The Boston Globe, August 22, 1999
Year later, US attack on factory still hurts Sudan
By Jonathan Belke
Friday marked the one-year anniversary of the US Tomahawk cruise
missile attack on the $100 million El-Shifa Pharmaceuticals factory
in North Khartoum, Sudan. While the attack killed or injured several
people, the loss of the factory has had longer-term consequences for
the people of Sudan. Without the lifesaving medicine it produced,
Sudan's death toll from the bombing has continued, quietly, to rise.
US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright justified this attack on
Aug. 20, 1998, by citing the need to combat terrorism as the war of
the future, and claimed this factory was capable of producing nerve
gas. Indeed, administration officials claimed that a soil sample from
outside the plant contained traces of a substance used in nerve gas
production. The bombing was ordered a week after terrorist bombs
destroyed US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
But now, a year later, there is not a shred of evidence suggesting
that the pharmaceutical plant in Sudan produced nerve gas.
After months of waiting, with little fanfare the US government
indirectly vindicated Salah Idris, the owner of the factory, and the
Republic of the Sudan. While the government didn't admit its guilt or
confess its blunder, last May 4 it did remove the freeze it had
placed on Idris's assets. (Had the United States not done so, it
would have been forced to reply to the factory owner's lawsuits to
lift the freeze.)
While this retreat suggests the United States had no evidence to
support its claim that the missile attack was to combat terrorism, it
brought to light a whole new spectrum of meaning to the phrase
''crimes against humanity.''
The El-Shifa facility had been called the Pride of Africa at its
opening, which drew much fanfare, heads of state, foreign ministers,
and ambassadors. The factory even became a supplier of medicine to
Iraq as part of the United Nations Food for Oil program.
More importantly, this factory provided affordable medicine for
humans and all the locally available veterinary medicine in Sudan. It
produced 90 percent of Sudan's major pharmaceutical products.
Sanctions against Sudan make it impossible to import adequate amounts
of medicines required to cover the serious gap left by the plant's
destruction.
Thus, tens of thousands of people - many of them children - have
suffered and died from malaria, tuberculosis, and other treatable
diseases.
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