Twenty-five years ago, on Aug. 20, 1998, without warning, the United States bombed the largest pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. After destroying Sudan’s principal source of medicine, tens of thousands of people all over Africa likely died. This war crime has largely been scrubbed from living memory in the West.

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The Clinton administration ordered the cruise missile attack on al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory — and a simultaneous attack on Afghanistan — two weeks after U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were bombed, acts attributed by the White House to its former ally, exiled-Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden. … Though none of the perpetrators of the Aug. 7 embassy bombings were Sudanese and nothing connected the attacks to the country, the United States decided to hit Sudan. Their target: Sudan’s most prized, life-sustaining medicine factory.

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President Bill Clinton rationalized his retaliatory bombing of Sudan with unsubstantiated claims that al-Shifa was a secret chemical weapons factory connected to bin Laden. These were outright lies. As the New York Times later reported, “Indeed, officials later said that there was no proof that the plant had been manufacturing or storing nerve gas, as initially suspected by the Americans, or had been linked to Osama bin Laden, who was resident of Khartoum in the [1990s].”

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Ever since Sudan opposed the 1991 U.S. war on Iraq, its policy toward Sudan had been destabilization. … [Sudan] opposed the 1991 U.S. war against Iraq and were a major supporter of the more militant Palestinian groups. The United States tried to isolate Sudan in international circles.

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The al-Shifa Pharmaceutical Factory opened in 1997 to great fanfare in the presence of heads of state, foreign ministers and ambassadors. Its opening meant that Sudan’s self-sufficiency in medicine would rise from about three percent to over 50 percent. … Al-Shifa produced 90 percent of the drugs used to treat Sudan’s seven leading causes of death. Malaria and tuberculosis topped the list. It produced virtually all of the country’s veterinary medicine. Livestock, Sudan’s third largest export at the time, was vital to the economy and overall food supply.

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“It is difficult to assess how many people in this poor African country died as a consequence of the destruction of this factory, but several tens of thousands seems to be a reasonable guess,” wrote Werner Daum, Germany’s ambassador to Sudan (1996 to 2000) three years later.

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Clinton charged that it was a secret “terrorist-related facility” involved in the production of chemical weapons for war. The engineers and managers that built and operated al-Shifa disagreed. Henry Jobe, the U.S. plant designer, said it was impossible. So did Tom Carnaffin, the British engineer who oversaw the plant’s construction. Carnaffin told the Chicago Tribune that “it just isn’t equipped to cope with the demands of chemical weapon manufacturing. You need things like airlocks but this factory just has doors leading out onto the street.”

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Immediately after the al-Shifa bombing, Sudan’s government requested that the UN Security Council conduct an on-site investigation. Nearly every state in Africa and the Middle East supported the request. When a resolution was submitted calling on the UNSC to study “whether al-Shifa has been engaged in the production of chemical weapons ingredients” and “whether there exists any link … between al-Shifa and the Osama bin Laden terrorist network,” the United States vetoed it.