Sudan has been on the list of state sponsors of terrorism since 1993, when the country was a veritable “who’s who” of international terrorists. Osama bin Laden chose Sudan as the headquarters of his al Qaeda terrorist network before being expelled from the country in 1996. Khartoum’s support for Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups is well-established. The country’s banking system was sufficiently lax that terrorists could stash their money without worrying about the Sudanese government confiscating it.
Khartoum’s new transitional authority, however, wants to turn the page from Sudan’s decades-long history as one of the world’s chief terrorist enablers. The overthrow of Sudanese dictator Omar Hassan al-Bashir last year and his replacement with a military-civilian governing council, which will rule the large African nation until elections in 2022, has provided Sudan with its best opportunity to get off the terrorism list.
According to a Sept. 25 report by the New York Times, Sudan’s provisional leaders may be close to seeing their country’s name off the U.S. blacklist. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been working on a deal with the country’s governing council this year and traveled to Khartoum last month to meet with Sudan’s top civilian and military authorities, the first time a U.S. secretary of state stepped foot on Sudanese soil in 15 years.
The deal under discussion includes Sudan’s delisting from the State Department’s terrorism list in exchange for agreeing to compensate victims of the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombing attacks in Kenya and Tanzania to the tune of $335 million. Khartoum continues to insist that the money will only be released when Washington assures Sudan that no additional terrorism-related lawsuits are in the pipeline. Then, of course, there’s Israel, which has already signed two normalization accords with the UAE and Bahrain and undoubtedly would like to sign one with Sudan, a historical adversary.
On its merits, the U.S.-Sudan agreement is a straightforward proposition. Washington stops blocking international economic assistance and loans to Sudan, and the Sudanese government agrees to pay up for its involvement in one the worst terrorist attacks against a U.S. diplomatic facility in history.
However, the Israel normalization issue and the terms of the final monetary settlement are holding up the deal. Despite Pompeo’s urging, senior lawmakers, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Foreign Relations Committee ranking member Bob Menendez, are opposed to granting immunity to Sudan. Doing so would take away the right of others, such as the families of those who died on Sept. 11, to pursue their own claims against Sudan in court.
To wrap my head around this, I called up my friend Colin Clarke, who is a senior research fellow at the Soufan Center, to ask what exactly was going on. Clarke, who is also a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, commented that he was skeptical about the timing of these talks between Washington and Khartoum. The negotiations, he said, are mainly about politics. The administration is attempting “to stack and claim foreign policy wins before the election,” Clarke told me. “My question would be, why did they wait until now? Why wasn’t this on the top of Trump’s agenda?”
The answer, of course, may very well be election-year politics: A similar agreement between Israel and Sudan wouldn’t be a bad thing to have approximately five weeks before the election.
Whatever the justifications for the Trump administration’s sudden interest in Sudan, the African country has been making improvements on counterterrorism — improvements Clarke told me were slow-going. The State Department’s annual terrorism report assesses that Sudan has “taken steps to work with the United States on counterterrorism” and that “the Sudanese government continued to pursue counterterrorism operations alongside regional partners, including operations to counter threats to U.S. interests and personnel in Sudan.” This is a far cry from the days when al Qaeda was stomping around Sudan unencumbered.
Sudan’s delisting is virtually assured. The only question is when it actually happens. And that, like most decisions these days, will be determined in large part by politics.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
