This week's referendum for the independence of South Sudan represents a major blow to one of the worst regimes in the world: the Sudanese government under General Omar al-Bashir, who has been its president. The Khartoum government not only has to renounce control over roughly a third of its territory, which unlike northern Sudan is not Muslim, but it also is losing at least half if not more of of its oil resources, which it must share with the new state in southern Sudan. Al-Bashir deserves being handed a defeat on this scale. Since he first came to power in a military coup in 1989, al-Bashir has made Sudan into one of the major backers of international terrorism, while his army engaged in genocidal activities in the Western Sudanese province of Darfur.
Most observers are not fully aware of how Sudan has contributed to international terrorism over the years. The transition of Sudan to a state-supporter of terrorism was facilitated by al-Bashir's political alliance in the 1990's with Hassan Turabi, the leader pf the National Islamic Front, which was the Sudanese branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. It was the first time the Muslim Brotherhood came to power in the Middle East (the second time was through the 2006 Palestinian elections, which brought Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood to power). The Sudanese leadership did not sent terrorists to attack the West, however they became willing to provide sanctuary to the most dangerous Islamist organizations from al-Qaeda to Hamas.
For example, in April 1991, Sudan hosted an anti-American conference for radical Islamists which brought together Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Afghan mujahidin, and even Osama bin Laden, who based his activities in Sudan until 1996. At subsequent Sudanese conferences, Hizbullah also attended. During this period, Hamas opened training camps in Sudan, where terrorists like Hassan Salameh, one of the masterminds of the 1996 wave of bombing attacks, was trained. Egypt charged that Sudan hosted the the members of the Egyptian Islamic Group who attempted in 1995 to assassinate President Husni Mubarak in Addis Ababa.
Sudan not only hosted bin Laden, it also reached out to the Iranians. In 1991, President Rafsanjani arrived in Khartoum with a large delegation that included the commander of the Revolutionary Guards. Western intelligence agencies estimated that Iran stationed some 2,000 Revolutionary Guards in Sudan in this period. The Iranian investment in Sudan was partly based on the hope of converting Port Sudan into a base for the Iranian Navy, once it acquired the capability to deploy ships in the Red Sea. In January 2009, Iran delivered a shipment of long-range rockets for Hamas to Port Sudan; according to American sources, Israeli aircraft destroyed a weapons convoy with the Iranian rockets on Sudanese soil.
Sudan's reputation in the international community has been stained by its involvement in genocide. Khartoum's attacks in western Sudan, known as Darfur, that began in 2003 and has taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians who were killed by militias supported by the Sudanese government. The US Department of State described the killings in Darfur as genocide (a legal determination that the UN refused to accept). In any case, in 2009, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for President al-Bashir for the crime of genocide. Coming to Bashir's defense have been the Arab states as well as Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.
Al-Bashir certainly earned the breakup of Sudan for the policies he followed over the last 20 years. This past week there has been a concern expressed in Arabic newspapers, like al-Hayat, that what is happening in Sudan is a contagious disease that will spread to the rest of the Arab world, leading to the breakup of Arab states, as occurred in the Balkans. As much as the freedom of South Sudan should be celebrated, Israel certainly should have no interest in this process of the breakup of states spreading elsewhere in the Middle East. The weakening of the Arab state system will only benefit Iran, which both Israel and the Arab states both must contain.
