The End of the Sudanese Left

Rashid Abdel-Rahim
The European intelligence platform Africa Intelligence reported that a delegation from the leadership of Sumoud had visited the Israeli capital, Tel Aviv, and held talks there. According to the report, the delegation included Babiker Faisal and Khalid Omar Youssef.
It is not surprising that a Sumoud delegation should visit Israel, since the government with which its members were associated was the one that approved the Abraham Accords, signed by then Justice Minister Nasredeen Abdelbari. The Hamdok government also received Israeli intelligence officials and, according to the author, opened the doors of Sudan’s military-industrial sector to them.
Sumoud is an alliance representing the Sudanese left that assumed power after the fall of the National Salvation regime. The Sudanese left, like the Arab left more broadly, was built principally around communist parties, from which other groups learned what they called “struggle”, as well as political, organisational, underground, and clandestine activity.
The Sudanese Communist Party itself, the author argues, was founded on a Jewish organisational base. Its founder was the Jewish activist Henri Curiel, who established the party by recruiting Sudanese students studying in Egypt.
Curiel incorporated those Sudanese students into the Egyptian organisation known as HADITU, an abbreviation of the Democratic Movement for National Liberation. On returning to Sudan, they were to work under the organisation Curiel had established there, known as HASITU, an abbreviation of the Sudanese Movement for National Liberation.
Curiel also recruited figures whom he placed at the head of the communist organisation, among them Abdel Khaliq Mahjoub and Dr Izz al-Din Ali Amir.
Sudanese and Arab left-wing parties operated within a single political front led by the communist parties, which were the strongest in terms of preparation, organisation, and international connections. They also benefited from the powerful international backing of the Soviet Union.
Alongside the communist parties, Arab left-wing movements included both the Iraqi and Syrian wings of the Ba’ath Party, as well as Arab nationalist and Nasserist movements.
These parties expanded their influence across the Arab world during the 1950s and, at different times, came to dominate political life in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Algeria, and Yemen.
Left-wing rule in all these countries, the author contends, was characterised by dictatorship, authoritarianism, and repression, ultimately culminating in the tyranny of one-man rule.
Personal dictatorship, in turn, created conditions that facilitated the work of Israeli intelligence and its penetration of Arab regimes.
In Syria, Israel obtained strategic information through the activities of the spy Eli Cohen, who provided valuable intelligence on the Golan Heights. The author also associates Israeli intelligence-gathering with information about the Al-Kibar reactor and with the Arab defeat of June 1967.
Extensive espionage operations also took place in Iraq. One of the most prominent examples was Israel’s acquisition of a MiG aircraft, which enabled it to obtain technical information about a fighter that formed an important part of Soviet military capability and, in the author’s phrasing, of American calculations concerning aerial superiority.
Iraq likewise became a broad arena for Israeli intelligence operations, during which a number of scientists working in the nuclear field were assassinated. The most famous of these cases, the author states, was the killing of the Egyptian nuclear scientist Yahya El-Mashad, who had been working in Iraq.
Israel entered our region, the author argues, through parties it either established or supported, as well as through successful espionage operations targeting authoritarian Arab regimes.
Left-wing rule during the Hamdok period was itself dictatorial, in the author’s view. Israel therefore found ample room to operate in Sudan, where, he alleges, some were prepared to offer themselves cheaply in pursuit of their ambition to govern.
This, the author concludes, is how left-wing rule comes to an end:
subservient, humiliated, and cheaply bought.

Shortlink: https://sudanhorizon.com/?p=16388