Bashir, the ICC and Jirtig
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By Magdi El Gizouli
President Bashir’s return to Khartoum after the drama of his ‘missed’
arrest in Johannesburg was to say the least anticlimactic. The
microphone set up for him to address the ‘spontaneous’ crowd which
gathered at the airport to greet him home did not work. Turned to mute
by a mysteriously untimely intervention, the president shouted a few
sentences from the roof of a white pick up and that was it. To the
disappointment of journalists there were no defiant sentences to quote
for next day’s headlines. The only memorable picture was Ghandour, the
former senior presidential assistant and new foreign affairs minister,
wiping what seemed like tears from his eyes in a press conference to
announce the president’s return. The government, fresh in office, was
by no means ready to grant the big man a hero’s welcome. I guess,
everybody was a bit exhausted. In a sense, the entertainment was cut
short, no fiery speech and no jellabiya groove and ceremonial
ululations.
I wonder what he did for the rest of the day. The president probably
needed time to rest from the agitations of his South African
adventure, and most likely sought the assuring company of family and
relatives. Well-wishers of all sorts probably stalked him wherever he
eventually settled. At seventy one years old, Bashir is in a position
to enjoy the full catalogue of patriarchal privileges in Sudan,
projected in this case to the national scene. Indeed, one of his
favourite leisure time activities is to attend the formalities of
marriage consummation restricted to males and to carry them out
himself as trusted elder. Hassan al-Turabi and al-Sadiq al-Mahdi are
in the same business. Turabi, the sheikh, invites both bride and
bridegroom to the mosque attend the declaration of their marriage
‘contract’ breaking with established tradition whereby an ‘agent’, in
the rule father or uncle, represents each. A scholar of constitutional
law and a ‘victim’ of constitutional violation Turabi has come, at his
twilight, to consider the idea of ‘contract’ paradigmatic for Muslim
dealings in the world, from the private sphere to the market and the
state! Sadiq al-Mahdi, on the other hand, crosses into a matriarchal
role to play grandmother and officiate the the ancient fertility
rituals ofjirtig. Bashir is no innovator in these affairs but is
famously keen to attend wedding parties and mingle with the ladies,
almost always accompanied by his former defence minister, Abd
al-Raheem Mohamed Hussein.
Why did Bashir take the risk, it must be asked. Seemingly, the
president was sure he could count on South African government
cooperation in evading judicial challenges. Events played out in such
fashion, and Pretoria was left to deal with the domestic consequences
of its African Union (AU) commitments. Overlooked in the debate over
the toothless International Criminal Court (ICC) and the political and
diplomatic bargains that frame its actions or inactions is Bashir’s
investment in the ICC indictment. While perceived by Bashir’s many
foes, domestically and internationally, as a threat, even if in
waiting, the ICC has paradoxically become one of the president’s
resources, a propaganda tool that he invokes at will. Over time, the
efficiency of the handy tool has worn off though as evident in
Bashir’s inglorious return home. Only Ghandour has maintained the ICC
passion alive. Just appointed foreign affairs minister and arguably
among a handful of surviving Islamic Movement politicians in Bashir’s
government, he has a lot to lose. When the indictment was announced
back in 2009, businessmen paid for advertisement pages in Khartoum’s
newspapers ridiculing the former ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo and
declaring solidarity with the president. A government board of
religious scholars even issued a fatwa forbidding the president to
travel to the League of Arab States summit in Doha in March 2009, his
first foreign trip after the ICC indictment. Attention to the issue
has since waned off considerably, and the president’s foreign travels
have remained restricted to safe regional neighbours and allies.
The elections last April were supposed to rejuvenate support for the
president and the ruling party but were effectively a register of
absent voters. NCP candidates competed among themselves in the
pre-election jockeying for nominations and the president was more or
less campaigning against his own twenty six years record in government
with a negative argument warning voters of the political void that
awaits them if he vacates the seat of sovereignty. Designed to help
the NCP adjust its alliances on the basis of a managed expression of
popular will, the main outcome of the process was the cynical
abstinence of the electorate. The government pretended to hold
elections and people pretended to vote as it were. According to NCP
figures, total voter turnout was lower than the number of registered
party members as if the ballot was a fard kifaya, an obligation of all
that is absolved when performed by some.
The elections however offered the president an opportunity to settle
scores with the more demanding leaders of the party, the remaining
Islamic Movement politicians who still had the nerve to imagine an
autonomous space for politics aside of his will after the purge of
December 2013 in which he dismissed the NCP high priests, Ali Osman
Mohamed Taha, Nafie Ali Nafie, Awad al-Jaz and others. The new cabinet
was further expunged of old-timers and staffed with a pick of NCP
juniors and leaders of allied parties who have only the president to
thank for their careers. Ali Karti and Mustafa Osman Ismail will now
have to make do with parliamentary incentives and prepare for
political retirement and the storytelling expected of figures from the
past. One can already imagine Mustafa Osman Ismail welcoming Turabi to
preside over the marriage contract of a daughter or son, Sadiq
al-Mahdi to lead the jirtig, and awkwardly catering to the rayes Omer
(al-Bashir) and his buddy Abd al-Rahim (Mohamed Hussein),
appropriately rewarded with a retirement package as governor of
Khartoum, when they crash into the wedding party. To seal the fate of
parliament, the president favoured Ibrahim Ahmed Omer as speaker of
the house, while rumour was strong that Taha was the lead candidate
for the position. The NCP bloc in parliament voted handsomely in
favour of the the soft-spoken veteran of the Islamic Movement who
eagerly avoids controversy and probably even opinion; voting against
him would be simply inappropriate. For the party, Bashir chose the
former agriculture minister Ibrahim Mahmoud Hamid to replace Ghandour
as deputy chairman for executive affairs. Ghandour was compliant but a
chattering media man. Ibrahim will adorn compliance with the virtue of
silence. Signalling a further downgrade of the party’s influence over
the presidency, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) acting chairman
Mohamed al-Hassan al-Mirghani, son of the ailing Mohamed Osman who
withdrew to London after the September 2013 protests, was appointed
senior presidential assistant, a position usually reserved for a
deputy chairman of the NCP. Taha and Nafie doubled as deputy chairmen
of the ruling party and vice president and senior presidential
assistant respectively while Ghandour was deputy chairman of the NCP
for executive affairs and senior presidential assistant.
The ICC-shadowed trip to South African was the president’s response to
the political malaise left behind in a political arena cleansed of
able foes and capable allies alike and the accelerated
bureaucratisation of the NCP. Indeed, the ruling party, thanks to
Bashir, is shedding off advantages of the third tareeqa it aspired to
become and slowly but surely assuming the features of Nimayri’s Sudan
Socialist Union (SSU), a party of the state under the authority of one
man. The president probably calculated that the adventure would bring
him back home a hero. Well, he pretended, and people pretended not to
notice. In fact, he would have gained more from yet another late hour
mingle with the bold and beautiful of the capital, iPhones zapping in
WhatsApp time the gold shine and glitter on the background of
magnificent tobs and dazzlingly white jellabiyas on selfies with
#Bashir.
The author is a fellow of the Rift Valley Institute. He publishes
regular opinion articles and analyses at his blog Still Sudan. He can
be reached at [email protected]
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