Israel's Secret Role In Sudan

Courtesy Of "The Uganda Record"

On Jan. 9, 2010, if present indications hold up, the 54th African nation-state will come into existence.

The mostly Black African, mainly Christian and animist southern part of Sudan will vote in a referendum for independence. Sudan will cease to be Africa's largest country and be replaced by Algeria in that position.

The last time this happened --- the referendum that led to the creation of the State of Eritrea out of Ethiopia in 1993 --- an awkward co-existence of five years was followed by all-out war in 1998 and today there are no diplomatic relations (or almost no relations of any kind except hostility) between Eritrea and Ethiopia.
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Next year 2011, with elections now being followed by violent protests across the continent, is going to be one of the most complicated years for Africa in recent history.

Israel's Secret Role In Sudan's Breakup
Northern Sudan is one of the best-educated regions of Africa and Sudan as a state one of Africa's most powerful militarily. After the Arab disaster in the June 1967 Six-day War with Israel, Sudan provided shelter bases for the remaining Egyptian airforce place that had not been destroyed by Israel.

Sudan trained Egyptian airforce and ground forces, something that alarmed Israel. The Israelis realized that a strong Sudan would be a permanent geopolitical threat to them.

The following year, Israel started to support and arm the breakaway Anyanya movement of southern Sudan and using the then Ugandan army commander, Major-General Idi Amin as coordinator, funneled arms to the southern rebels.

This was part of the reason that Israel actively supported the 1971 military coup that brought Idi Amin to power in Uganda.

On Sept. 4, 2008, Avi Dichter, a former Israeli internal security minister and former director of Israel's internal security service Shabak, presented a lecture in Jerusalem in which he explained Israel's role in stirring trouble in Sudan.

Said Dichter: "Our allies or our friends in southern Sudan are capable of implementing the Israeli agenda. We had to weaken Sudan and deprive it of the initiative to build a strong and united state. That is necessary for bolstering and strengthening Israel's national security. We produced and escalated the Darfur crisis to prevent Sudan from developing its capabilities.

"Our strategy which was implemented in southern Sudan in the past and is being implemented now in Western Sudan [location of Darfur] has succeeded in changing the situation in Sudan so that it becomes critical and divisions occur," Dichter continued. 

"The present conflicts in Sudan will sooner or later lead to its partition into several entities and states. There are international forces led by America that insist on interfering in Sudan in favour of the independence of southern Sudan, and also of Darfur, similar to what happened in Kosovo," Dichter said.

On Dec. 3, the Qatar-based Arab language satellite TV station Al-Jazeera, in its talk show The File, discussed the forthcoming Sudanese referendum and the secret hand of Israel in Sudanese affairs.

Jalal Nassar, the Managing Editor of Egypt's mass circulation English language Al-Ahram Weekly told Al-Jazeera that when the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak became Prime Minister, his government came up with a blueprint that has wrecked havoc on Arab states.

This plan, said Nassar, involved secret Israeli plans to stir as much trouble in key Arab states like Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon and Sudan that they would lead to the break up of these states in similar fashion to what happened to Yugoslavia.

If true, this might not only explain the inevitable breakaway of southern Sudan in January but the civil war in Darfur that became a major and long-running international news story out of proportion to the crisis.

More intriguingly, it appears to confirm the suspicion of many of us about the abnormal violence that followed the 2003 Iraqi war and the fall of Saddam Hussein from power.

Something about this violence in Iraq was simply too extreme, heartless and well-orchestrated to be the work of militant Shia and Suuni groups alone. Often, the same United States forces that had so easily toppled Saddam Hussein were unable to grapple with the post-Saddam violence.

Mamduh Hamzah, an Egyptian engineer who took part in the Al-Jazeera show pointed out the fact that in 1983 while the late SPLM leader John Garang was in the United States pursuing his Master's degree, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) recruited him and helped propel him to the leadership of the recently-formed Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM).

By the time the Comprehensive Peace Treaty was signed in 2005, Garang, influenced by the Egyptians, had realized that Israel was the hand behind much of Sudan's history of turmoil. Garang started to draw close to the Arabs --- including Egypt and Sudanese president Umar Al-Bashir.  Garang was killed.

According to Hamzah, Rebecca Garang, the widow of John Garang, had expressed the opinion that Garang "realized Israel's intentions, and that Israel was not helping southern Sudan and spending $500 million out of love for southern Sudan."

This new information sheds new light not only on the mysterious death of Garang during a visit to Uganda at the invitation of President Yoweri Museveni --- his first outside Sudan following the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Accord --- but also the possible advance knowledge by Museveni of this plot to kill Garang or his inadvertent hand in it.

This might explain the three days Museveni remained hidden from public view after Garang's death in Museveni's presidential helicopter on July 31, 2005 and why the Libyan leader Col. Gaddafi suddenly turned hostile to Museveni after Garang's death.