Khartoum is trying to end civil war

By Andrew Hammond

KHARTOUM (Reuters): At first glance, Khartoum doesn't seem like the capital of a country at war.

The civil war that has raged for nearly 18 years seems far removed from everyday life in this relaxed city of some four million people straddling the Nile in Sudan's central plain.

This week's summit of Sahel and Sahara countries, which has drawn a host of African dignitaries, including 10 heads of state, to Khartoum, has strengthened the sense of normality.

The Islamist government is touting the meeting as marking the end of years of regional isolation that Sudan suffered as a result of its support for militant Islamic groups violently opposed to some governments in the Arab world and beyond.

Ties with Arab and African neighbors have improved since President Omar Hassan al-Bashir broke his alliance with the Islamist scholar Hassan al-Turabi, the man blamed for destabilizing the region by trying to export religious fundamentalism, in 1999.

The summit is one of a series of high-profile gatherings, including an international trade fair, which have filled Khartoum's normally quiet five-star hotels to capacity.

The last event on this scale in the capital was a Turabi- inspired Arab and Islamic Popular Congress, held in 1994 at the height of Sudan's foray into radical Islamic politics.

"Yes to economic unity between countries of the Sahel and Sahara", reads one of the many banners festooning the capital, reflecting the shift in Sudan's political priorities.

The African leaders were even taken to Sudan's reconvened National Assembly on Monday to witness Bashir, who won elections in December that were boycotted by opposition parties, taking his oath at the start of a second five-year term as president.

"This is Sudan getting its presentation right for international consumption," one Western diplomat said of the parliamentary spectacle.

But for all Khartoum's surface tranquility, reminders of the fighting are never absent for long.

"When there is serious fighting in the south, there are funerals in the capital and it (the war) is felt by almost everybody," said Albino Okeny, chief editor of the English- language Khartoum Monitor, a daily aimed mainly at the many southerners who are more at home in English than Arabic.

The main war theater is in the south, but fighting has also flared in parts of central and eastern Sudan.

Last year the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) allied with northern opposition groups, launched an offensive that briefly captured the eastern city of Kassala.

"When there is military pressure, the army needs more money, so in some states there will be no salaries paid to civil servants," Okeny said, citing al-Fasher in the west, where he said salaries had not been paid for nearly a year.

Aid groups say almost half of Khartoum's residents hail from the mainly Christian or animist south, where rebels began fighting in 1983 for autonomy from the Muslim, Arabic-speaking north. The conflict has cost up to two million lives in fighting and war-related famine and disease.

Most of Khartoum's southern residents have been displaced by fighting and many live in shanty districts ringing the capital, forming what Okeny called an economic and political underclass.

"But there is no animosity on the streets or on a personal level. We all live peaceably," said Okeny, a southerner.

Southerners form roughly a third of Sudan's 30 million people.

Military call-up is another way in which the war touches people's lives in the capital. "We don't feel the war here, until young people are conscripted to fight in the army," said 26-year- old waiter Mahmoud Abdallah.

Secondary school certificates are given only to pupils who have completed three months of military service, pending another nine months which university students can defer.

"I didn't object to it, but many young people have left the country to go Cairo and other places to avoid it," said Abu Bakr Ahmed, 22, a dental student from north Sudan.

He said some people are sent to the frontline in the south, but since he had to serve only as a security guard, he volunteered to finish the 12 months before university.

"The government is trying to end this war, but the United States has an interest in keeping it going," Ahmed said.

Sudan has said it wants better relations with the new U.S. administration of President George W. Bush. Washington has included Sudan on its list of countries supporting terrorism since 1993 and appears to favor the southern rebels.

Khartoum will win the war "not by force, but by faith", Bashir is shown telling troops every Friday, the weekly Muslim holiday, on state television's Arena of Sacrifice.

During his inaugural speech to parliament this week, Bashir called for a cease-fire, promising equal participation for southerners in public life. "There should be a fair relationship between the north and the south," he declared.

The government and the SPLA have held several rounds of peace talks in the past but failed to solve disputes over the borders, the relationship between state and religion and the sharing of resources between north and south.