Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory
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Al-shifa_pharma_débris.jpg
On August 20 1998, the al-Shifa ("Health") pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, Sudan, was destroyed in cruise missile strikes launched by the United States in retaliation for the August 7 truck bomb attacks on its embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya, in which 225 people were killed and a further 4,000 wounded (see: 1998 U.S. embassy bombings).
The administration of President Bill Clinton justified the attacks, dubbed Operation Infinite Reach, on the grounds that the al-Shifa plant was involved in producing chemical weapons and had ties with the violent Islamist al Qaeda group of Osama bin Laden, which was believed to be behind the embassy bombings. The August 20 US action also hit al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, to where bin Laden had moved following his May 1996 expulsion from Sudan.
The Khartoum attack was noted for its outstanding precision, as successive missiles all but levelled the al-Shifa works with minimal damage to surrounding areas. But the factory is today widely thought to have had no connections with weapons-related activity or with bin Laden. It was, however, Sudan's principal source of anti-malaria and veterinary drugs. That there would be a very serious human catastrophe was predicted at once by Human Rights Watch, giving details of effects already visible after a few months. In Summer 2001, Werner Daum (Germany's ambassador to Sudan 1996–2000) wrote an article [1] (http://hir.harvard.edu/articles/index.html?id=909&page=1) in which he estimated that the attack "probably led to tens of thousands of deaths" of Sudanese civilians. The regional director of the Near East Foundation, who has direct field experience in the Sudan, published in the Boston Globe another article with the same estimate. Noam Chomsky has quoted these three sources more than once when making comparisons between these attacks and the attacks on New York on 11th September 2001, arguing (in a reductio ad absurdum) that if the US had the right to bomb Afghanistan in retaliation for the latter attack, then the Sudanese would have the right to bomb America for the attack in Khartoum.
The strikes were criticised by many as being motivated at least in part by a desire to deflect attention from President Clinton's ongoing domestic (in both senses of the word) troubles in the Lewinsky scandal, coming only three days after Clinton admitted to his affair with Lewinsky. Nonetheless, opponents to this 'Wag the Dog' theory raise the fact that concurrent strikes against al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan disprove this theory, given that an additional strike would do nothing to divert attention that the Afghanistan strike might have already achieved.
External link
- Monterey Institute of International Studies links to related sites (http://cns.miis.edu/research/wmdme/biblio.htm)