From: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu (Rich Winkel)
Subject: STRATEGIC THRUST BEHIND SOMALI INTERVENTION
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: PACH
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 1992 01:09:34 GMT

/** pacnews.sample: 191.0 **/
** Topic: Strategy behind Somalia Interventi **
** Written 12:23 pm  Dec 16, 1992 by pacificnews in cdp:pacnews.sample **
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
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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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