KHARTOUM, 19 March 2004 — Hassan Al-Turabi, who knew Osama Bin Laden and once organized an international Islamist alliance, said in an interview yesterday that Washington was exaggerating the reach of Al-Qaeda to frighten people.
“I don’t think he (Bin Laden) has a worldwide network. The Americans are looking for ghosts. Whenever they are fighting or they are hit (they say) ‘Ah, Al-Qaeda is there,’” Al-Turabi told Reuters in his Khartoum home, where he has lived quietly since his release from jail last October.
“The word Al-Qaeda has become just like in the old days when you try to frighten the children. There is a ghost they are fighting,” he added.
Al-Turabi knew Bin Laden when he lived in the Sudanese capital in the early 1990s, and Sudanese Islamists say Bin Laden saw Al-Turabi as a spiritual mentor, despite ideological differences between them.
“I understand whatever he is doing,” said Al-Turabi, but added that he and Bin Laden were not on the same wave length because of their different backgrounds.
The Sudanese government expelled Bin Laden under US pressure and closed down Al-Turabi’s Popular Islamic Conference Organization, which hosted regular gatherings of Islamist groups in Khartoum, including organizations such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Washington saw Al-Turabi as an intellectual leader of the international Islamist movement opposed to US interests and cited his organization’s activities when it put Sudan on its list of “state sponsors of terrorism”.
But three years in jail appear to have mellowed Al-Turabi, who said the Bush administration was advocating democracy in the Arab world in the genuine belief that autocratic government in the region gives rise to extremism.
Most Arab intellectuals say they are skeptical about Bush’s campaign for democracy, seeing it as a retroactive justification for the invasion of Iraq a year ago or as a distraction from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“Before, they preferred an autocracy. But now they realize that there is an upsurging spirit in every country and if you suppress them too much then you develop a spirit of extremism. So they are opening up a little bit now. They think democracy is better,” Al-Turabi said.
But he added “They are campaigning also for oil and this confuses their thought.”
Al-Turabi declined to endorse the concept of a US campaign against Islam itself and attributed US policy to ignorance rather than malice. He recalled that when he went to Washington in an official delegation in the early 1980s, US President Ronald Reagan was under the impression that Sudan was in Latin America. “They (the Americans) don’t know much about issues. They are learning but not fast enough,” he added.
The Sudanese government, which remains broadly Islamist despite the rift with Al-Turabi, has restricted the politician’s activities but Al-Turabi said he keeps in touch with like-minded people around the world by using other people’s telephones.
He has acted as informal political adviser to the Islamic Party of Iraq, part of the US-appointed Governing Council.
A delegation from the Iraqi party, which represents Sunnis, wanted his advice on drafting the recently approved interim constitution.
Al-Turabi said the exaggeration of Al Qaeda’s reach was part of a pattern of using Arabic words to instill a fear of the alien among Westerners. “Even the word jihad, they don’t translate it into English as ‘struggle’. Because it’s foreign, it frightens everybody. It’s alien,” he said.
