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OP-ED

The US and Sudan: Two acts of terror, but only one act of compensation

The US and Sudan: Two acts of terror, but only one act of compensation
The al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, Sudan, 10 years after the 1998 bombing. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Sudan has, according to President Donald Trump, agreed to pay compensation for its role in the east African US embassy bombings. Surely then the US should pay Sudan reparations for its bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical facility?

On 19 October 2020, US President Donald Trump tweeted that Sudan had agreed to pay compensation for assisting al-Qaeda in the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. As part of Sudan’s recent rapprochement with the West, the former agreed to pay out $335-million to the 224 victims and the many more who were injured.

Unfortunately, these bombings were not the only state-sponsored act of terror to occur on east African soil in 1998. President Bill Clinton’s decision to fire 14 cruise missiles into one of Sudan’s only major pharmaceutical factories – the Al-Shifa facility – was another. The attack deprived Sudanese citizens of essential medicines, which by many estimates led to tens of thousands of deaths in the region. No compensation has been awarded to the victims of this attack.

It is important to note, the US did not attack the al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory arbitrarily. Following the US embassy bombings, Washington retaliated against al-Qaeda by striking its positions in the Middle East and north Africa. The bombing of al-Shifa formed part of this operation. US officials claimed the factory was operated by Osama Bin Laden for the purpose of producing chemical weapons for al-Qaeda. In reality, the factory was producing all of the country’s TB medication and roughly half of its anti-malarial drugs – among other crucial medicines. It is thus unsurprising that the estimated death toll was in the tens of thousands. To make matters worse, no connection between al-Shifa and Osama has ever been established, nor were any illicit materials found.

So what was the evidence? On what basis did the US claim a major pharmaceutical factory, providing medicines to some of the poorest people in the world, was producing chemical weapons for al-Qaeda? The US case rested on one key incriminating detail – a soil sample outside of al-Shifa containing traces of EMPTA, a chemical used to produce nerve gas. Upon closer inspection, this justification crumbles.

Experts have pointed out several flaws in the EMPTA story. Firstly, EMPTA’s use is not limited to chemical weapons. The international body for the monitoring of chemical weapons compliance states that the chemical has legitimate uses for antibiotics – commodities which the factory produced. It is thus no surprise that RJP Williams, professor of inorganic chemistry at Oxford, holds that it is impossible to ascertain a link between trace amounts of EMPTA and the production of nerve gas.

Even if we assume EMPTA is used only for nerve gas production, problems with the sample’s collection further undermine the US argument. The CIA did not collect the sample themselves and had to rely on a foreign source which was likely hostile to Sudan. As an anonymous CIA agent told The Village Voice, the collection of the sample was probably conducted by an actor with perverse incentives. Even if none of this was a problem, the US has never produced the sample for independent verification.

Clearly, the evidence was weaker than it first appeared. Yet this was neither just a case of bad evidence nor an error made by a “well-intentioned giant”; this was an act of gross negligence. Prior to its decision to level the factory, US intelligence was neither aware that al-Shifa produced medicine, nor that it was open to visits from the public. They did not know who owned it, nor that it had been approved by US representatives at the UN to sell veterinary medicines in Iraq. In other words, US officials did not take the time to learn the most rudimentary details about the factory before firing advanced ballistic missiles into it.

What al-Shifa reveals is that the lives of the Sudanese held no significant weighting in their calculation about whether to strike the facility. If they had, the US surely would have made some effort to learn what it was they were bombing. It is this that makes the attack on al-Shifa such a morally repugnant crime. And while there would be an ethical obligation for the US to compensate Sudan, regardless of how the mistake was made, the gross negligence on display makes the case for compensation all the more just. 

While the notion that Sudan ought to pay the US compensation might sound absurdly harsh in and of itself, it might contribute to the development of a positive international precedent: if states commit unjustified acts of violence, they will be required to compensate their victims. Yet, this precedent has no moral value if only poor and vulnerable states are forced to adhere to it. If the international community truly cares about this precedent, there is a strong moral imperative for the US to pay the victims of its act of atrocity at al-Shifa. DM

Jesse Copelyn is a student at SOAS, where he is completing an MSc in Violence, Conflict and Development. Twitter: https://twitter.com/jessecopelyn 

Joseph Sassoon is a predoctoral Fellow at the University of Zurich, where he is working on projects related to political economy and economic history. Twitter: https://twitter.com/jusef__11

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