
1967 war in exchange for full Arab recognition. But while suggesting that a
precise time limit be tied to the offer, it declined to set one.
As usual, the meeting was enlivened by the longest-serving Arab ruler,
Libya's flamboyant Muammar Qaddafi, who mumbled insults at King Abdullah of
Saudi Arabia from behind his wraparound sunglasses. The two later met to
heal their rift, which began in 2003 when the king insulted Mr Qaddafi after
the exposure of a Libyan plot to kill him.
But the meeting failed to resolve the biggest current row between leaders.
Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, whose ancient and populous country once dominated
inter-Arab diplomacy, disdained to travel to Qatar, reflecting intense
irritation with diplomatically hyperactive Qatar. Aside from hosting exiled
foes of Mr Mubarak, the tiny, gas-rich emirate sponsors the al-Jazeera TV
channel, which often ridicules Egypt's 80-year-old leader and backs the
Muslim Brotherhood, his main opposition.
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