The Soviet Viet Nam

Like their neighbors in Egypt, the men who run the Sudan have found foreign Communists a good deal easier to get along with than the domestic variety. Two weeks ago, Major General Jaafar Numeiry, 41, the Sudan's leftist leader, vowed that he would "crush and destroy" the country's 6,000-member Communist Party. The local Communists, he said, were guilty of everything from sabotage to poking fun at the Sudanese armed forces.

Nonetheless, Numeiry's revolutionary regime is becoming more and more dependent on the military support of the Soviet Union, which has some 500 advisers in the Sudan. Farther down the Horn of Africa in Somalia (see map), there are an estimated 325 Russian advisers. Last year the Russians began to construct a naval base at Port Sudan on the Red Sea, an installation that will be useful, once the Suez Canal is reopened, in the further expansion of Soviet naval activity in the Indian Ocean. Now the Russians are installing SA-2 antiaircraft missiles to defend the base.

Even more startling is the fact that about 100 of the Sudan's Soviet advisers are directly helping the Khartoum government to prosecute its civil war against 6,000,000 black southerners. (The north contains 6,000,000 Arabs and 3,000,000 blacks.) The southerners demand autonomy within a federation, arguing that under the existing system they will never be given any real authority by the Arabs of the north; at independence in 1956, for example, the northerners grabbed off 796 of the 800 available government posts. There is, moreover, a long history of hatred between the two regions: in the 19th century, Arab slave traders from Khartoum and Cairo carried off 2,000,000 blacks in chains from southern Sudan.

Drums Sounding. Since last September the Russians have engaged in ground operations in all three southern provinces. Last month they accompanied Sudanese army units in a raid on the main guerrilla camp, Owing-ki-bul (an Acholi war cry that means "Hear the drums sounding"), attacking the southerners by surprise while many were bathing in a river. The rebel Anyanya (who took their name from the poison of a cobra or scorpion) lost a dozen men and considerable equipment. A bombing raid against a rebel base at Morta near the Uganda border caused nearly 1,000 civilian casualties.

Russians have almost certainly flown helicopters into combat against southern rebels. They, as well as Egyptian pilots, may also have conducted bombing missions with AN-12 transports and two squadrons of TU-16 medium bombers. The Russians, in addition, are known to have carried out MIG training missions in the north, but whether they have flown MIGs into combat in the south is uncertain.

In any case, the Soviets have already set two unwelcome precedents for themselves: never before have they participated so actively in a Third World counterinsurgency effort, and never have they fought against Black Africans and helped bomb their villages. The situation prompted an Oslo newspaper, Morgenbladet, to headline a Sudan story a bit hyperbolically: THE SOVIETS HAVE THEIR VIET NAM.

Soldier of Fortune. The southerners have received some modest foreign support of their own. In September 1969--about three months after Numeiry seized power in Khartoum and aligned the Sudan more closely with Egypt--the Israelis began parachuting arms and supplies from an unmarked DC-3 to Owing-ki-bul. The DC-3 apparently flies in from either southwestern Ethiopia or northern Uganda; Israel provides extensive aid to both countries. Because the Khartoum government has allowed Ethiopia's Eritrean rebels to cross the Sudan while returning to their own country from overseas, Emperor Haile Selassie has permitted the southern Sudanese to take refuge in Ethiopia from time to time.

Until recently, the southerners were also aided by one of Africa's more notorious soldiers of fortune, German-born Mercenary Rolf Steiner. A veteran of losing battles in Indochina, Algeria and Biafra, Steiner spent some 13 months trying to train the rebels to fight the ruling Arabs. "They fight very well against each other," he once said. "But against the Arabs they feel inferior."

Late last year Steiner was captured by Uganda police while spending a few days of unofficial rest and recuperation outside the war zone. After three months in a Uganda jail, Steiner was secretly turned over to Sudanese authorities. He is now in prison in Khartoum, where his fate will be settled by still another group of foreign Communists. The case against him is being prepared by some of the 50 East Germans who advise the Sudanese Interior Ministry on security techniques.

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