Promise on the Nile

THE SUDAN Promise on the Nile

In the dusty, sun-baked capital of Khartoum, Africa's biggest new nation prepared this week for the Sudan's first general election since independence was formally achieved two years ago. On the spreading veranda of the Grand Hotel, dapper officials gazed out over the heat-shimmering waters of the Blue Nile, sipped whiskies and soda, conversed alternately in the clipped accents of Oxford and Cambridge and the throaty lilt of Arabic. Less prosperous politicos gathered for drinks or coffee at Pagoulatos' Confectionery and Bar Lord Byron.

Across the river, in Khartoum's sister city of Omdurman,*inside a mud-walled courtyard cut off from the street by a corrugated iron door and guarded by a somnolent sentry, an intelligent, tough and tenacious Sudanese politician sat on the edge of a sagging couch, downed numberless cups of coffee as he conferred busily with a steady flow of visitors. His Excellency Sayed Abdullah Khalil wants to win next month's election for his Umma (Nation) Party and keep the post he now holds: Prime Minister of the Sudan.

Split at Midriff. Khalil is a soldier turned politician. A onetime brigadier in the Sudan Defense Force under the British, he fought at Gallipoli in World War I, in the western desert and Italy in World War II. As a politician, he presides over a constituency that is one of the world's most complex. The Sudan is nearly four times as large (967,500 sq.mi.) as Texas, has a population (10.2 million) less than that of the New York metropolitan area. From Wadi Haifa, astride the Nile at the Egyptian border, the Sudan stretches south 1,250 miles to Yei, at the border of the Belgian Congo.

The unmarked line that divides Moslem Africa from Negro Africa (generally put at 12DEG north of the equator) splits the Sudan at its midriff, subjects the fledgling country to the tensions of both. In the swampy south and in Kordofan live the eccentric Nuers (who stand for hours, like cranes or herons, on one leg), the equally naked Nuba (whose chief adornments are grotesque, cicatrized tribal scars on cheeks and foreheads), and, along the Red Sea coast, the mop-haired Hadendowa (Kipling's Fuzzy-Wuzzies, who "broke a British square"). Inevitably, the primitive southerners distrust and dislike their more sophisticated Arabic countrymen in the north, who used to swoop down on their villages and carry off their sons and daughters for sale as slaves in the marts of the Middle East. The north, in turn, is beset by factionalism among its Moslem religious leaders.

But the major strains on the Sudan come from outside. Egypt would welcome a chance to annex the country, is meanwhile trying to force it into a Nasser-styled policy of neutrality. The Soviet Union, which recognizes that the Sudan is a gateway to the African continent, has tried its best blandishments. That neither has succeeded is largely due to tough-minded Premier Abdullah Khalil.

With the Egyptians Khalil maintains solid ties of friendship. Sudanese cultural ties with Egypt are close; many Sudanese were educated in Egyptian universities. But Khalil has labored mightily to remind his electorate (some of whom actually favor union with Egypt) that the Sudan did not achieve independence from Britain in order to become a dependent of Gamal Nasser. In the Khartoum Parliament, Khalil personally glowered down an attempt by the opposition to force him to break off diplomatic relations with Britain and France after they invaded Suez.

Cash for Cotton. Khalil's stand against Communist attempts at penetration have been forthright. His Umma Party espouses "positive neutrality," and Khalil sees that it is exactly that. When the Russians offered to take the Sudan's unsold cotton crop last year in exchange for arms, Khalil replied bluntly that what he wanted was agricultural machinery, not tanks. "We're not going to fight anybody," he said. "The cotton market is just a few hundred yards from the Soviet embassy. They can walk there and buy any time they want. And they can pay cash. In the auction there's no alternative for cash." Later he recalled: "They got angry, but that's how we're going to deal with them. We're going to tell the truth."

Khalil sternly refused to let the Russians stage an "atoms for peace" exhibition in Khartoum, arrested and questioned Sudanese students who attended last summer's Moscow Youth Festival. On another occasion he acidly reminded the Russians that they kept a 55-man staff in Khartoum, compared with the Sudan's three men in Moscow.

Though some of Khalil's critics recall the time he edited the speech of a rival politician by indicating with the muzzle of his pistol the lines to be deleted, he has slowly built up increasingly solid support for his policies. Nine months ago Khalil felt unable to sign up for U.S. aid when U.S. Special Ambassador James P. Richards offered it under the Eisenhower Doctrine. But last month he announced acceptance of U.S. technical aid under the U.S. Mutual Security Program. And the Sudan's cotton crop, which Khalil refused to mortgage to the Russians for arms, is now moving well on Western markets.

No Begging Bowls. As an administrator, Khalil is among Africa's best. His budgets are balanced, and any surplus has been applied to development projects. Visiting Western moneymen have been impressed by Khalil's insistence on a pay-as-you-go approach to loans, his refusal to ask for more aid than the nation can repay. "The Sudanese," said one admiring U.S. official, "are not holding out any begging bowls."

The major crop is cotton. But the Sudan also produces nine-tenths of the world's supply of gum arabic, is going ahead on its own with a well-thought-out plan (originated by Britain after World War I) for developing the Gezira region, a 5,000,000-acre triangle of potentially rich flatland between the Blue and White Niles.

All that the Gezira needs to make it the most green and pleasant land in all of the Sudan is water. Because of the area's gentle slope, engineers have only to scoop canals to bring water flowing in from the Blue Nile. Already, more than 25% of the Gezira tract is blooming--a sort of California Imperial Valley development in the midst of the parched Sudanese plains. A Sudanese proposal to expand the Gezira development by another dam on the Blue Nile at Roseires (see map) has met with violent opposition by Egypt. For years Egypt and the Sudan have worked under an agreement that gives Egypt twelve-thirteenths of the Nile's flow, the Sudan the remainder. Egypt completely controls the Jebel Auliya Dam 450 miles inside Sudanese territory, keeps careful watch on the Nile's flow at Malakal and Juba. But the Sudanese, increasingly annoyed at Egypt's interference, may decide to go ahead at Roseires anyway. And they hold one long-term trump card: refusal to let Egypt undertake the proposed Aswan High Dam unless the Sudan gets more Nile water upstream.

Prison School. Ranged next month against Khalil and the Umma Party will be a conglomeration of rival political and religious factions, chief of which is the National Unionist Party headed by short, shrewd Sayed Ismail el Azhari, an ex-schoolteacher and longtime nationalist whom the British once jailed ("In a backward country, prison is the politician's university, and I graduated," he says). El Azhari, who is an alumnus of the American University of Beirut, was financed largely with Egyptian money in the Sudan's last elections four years ago, is campaigning for "closer ties" with Egypt. His followers talk an anticolonial line that often slips over into outright anti-Westernism. El Azhari's main strength is in the cities in the north, while Khalil's speeches for water, cash and cotton go over well in the countryside.

The real battleground may be the south, because Khalil's Umma and El Azhari's N.U.P. are thought to be almost equally balanced in the north. Who will win in the south is anybody's guess. In the last elections in 1953, many southern tribesmen arrived at the polls under the impression that the government was going to give them a big party. A few arrived drunk on dura (millet) beer, and at one polling station a naked tribesman appeared smeared from head to foot with white wood ash. Asked why, he replied with simple dignity: "Is my clothes." Others refused to vote at all, regarded the whole procedure as a remote, devious and none-too-honest power struggle between the "foreigners" in the north. Now, though they still live in prehistory's backyard, many of the southerners are demanding increased local autonomy in return for their votes. Two and a half years ago, more than 200 people were killed when southerners staged a mass uprising in protest at discrimination against them by their administrators from the north.

Holding the Egyptians at arm's length, fending off the Russians, battling his political opponents, Abdullah Khalil is already under attack for seeking U.S. aid for future development. Intent on irrigation pumps and not guns, Khalil takes little pains to conceal his impatience with other Middle East leaders who have accepted highly publicized Soviet arms deals that leave their basic problems unchanged. "They need money," he says. "They can't live on MIGs."

Of all the promising new nations born since World War II, Khalil's Sudan seems to have a better chance than most of making its own way on its own terms.

*Thirteen years after the Dervishes of the Mahdi killed Britain's famed fanatical General Charles Rogers ("Chinese") Gordon at the end of a ten-month siege in 1885, Lord Kitchener returned for revenge and to forestall French expansion in the area, slew 10,563 Dervishes in a brief pitched battle at Omdurman. Among Kitchener's cavalry subalterns in the battle: Winston Spencer Churchill, then 23.

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