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Subj:   Strategy behind Somalia Interventi

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/* Written 12:23 pm  Dec 16, 1992 by pacificnews@igc.apc.org in
 igc:pacnews.sample */
/* ---------- "Strategy behind Somalia Interventi" ---------- */
From: Pacific News Service <pacificnews>
Subject: Strategy behind Somalia Interventi

/* Written 12:27 pm  Dec 14, 1992 by pacificnews@igc.apc.org in
 igc:pacnews.storie */
/* ---------- "Strategy behind Somalia Interventi" ---------- */
COPYRIGHT PACIFIC NEWS SERVICE
450 Mission Street,  Room 506
San Francisco, CA 94105
415-243-4364



OPINION & ANALYSIS -- 895 WORDS

STRATEGIC THRUST BEHIND SOMALI INTERVENTION

EDITOR'S NOTE: The U.S.-led U.N. intervention in Somalia coincides
with the rising Islamic revolutionary tide throughout the Arab world.
Possible target for another U.S. intervention is the Sudan, which, like
Somalia, is wracked by hunger and civil war. But unlike Somalia, the
Sudan is dominated by a powerful Islamic revivalist movement feared
by other Arab governments. PNS editor Franz Schurmann, a
sociologist and historian at the University of California, Berkeley, has
lived and travelled widely in the Islamic world and closely follows the
Arabic press.

BY FRANZ SCHURMANN, PACIFIC NEWS SERVICE

Despite its highly touted aims to feed starving people, Operation
Restore Hope also has strategic aims that go way beyond its limited
humanitarian mission. In fact, the United States once again may be
taking on a vast new revolutionary force in the name of winning the
hearts and minds of suffering people.

One key strategic aim of the U.S.-led U.N. intervention in Somalia is to
restore the Western-Muslim coalition that fought the Gulf war. A
second is to send a warning to the Sudan and Iran that the U.S. will not
tolerate any semblance of an Islamic fundamentalist revolution in
northern Africa.

The intervention comes at a time when an Islamic tide is rising fast in
the Arab world, especially in Egypt, and a warning that the U.S. might
take action against the Sudan was sounded recently in a remark by Rep.
Lee Hamilton (D-Indiana), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs
Committee, about possible "intervention to save the Sudan." The
Sudan has recently been listed by several international organizations as
the most hunger-threatened country in the world.

A civil war between the Sudan's Muslim north and its
Animist/Christian south has been going on since the late 1960s,
though truncated by a lengthy truce. But what most worries
Washington and its Arab allies is that the Sudan is ruled by a military
junta closely linked with Islamic fundamentalists. And the junta has
close ties to Iran, symbolized by the recent arrival in Khartoum of an
official Iranian delegation numbering some 240 members.

Egypt's president Hosni Mubarak in particular blames the Sudan and
Iran for aiding and abetting fundamentalist terrorism in the poor
regions of Upper Egypt close to the Sudan. For many years Egypt and
the Sudan were virtually one country, and some Egyptian leaders
believe the fundamentalist upheaval will collapse if the alleged Islamic
training camps across the border are destroyed.

The population of the Sudan, Africa's largest country in area, is racially
mostly black -- the Arabic word "Sudan" means "country of the blacks."
It is also the eastern flank of a much larger geographical Sudan with a
long and brilliant Islamic history that extends west to Senegal.

A century ago a powerful Islamic revivalist movement arose in the
modern Sudan. It came close to administering the first defeat to British
imperialism since the American Revolution. The key figure of that
movement was the "mahdi" (the "God-inspired leader" or messiah).

Ironically, while a contemporary descendant of that mahdi, Sadiq Al-
Mahdi, has emerged as a moderate alternative to the dominant
fundamentalism, neighboring Arab powers fear that "fundamentalist
terrorists" could again pour forth from the Sudanese deserts. Six
hundred years ago a great North African philosopher, Ibn Khaldun,
wrote that desert tribes, bonded by powerful loyalties he called
"asabiyya" would again and again attack civilization. And today other
Arab writers fiercely warn against "gangs of terrorists held together by
asabiyya threatening contemporary civilization."

A Western-trained Sudanese Ph.D, Dr. Hassan Al-Turabi, is now being
fingered by nervous Arab governments as the leader of a world-wide
fundamentalist movement. Turabi himself recently warned that the
U.S. is seeking "to destroy the Islamic order in the Sudan," and said any
U.S. intervention would meet a "fierce jihad" from an Islamized army
and large numbers of popular militias.

Turabi particularly denounced the Algerian government, which
denied its own fundamentalists their crushing electoral victory a year
ago. Noting that the Algerian regime's mainstay, the army, was secular
only in its upper ranks, Turabi commented "the regular soldiers are all
Muslim."

Turabi's words imply that the secular Arab states are losing control of
their societies and armies. The religious rulers of U.S. ally Saudi
Arabia, believing his words may be true, have taken a very cautious
approach to Turabi, the Sudan and Somalia. The Saudis, in fact, are
hoping Turabi might make a deal with Sadiq Al-Mahdi for a
democratic Sudan in which even the southern U.S.-educated rebel
leader John Garang would have a place.

But by reviving the Gulf war coalition and going into Somalia, the U.S.
has brought a military threat back into Red Sea geopolitics. Khartoum
is now clearly worried that U.S. forces, with or without U.N. sanction,
could go into the southern Sudan to save people from starvation. They
would be welcomed by Garang's forces and likely could easily
overpower government forces holed up in the region's few large
towns.

And it is Washington's and Cairo's hope that U.S. intervention,
coupled perhaps with an Egyptian military thrust into the Sudan, could
provoke the junta's downfall.

There is an old conviction in the minds of many international
strategists that if you can lop off the heads of a revolutionary
movement, that movement will collapse, a belief that is currently
being tested by the elimination of Peru's Shining Path leader, Abimael
Guzman. The hope is now rife in Middle Eastern government circles
that a fundamentalist defeat in the Sudan could "tame" or destabilize
Iran and that this will eliminate Islamic fundamentalism as a serious
political threat in the region.

The stakes are high and the gamble is big, but it would be extremely
short sighted to believe a few U.S. marines can end a revolutionary
process, long brewing in the Arab and Islamic worlds, that still seeks
redress for enormous and deeply felt grievances.

(12141992)      **** END ****    COPYRIGHT PNS





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