When fighting broke out in Sudan last month I was transported back to the Hotel Acropole in Khartoum, where I showed up in the summer of 1990 to cover my first war. I was 26, and in chasing a remote African conflict I could not have been engaged in a pursuit more distant from the concerns of my countrymen. Yet without knowing it, I had entered an environment that a little over a decade later would violently thrust itself into the heart of American life.
In every war there is a “cool” hotel, where the most colorful writers, journalists, soldiers, mercenaries and humanitarians schmooze, booze and sometimes brawl with each other and the locals. In Khartoum it was the Acropole. It joined the storied ranks of the Pasaje in Havana during the Spanish-American War, where Stephen Crane wrote brilliant dispatches, as well as the Florida in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War and the Scribe in Paris after the Liberation, both immortalized by Ernest Hemingway.
In Kabul after 9/11 we actually had two: the frat house-like Mustafa run by the soft-hearted Afghan-American tough guy Wais Faizi, and the more elegant Gandamack Lodge, run by the romantic Englishman Peter Jouvenal, best known as the cameraman for the CNN team who interviewed Osama bin Laden in 1997.
For all the craziness, a lot of good work gets done in these places, and much is learned about the country in chaos, the intersecting fault lines of an era’s crises, and, for the most perceptive, the direction in which history is heading.
That was the era of the great Horn of Africa famines, starting with the Ethiopian in 1984 and extending to the Somali in 1992, with considerable starvation in Sudan as well. “A hungry child knows no politics,” President Ronald Reagan famously declared when justifying his administration’s engagement in famine relief in then-communist Ethiopia.
Yet, as Robert Kaplan pointed out in his insightful book “Surrender or Starve: The Wars Behind The Famine,” in these hot and dusty places children are hungry to the point of death because of politics. That stark fact can be seen in the reciprocal interactions among war, human suffering and terrorism in these lands, and the significance of that harsh dynamic for the world at large.
When I arrived in Khartoum, politics had taken an especially extremist turn. The year before the democratically elected government had been overthrown in a military coup by Gen. Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who pursued a radical Islamist agenda. Not only did he unleash a wave of genocidal violence against the Christian and animist tribes in the south of the country, but he granted asylum to Osama bin Laden and other terrorists.
At the Acropole the talk was mainly about the civil wars in Sudan and neighboring Ethiopia, how they had created the famines and what could be done about it — but rumors grew that Bashir was turning to foreign terrorists as force multipliers for his ideologically and physically brutal policies. It was my routine to walk from the hotel along Mek Nimr Street down to the magnificent Blue Nile River each morning: Only years later, during the East African embassy bombings trial in New York, did I learn that I had been passing bin Laden’s office every day.
Bashir managed to stay in power for thirty years by combining his brutality with cynical pragmatism. To appease the United States and obtain concessions, he eventually allowed the south to become independent and pressured bin Laden to leave Sudan for Afghanistan, where hungry children have been politicized into terrorists for over forty years. It was a perfect place for bin Laden’s malice to thrive.
For all the hopes raised by Bashir’s ouster after popular demonstrations four years ago, the catastrophic scenes coming out of Khartoum show that he had also managed to break his nation, perhaps beyond repair. It was always a delusion to believe that the Bashir-shaped Sudanese Army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces — drawn from the Janjaweed militia that perpetrated the Darfur genocide on his orders — would ever accept democracy, which had been the basis of all international diplomatic interventions over the last two years. Despite — or because of — their shared brutality, they could not even accept each other.
Amidst the mass torment these sociopaths are inflicting, the fate of a single Sudanese-American professional friendship symbolizes the magnitude of the tragedy. Sudanese-born Dr. Mohammad Eisa, who practices in the Pittsburgh area, and Dr. Bushra Sulieman, an American of Sudanese descent who practices in Iowa City, divided their healing arts between the two countries. As the fighting transformed therapeutic need into medical desperation, Dr. Sulieman braved the gunfire in Khartoum to tend the wounded. He was stabbed to death by common robbers, leaving his colleague to flee to Port Sudan, lamenting the loss of a great humanitarian for “nothing.”
Further embodying the betrayal of many decades of humanitarian hopes is the fate of the Acropole, the hub of famine relief in the 1980s. Still grieving last year’s passing of the great-hearted George Pagoulatos, whose savvy was indispensable to that effort, the Greek-Sudanese family that founded the hotel in 1952 was forced to abandon it and flee to Athens with only the clothes on their backs, leaving seventy years of romantic lore to looters.
Countries become safe havens for terrorists in two ways: When the ruling regime formally gives them sanctuary, as Bashir and the Taliban did to bin Laden and others, and when they have become so chaotic, to the point of civil war and state collapse, that terrorists can thrive in ungoverned spaces, as has happened to different degrees in Somalia, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and the Western Sahel. Sudan, which formerly was in the first category, is now rapidly sliding into the second.
And despite the sanguine declarations of the Biden administration in the wake of our lost war in Afghanistan about its ability to remove terrorists from the battlefield and to address future threats anywhere from “over the horizon,” that is a vast environment that cannot be controlled by drones and targeted raids.
So for all the seeming remoteness of the fighting in Khartoum, the United States must also face the fact that Sudan, like all these other pitiable lands, has once again the potential to violently thrust itself into the heart of American life.
Vanni Cappelli, a freelance journalist, is the president of the Afghanistan Foreign Press Association.
First Published: May 7, 2023, 9:30 a.m.
