The Mercenaries’ Raid (July 1976): When Bona Malwal defeated the parties of the Center alone

Abdullah Ali Ibrahim

Summary :

Perhaps the southern margin’s attack on the “Mercenaries’ Raid” in 1976 in defense of the center of power in Khartoum tempted the elite of the margin in the “Rapid Support RSF” to complicate their grievances against this center so that they see themselves as partners in the center, not employees.
On July 2, the 48th anniversary of the attack of the National Front, an alliance formed between the Umma Party, the National Unionist Party, and the Muslim Brotherhood, on Khartoum across the desert from their positions in Libya to overthrow the regime of President Jaafar Nimeiri, passed.
It took the state only three days to disperse their gathering and turn them back.
To isolate the opposition attack, the regime’s media described what the armed forces SAF are doing today in response to the attack by the “Rapid Support forces RSF as a “foreign mercenaries’ raid” until it became known as the “Mercenaries’ Raid” in political literature, whether you agree with the name or not.
Perhaps those who did not agree put it in parentheses in order to convey understandings without being bound by the opinion contained in the description.
This anniversary comes and to this day, and for more than a year, an armed attack has been taking place in the name of the margin in Sudan to change the “State of 56” under the pretext of the monopoly of the northern Nile elite, or rather all of its people in an extremist narrative, its center since Sudan’s independence in 1956 and its benefits.
Here we will go beyond the significance of the 1976 “Mercenary Raid”, which is that this center, which the margin depicts as a body that if it feels feverish, the rest of it will collapse due to its excessive solidarity and strength, was not like that in reality.
So, in the “Mercenary Raid”, the dominant parties of the center came out against one of its regimes, Nimeiri regime, to remove him from power by force.
This was repeated in the October 1964 Revolution, the 1985 Revolution, and the most recent of which was December 2018.
So the disagreement is the master of the situation in the center, not the valve, as the elite in the margin claim.
The most important issue raised by the “mercenary invasion” is whether the center, since it was purely for its elite and its elite, did the margin not interfere with it for a reason, interest or aversion? In other words: Was the margin innocent of the center’s ugliness if this ugliness is what incites people against it in this day of Muslims?
It is known that South Sudan played a decisive role in eliminating the “mercenary invasion”. Bona Malwal, the journalist and Minister of Information in Nimeiri’s state (1972-1978), provided an interesting biography of that role in his book “Sudan and South Sudan: From One Sudan to Two Sudans” (2015).
Malwal, from his account, is almost the only one who eliminated the “mercenary invasion” from above the media roles that he had arranged and reaped the fruits of when the need arose for them.
On the day of the invasion, Malwal was among the statesmen who were receiving Nimeiri at the airport when he returned from a foreign visit. The “mercenaries” attack on the airport began, but the plane landed safely and Nimeiri got out to get into a car that was prepared for him to a safe location.
Maj. Gen.Mohamed El-Baqir Ahmed, the Vice President of the Republic, called on those who were welcoming him to disperse. Malwal followed Maj.Gen.El-Baqir’s car, which was accompanied by Maj.Gen. Khaled Hassan Abbas, a member of the dissolved Command Council of the May 25, 1969 coup, to catch up with him and find out what was going on.
El-Baqir headed to the General Command, and no sooner had his car approached its gate than they were stopped by a group that Malwal described as “strange-looking people.”
The car turned quickly for Malwal to confront Maj. Gen. El-Baqir, who opened the door and told him, “Father, I have told you to go home.” Malwal said that at that moment it seemed to him that the matter was truly serious. Malwal went to his house, which was located near the General Command. As soon as he entered it, a friend from the police officers came to him to convey to him the news of a coup from an unknown source, and to ask him and his family to leave their dangerous home in his car and go home.
Bona refused to leave, although he told his friend to take his family and a guest with him to a safe place because as a minister in the state he wanted to know what was going on before he made the decision to hide himself.
When Malwal went out to go to his office in the Ministry of Information, he knew by instinct that what was happening was not an ordinary coup.
He was of course aware of the communication system between the leaders of the state, which he had contributed to as Minister of Information. It was based on two methods: either the regular telephone or another secure one for the president, his ministers and the leaders of the regular forces.
Malwal tested both systems in his home, and found the regular telephone out of order. It later became clear that the one who did this was a technical battalion of the Muslim Brotherhood who had occupied the telephone house in the center of Khartoum, close to the Ministry of Information.
He found the secret telephone working. In view of this situation, Malwal agreed that what was happening was not an ordinary coup. If it had been an army coup, his commander would have disabled the secret telephone to secure his coup, but that did not happen this time.
In his office, Malwal found the secret telephone working as he expected. There he decided to stay to manage the battle to repel the invaders with that unique possibility, and to say that he turned the ministry building into an operations room for three days.
He hit President Nimeiri but there was no response. He hit Major General Al-Baqir. He said that he was annoyed by the telephone and happy with it at the same time. The Maj. Gen. said annoyed, “Bona, you did not obey my order to go home.” However, according to Malwal, the Maj. Gen. was happy with their companionship at a difficult turning point in the country.
Malwal touched on the systems he had established in the ministry to secure his country from being attacked. The “invaders'” occupation of the radio did not benefit them because they failed to operate it and would have failed to broadcast anything to the citizens even if they had occupied the transmission station in the suburb of Soba.
The government had arranged a system in Umm Jaras station to disable the broadcast from Omdurman and Soba radio stations. Even more cunning was their connection of Umm Jaras station to Radio Juba, the capital of the southern region, to serve as an alternative radio station whenever Radio Omdurman was put out of service by coup plotters or others.
Juba replaced Omdurman, broadcasting government statements to the people about the foreign mercenaries who had invaded the country and reassuring them that the state, led by Gaafar Nimeiri, would send them back humiliated.
The secret telephone operation encouraged General Al-Baqir to ask Malwal to try to contact President Anwar Sadat to send the 500 Sudanese soldiers who had been stationed on the border between Egypt and Israel after the 1973 war.
Malwal sent some of his office staff to the Egyptian ambassador, Saad Al-Fatatri, to convey the Sudanese government’s desire.
Egypt’s response was that the soldiers would arrive in Khartoum within three hours if they could guarantee that Khartoum airport was under government control. Malwal replied that the airport was indeed under government control, but he knew that this was not entirely true.
The airport was adjacent to the General Command, whose battle was still ongoing. But he was waiting for that control of the airport when forces from Shendi, Madani and Gedarif arrived in Khartoum. By calculating the time of arrival of those forces in Khartoum, Malwal believed that he had given Sadat enough time to send the soldiers and liberate the airport. Bona later learned from Major General Youssef Ahmed Youssef that there were only 37 soldiers in the General Command that day while it was under fire from the “invaders”.
To terrorize the invaders, he distributed them along the defense line to take turns firing so that the enemy would think that the intensity of the fire was an indication of their large numbers, which they were not.
The international press came to Khartoum and asked to see those mercenaries who stormed the Khartoum courtyard. Malwal asked Maj.Gen. Al-Baqir to bring him some of them so that the international media could see them and believe them. Al-Baqir told him how he could believe that their soldiers would find a mercenary and leave him alive for him to show to the journalists, and he said that we killed them all. After the Major General’s answer, Malwal decided to stop talking about foreigners and mercenaries because it was difficult to prove the incident. However, he believed that there was a group of them in the “raid” under the lure of the National Front. He said that some of them fled the confrontation and took refuge with families who handed them over to the authorities.

Malwal’s stand was not in defense of one of the systems of the 56 State of the mind. He said that it came from his conviction that if a person assumes responsibility in the state, it is a national trust that he bears its burden with strength, even sacrificing his life. The trust hanging over his conscience at that time was the self-rule system in the south, which the southern nationalists and the center agreed upon in the “Addis Ababa Agreement” (1972).

The agreement guaranteed the south powers to manage its affairs according to the laws of democracy, which the north (i.e. the center) itself did not enjoy under the control of President Nimeiri and his one party, not to mention the agreement stopping the civil war that had been going on since 1963, so that the south would live a decade of peace that it had not enjoyed even after it gained independence from Sudan.
Malwal could not entrust the protection of that southern national gain with the center even to the center. He said that he could have let the center strike the center and the south come out safe, as the phrase goes. He could have, in his words, hidden himself from events as the head of the regime himself did by securing himself in a suburb of Khartoum. Mansour agreed with him about President Nimeiri’s absence from the wheel of leadership during those critical days in his book “Sudan and the Dark Tunnel”. We saw him reject his friend’s offer to leave his house to take refuge in a house other than his own. He also disobeyed General Al-Baqir’s order twice to leave the order and stay in his house.
In fact, he knew that he was sitting above a communications channel that had been carefully designed to protect the regime at such a juncture. Malwal, on top of this and that, knew what the National Front had in mind for the “Addis Ababa Agreement” when it defeated the Nimeiri regime.
I strongly criticized it when it was first signed and wrote to President Gaddafi about the Nimeiri regime’s squandering of the unity of Sudan and the Arabs by signing a suspicious agreement behind which were the World Council of Churches( WCC) ,Emperor Haile Selassie and the American intelligence.
Malwal is convinced today, like many southerners, that Nimeiri’s attack on the “Addis Ababa Agreement” and its unilateral cancellation in 1983 was the work of the National Front, with which he had reconciled in 1977. Perhaps the southern fringe’s attack on the “mercenary invasion” in 1976 in defense of the ruling center in Khartoum is what tempts the elite of the fringe in the “Rapid Support RSF to complicate their grievances against this center so that they see themselves as partners in the center, not as employees.