Al-Shifa Pharmaceutical Factory - Consequences

Consequences

The Guardian headlined the story with "he loss of this factory is a tragedy for the rural communities who need these medicines" quoting Tom Carnaffin, technical manager with "intimate knowledge" of the destroyed plant. One month later, a correspondent of the same paper, Patrick Wintour, elaborated that the plant "provided 50 percent of Sudan’s medicines, and its destruction has left the country with no supplies of chloroquine, the standard treatment for malaria". He continued that, despite this, the British government (who publicly backed the U.S. attack) refused requests "to resupply chloroquine in emergency relief until such time as the Sudanese can rebuild their pharmaceutical production". The factory was a principal source of Sudan's anti-malaria and veterinary drugs according to the CBW Conventions Bulletin.

Germany's ambassador to Sudan from 1996 to 2000, Werner Daum, wrote an article in 2001 in which he called "several tens of thousands of deaths" of Sudanese civilians caused by a medicine shortage a "reasonable guess". The regional director of the U.S. based Near East Foundation, who had field experience in the Sudan, wrote an article in the Boston Globe with the same estimate and said "without the lifesaving medicine produced ... tens of thousands of people - many of them children - have suffered and died from malaria, tuberculosis and other treatable diseases ... produced 90 percent of Sudan's major pharmaceutical products ... Sanctions against Sudan made it impossible to import adequate amounts of medicines required to cover the serious gaps left by the plant's destruction ... Millions must wonder how the International Court of Justice in The Hague will celebrate this anniversary". The Al-Shifa facility was "the only one producing TB drugs - for more than 100,000 patients, at about 1 British pound a month" and "the only factory making veterinary drugs in this vast, mostly pastoralist, country. Its speciality was drugs to kill the parasites which pass from herds to herders, one of Sudan's principal causes of infant mortality".

In 9-11, Noam Chomsky argued that the bombing of Al-Shifa was a horrendous crime committed by the United States government that resulted in the deaths of several tens of thousands of Sudanese people from treatable diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis because they were deprived of medicines manufactured at the plant. "Insofar as such consequences ensued, we may compare the crime in Sudan to the assassination of Lumumba, which helped plunge the Congo into decades of slaughter, still continuing; or the overthrow of the democratic government of Guatemala in 1954, which led to 40 years of hideous atrocities; and all too many others like it."

The estimates of the death toll were disputed by Keith Windschuttle and by Leo Casey, who said the figures were "fabricated out of whole cloth". Windschuttle claimed that Daum "had done no research into the matter" and that "the reports of the Sudanese operations of the several Western aid agencies, including Oxfam, Médecins sans Frontières, and Norwegian People’s Aid, who have been operating in this region for decades, will not find any evidence of an unusual increase in the death toll at the time".

Human Rights Watch reported that the bombing had the unintended effect of stopping relief efforts aimed at supplying food to areas of Sudan gripped by famine caused by that country's ongoing civil war. Many of these agencies had been wholly or partially manned by Americans who subsequently evacuated the country out of fear of retaliation spurred by negative responses by the Sudanese government. A letter by that agency to President Clinton stated "many relief efforts have been postponed indefinitely, including a crucial one run by the U.S.-based International Rescue Committee where more than fifty southerners are dying daily". Mark Huband in the Financial Times wrote that the attack "shattered ... the expected benefits of a political shift at the heart of Sudan's Islamicist government" towards a "pragmatic engagement with the outside world".