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The Darfur Disaster

Up close and personal with the killers of Khartoum.

May 2, 2005, Vol. 10, No. 31 • By JONATHAN KARL
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Khartoum, Sudan

FLANKED BY 18TH-CENTURY CANNONS, Sudan's presidential palace stands impressively on the bank of the Nile. At the main entrance, elaborately decorated soldiers stand sentry, toting AK-47s fitted with razor-sharp bayonets. Entering the main hall, you walk under two enormous elephant tusks and between two vintage five-barrel machine guns aimed directly at you. Welcome to Khartoum.

Here at the palace, Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick sat down with the most powerful man in Sudan, First Vice President Ali Osman Taha. After their meeting on April 14 Taha took Zoellick on a palace tour, eager to show him the location of the most famous event ever to happen in that building: the killing and beheading of the British general Charles "Chinese" Gordon.

As the colonial governor in the 1870s, Gordon heroically fought to end the trade of black slaves by Sudan's Arab minority. A decade later, the British sent Gordon back to Khartoum to deal with an Islamic rebellion led by an ally of the slave traders who proclaimed himself the Mahdi, which is Arabic for the "expected one." The Mahdi's holy warriors overwhelmed the British, slaughtering Gordon in the palace. Although the precise circumstances of Gordon's death are disputed, Taha showed Zoellick the version depicted in the classic movie Khartoum, with Charlton Heston and Laurence Olivier. In the movie, Gordon stood, unarmed, atop a stone staircase as one of the Mahdi's holy warriors thrust a spear into his heart. Gordon's head was paraded around Khartoum atop a stake, a gruesome symbol of the defeat of British imperialism on the Nile and a lesson to Westerners who try to control events in Sudan.

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