Sudan's Macabre Display Of Victory Over Attackers

KHARTOUM, Sudan -- A week after Darfur rebels launched an audacious attack on this sand-swept capital, Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir presided over a macabre exhibit aimed at crushing any doubt as to which side won.

With state TV cameras set up across a dusty field, he surveyed a row of battered and bullet-holed Hilux trucks that government forces had seized from the rebels. Bashir raised an ivory-tipped baton, and hundreds of security forces cheered, waving shoes, T-shirts and other clothes allegedly stripped off the doomed fighters.

Then he strolled past a 200-yard-long photo gallery, a grotesque display of burned and dismembered bodies, allegedly those of the rebels. Each image was underlined with the same caption in Arabic: "summary of failure."