Dr Hassan Abdullah el Turabi

Sudan's National Islamic Front leader Hassan el Turabi would also be among probable targets for human rights activists...

* NIF: under opposition military pressure has offered self- determination referendum to various Sudan People' s Liberation Army factions most recently Colonel John Garang's; seen in north as divide-to-rule and time-buying tactic: process can be dragged on; it believes it can buy southern leaders but can only rent them; some in NIF think ‘losing' non-Muslim south is price of power in north; for others southern resistance ‘to Islam' and to the government makes south Dar el Harbera (Land of War as opposed to Dar el Islam); this is sub-text to countless atrocities and in effect to ‘kill or convert' policy; policy of spreading ‘civilisation project' abroad needs south as springboard; Hassan el Turabi has called the south the ‘gateway to Africa'; oil a further reason to hold south...

Eritrea and Ethiopia had been practical supporters (along with Rwanda and Uganda) of tearing up the OAU's doctrine of non-intervention in sovereign states' affairs; they joined the alliance to unseat Mobutu Sese Seko and are prime movers in the alliance to overthrow Hassan Abdullah el Turabi's National Islamic Front government in Sudan (whose titular head Gen...

Khartoum strongman Hassan Abdullah el Turabi said God had ensured that Ethiopians and Eritreans turned on each other the weapons the USA had sent to destroy Sudan...

NIF boss and National Congress Secretary General Hassan Abdullah el Turabi declared in February: ‘I do not like the party system' but ‘organised party politics is coming to Sudan'...

While implicitly repeating the NIF's claimed monopoly on Islam Hassan el Turabi was mocking the traditional parties El Sadig Sadeeg el Mahdi's Umma Party and Mohamed Osman el Mirghani's Democratic Unionist Party...

This forced the NIF into the open: it chose Ali Osman Mohamed Taha (AC Vol 39 No 1) number two only to Hassan el Turabi...

Their strategy is as much political as military: by cutting lifelines to Khartoum and defeating government forces in the south they believe they can trigger the ‘protected' (by arms) popular uprising and eventually bring down the government of figurehead President Omer Hassan Ahmed el Beshir and NIF boss Hassan Abdullah el Turabi...

But the coming dry-season could be critical: if John Garang de Mabior's Sudan People's Liberation Army takes Juba the NIF-held capital in the South things could start to unravel very rapidly for Hassan Abdullah el Turabi's Islamist government...

The dean of despots Mobutu Sese Seko was chased out in May Sudan's Hassan el Turabi faces coordinated military opposition from north and south Presidents Pascal Lissouba and Ange-Félix Patassé are grimly holding on against armed uprisings and even Nigeria's coup veteran General Sani Abacha has to think twice about plans to win his own presidential election next year...

Whitehall's agenda is more modest than Washington's which envisages the early overthrow of Hassan el Turabi's National Islamic Front regime by the combined northern- based Sudan Alliance Forces and southern-based Sudan People's Liberation Army...