الفريق أول صلاح قوش تحت الاقامة الجبرية

Quote: A return ticket for security chief Salah Gosh The 13 August move of Lieutenant General Salah Abdullah Mohamed 'Gosh' from Director of the National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS) to Presidential Security Advisor comes at a critical time for the National Congress Party (aka National Islamic Front) regime. President Omer el Beshir is fending off arrest for war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court and the party's leading tacticians are determined to secure total victory in national elections and a referendum on the future of the South, both due in the next two years. Cultivating Salah In the eyes of Western intelligence agencies, Salah Gosh was an important figure to cultivate. He was, according to British, French and United States officials, a source of valuable intelligence about terrorist cells planning to attack Western targets. This Western view of Gosh was based partly on his role as liaison officer to Usama bin Laden when the Al Qaida leader lived in Khartoum in the early 1990s and more generally because of his active role in Islamist politics in Sudan and the region (AC Vol 50 No 13). Gosh's release of selective intelligence about overseas Islamist cells to Western officials and his well-reported meetings with Central Intelligence Agency staff in the US and the Secret Intelligence Service in London were certainly approved by Khartoum as part of the elaborate chess game that produced Western backing for the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in 2005 and perhaps the latest calls by US Special Envoy to Sudan Scott Gration for the lifting of sanctions on Khartoum. Sudanese officers who have served under Gosh insist he is an astute and ideologically committed Islamist (albeit with a strong sense of self-preservation), however many technical intelligence skills he may have inculcated. They note that his ruthless pursuit of the relatives of those exiled Sudanese who were thought to have provided evidence to the ICC about the involvement of senior Khartoum officials in war crimes in Darfur marks him out as a core regime stalwart. Many go further and blame Gosh for the planning of the mass killings in Darfur, particularly in 2003 and 2004. Few people have a convincing explanation about why Salah Gosh's job was changed. He was chronically overweight and had a heart condition. It may have been poor health that made Gosh move to a less demanding post. 'He just worked too hard,' said one Western source. This did not still the febrile speculation in Khartoum, where there was more speculation about his politics than his health. Salah Abdullah Gosh was being sacked - no, his new job as Presidential Security Advisor was a promotion No, he was being kept in the Palace so that President Omer el Beshir could keep an eye on him No, he was being prepared to succeed Omer, probably at US instigation. However, few Sudanese expected Gosh's move to presage political change. Like his predecessor, Nafi'e Ali Nafi'e, Salah Gosh had survived sanctions against Khartoum and its security apparatus for planning the 1995 assassination attempt on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Addis Ababa. Many believe he was shifted sideways to please the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF), which he had publicly criticised after the Justice and Equality Movement's May 2008 attack on Omdurman. NISS paramilitaries had won the glory for defending the capital (AC Vol 49 No 11), publicly confirming that the multiple security organs are at the heart of the NCP(*). Some in the SAF objected to Salah because he is not a military professional: until the NIF's 1989 coup, he rose through the party rather than security. His replacement and former deputy, Gen. Mohamed Atta el Moula Abbas, may not impress the army either. A couple of years younger than Gosh at 52, he did not join the security services until he was 35; his early career remains obscure. Like Gosh, he is a committed party man. Also like Gosh, Mohamed Atta el Moula is an engineering graduate from the University of Khartoum (his hometown). After two years in General Security, he joined Foreign Security in 1994, which gave him experience in the NIF's operations abroad. In 2000, he was in the Palace, as what the government's Sudan Media Centre called 'Secretary General for peace consultancy'. This was the year when US Senator John Danforth was negotiating the Nuba Mountains ceasefire, which preceded the Machakos negotiations leading to the CPA in 2005. Mohamed Atta el Moula saw it all, being 'Peace Bureau Manager' in the Nairobi Embassy in 2001 and, after three years when he rose to Deputy General Manager of the NISS, headed the security dossier in the Kenya peace talks in 2004. Gosh trusted Mohamed and so does the NCP: he was at the Darfur peace talks in Abuja in 2006 and has attended the most recent ones in Qatar. Electoral expectations The same issues - Darfur and the South - still confront the new Security chief, plus a Northern opposition showing signs of resurgence in preparation for elections due in eight months. The elections follow the recent and disputed census and precede the 2011 referenda in the South and Abyei. Britain, the US (US$21 million last month) and the United Nations, back the elections as a means to restore democracy and human rights. Yet it is widely assumed that the regime will rig the vote, not a hard task for an oil-rich Islamist regime in power for 20 years. Since the CPA, the Sudan People's Liberation Movement has been slow to challenge the NCP. Instead, the SPLM has concentrated on protecting the Southern referendum on independence and consolidating its government in Juba. As one of the two parties to the CPA, a junior 'partner' of the NCP in the Government of National Unity based in Khartoum and the dominant party in the Government of Southern Sudan (GOSS) in Juba, the SPLM wants to be seen to be sticking to the spirit of the CPA and following the rules. In October 2007, the SPLM briefly pulled out of the GNU to protest against the NCP's failure to honour the CPA - by, among other things, not fully withdrawing its troops from the South and withholding oil revenue. The SPLM says the census under-counted Southerners (affecting oil revenue) and over-counted people in Darfur (where most people were not counted). Several opposition politicians have said they and their families were not counted in the North. This prepares the ground for massive fraud in the electoral register and electoral boundaries, which foreign monitors will have difficulty detecting. Already 1,000-2,000 people have been killed in ethnic clashes in the South this year. The SPLM accuses Khartoum of fuelling this fighting, with weapons and money. Both independent and SPLM sources say they have seen weapons, seized by the GOSS, which were apparently supplied by Khartoum to its local proxies. Khartoum supplied and trained militias during the North-South war and some are believed to be involved in recent fighting. One obvious suspect is Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army, which operated out of the Juba garrison when it was in NCP hands. Many still believe that the helicopter crash which killed SPLM Chairman John Garang de Mabior in 2005 was no accident and there is fear that his successor, GOSS President and national Vice-President Salva Kiir Mayardit, could be the next target. The appointment of Gier Chuang Aluong as Internal Affairs Minister, replacing Paul Mayom Akech, in May's GOSS reshuffle reflects a tightening of security in Juba. An influx of Northerners with no obvious affiliations is also causing concern. Counting the conflicts Another looming dispute between SPLM and NCP is over the North-South border. The CPA accepted the colonial border inherited at Independence in 1956. The problem is, it has been moved. President Ja'afar Mohamed Nimeiri's regime claimed a chunk of the Southern region of Bahr el Ghazal for Darfur (around Hofrat en Nahas), and the NCP's demarcation is said to include part of the oilfields from the South. This is closely linked to the Abyei question which, despite the 22 July ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague, is by no means settled. Although the PCA accepted the Abyei Boundaries Commission's (ABC) definition of Abyei's southern, south-western and south-eastern borders, the physical demarcation of the boundary will raise new problems. Due to start next month, this demarcation will depend on agreement on the precise location of the North-South boundary, both adjoining Abyei and beyond. There is plenty more scope for disagreement and delay (AC Vol 50 No 15). Equally explosive is the situation around Heglig, which the PCA declared was not in Abyei, as the ABC had determined. Khartoum immediately claimed Heglig for Northern Sudan, although historically it has been considered in the South. Heglig lies at the heart of an oilfield believed to have reached its peak; quality and output are declining. Khartoum's main oil partner, China, lacks the technology to extract the remaining oil but one of the troika watching over the CPA (Britain, Norway and USA) could help. Oslo has, we hear, offered to help the NCP regime with enhanced recovery techniques; this will not please Juba. In the North, the regime has launched a ferocious anti-SPLM campaign; it highlights corruption, tribal fighting, 'mass starvation' and inability to run a country. The head of the SPLM Northern Sector, Yasir Arman, a Northerner, has been declared an 'infidel' and 'apostate', which for some Islamists is a licence to kill. The message for Northerners is: 'You thought John Garang was your saviour, but the SPLM now cannot save you.' The Sudan Communist Party has also been declared 'infidel', which could be awkward since it is a leader of the new opposition alliance that includes the man who established Islamist rule, Hassan Abdullah el Turabi. His Popular Congress Party is one of three parties in a still unnamed group, the other being the Umma Party of El Sadig el Mahdi, whom the NIF deposed as elected Premier in 1989. His traditional rival, the Democratic Unionist Party, plays a discreet role in the alliance: after nearly 20 years of exile, its leader, Mohamed Osman el Mirghani, quietly made peace with the regime this year. Many (perhaps most) in his party do not agree and, led by stalwart oppositionist Ali Mahmoud Hassanein, joined the new alliance. So have a couple of dozen other parties. The opposition insists it will boycott the elections unless 'laws opposing freedom' are repealed and the regime accepts that, under the CPA, it can no longer claim to rule Sudan after 5 July. Many Northerners are horrified about the prospect of more NCP rule but lament the failure of the mainstream parties, which have had the same leaders for three decades or more. They would back any promising new alternative but for now that is not in prospect. (*)The security service's plan was to suck JEM into an ambush and also uncover JEM sleeper cells. (JEM leader Khalid Ibrahim Mohamed was not an NIF Security Minister for nothing.) JEM's advance was certainly known to the regime, since a police statement warned two days earlier of an impending 'sabotage attempt' after fighting in Kordofan, on the Darfur-Khartoum route. Sudanese sources say that Salah Gosh and his colleagues, including army officers, watched the JEM advance on video screens linked to unmanned aerial vehicles (drones), which Sudan now assembles with Iranian help (AC Vol 49 No 18).