SUDAN: Inept Revolt

Lieut. General Ibrahim Abboud, 58, proved surprisingly lenient last November when, in a bloodless coup, he seized the premiership of Sudan at the head of a military junta formed to combat “deteriorating democracy” (TIME, Dec. 1). No political enemies went to jail, and two former Prime Ministers were actually pensioned off at a liberal £100 a month. But leniency has its limits, and last week, in the air-conditioned, blue-carpeted Sudanese Parliament chamber at Khartoum, two rebellious brigadiers faced a full-dress court-martial. The charge: mutiny.

The two brigadiers belong to a familiar breed in the Moslem world. Like Egypt’s Nasser and Iraq’s Kassem, they are ascetic young soldiers resentful of corrupt old ways, antagonistic to the West, and impatient for change. In early March the two, Abdel-Rahim Mohammed Kheir Shennan, 46, and Moheiddin Ahmed Abdullah, 43, with two battalions of troops, quietly surrounded Khartoum, captured Abboud’s No. 2 man and held him for 24 hours. Fatherly General Abboud, after hearing the two soldiers’ complaints, dismissed his No. 2 man and appointed both Shennan and Moheiddin to places on the ruling Supreme Military Council. They did good jobs: Moheiddin as Minister of Communications; taut, lithe, Eager Beaver Shennan as Minister of Local Government. But their ambitions went farther.

Misfire. In late May they moved on Khartoum once again, with four scout cars, lights dimmed, leading three companies in full battle dress. But this time their coup misfired. A motor-pool major refused to lend his trucks to the cause. Sensing defeat, Moheiddin at 2 a.m. left Khartoum hoping to turn back the advancing troops, but could not find them. By then, news of the plot had gotten out. Easygoing General Abboud had had enough, arrested 18 officers.

At their court-martial last week, Shennan and Moheiddin were represented by five attorneys, including the president of the Sudan Bar Association. The prosecutor, acknowledging the deep Sudanese desire for reforms, said that “the Sudanese nation is still at the rear of the caravan” of progress. But there wars pointed evidence that the two had plotted against the Abboud regime. Witnesses testified that Shennan told an army captain in, of all unlikely places, the public reading room of Khartoum’s Sudanese Cultural Center that “nobody believes there has been a revolution in this country, not even we, the members of the Supreme Council.” Others said that the plotters advocated a purge of the army, with its “corruption inherited from the British,” and a return to semicivilian government.

In mid-trial Brigadier Ahmed Abdulla Hamid, Minister of Agriculture and Irrigation, who had been chosen by Shennan and Moheiddin to head the new Supreme Council, was placed under house arrest. Testimony showed that among those slated for the revamped council (although neither knew of the plan) were one of the members of the court-martial itself and the army’s chief investigator, who had prepared the case against Shennan and Moheiddin. Shennan haughtily denied that he would have confided in a 26-year-old captain (“He was not of my age, my rank, my standing”), and accused former top officials of “trying to sell out the Sudan to foreigners—the Americans.”

Economic Sickness. The inept revolt of the brigadiers had some comic overtones about it, but it could discredit the ‘Abboud regime, since the proceedings were being broadcast last week over the state radio. Abboud’s government in its first days had recognized Red China, negotiated some $18 million in barter agreements with the Communist bloc. But it has since shown itself friendly to the West, is getting $31 million in U.S. aid this year, £5,000,000 credits from Britain, a $6,000,000 loan from West Germany plus $19 million in export guarantees for German firms investing there. Sudan’s economy is far from healthy: its cotton stocks are moving at slashed prices, its domestic revenues are low. General Abboud himself long ago promised that “we will never hesitate to go back to our barracks at any moment that we are satisfied that good government is established.” So far, he has not yet provided the Sudan with such a government.