KHARTOUM, Sudan – If you’re sipping a cappuccino at a coffeehouse in the glistening new Afra Mall here in Sudan’s bustling capital, the helicopter gunships and janjaweed attacks and sprawling, squalid camps for Darfur’s millions of displaced people seem much farther than a two-hour airplane flight away.

The Afra Mall features a bowling alley, a movie theater, a gym, jewelry stores and a boutique specializing in Italian shirts. You can buy ping pong paddles, MP3 players and an electric shaver that oozes skin lotion.

The reasons for this capital’s surging prosperity are simple: oil and peace. The oil began to flow in the late 1990s, and by now the wealth is spilling out across Khartoum. And the peace – not in Darfur yet, but in the longer and more consuming civil war in the south – came last year in a deal that freed up Sudan’s national energy for better things. Investment from China, Turkey and the Arab world is flowing in. Sudanese expats are returning, often with new skills and sensibilities. Gross domestic product has shot up, more than doubling from 2000 to 2005.

What might Khartoum be like if an honorable peace ever came to Darfur?

Khartoum’s leaders already dream of turning their city of several million people into the next Dubai. But the reek of Darfur – a place synonymous with allegations of genocide and war crimes – infuses Sudan’s international image. How can any government consider warming relations with Khartoum when demonstrators worldwide are marching to protest what’s happening there?

The international tension over Darfur also contributes to Sudan’s police-state mentality, the other critical barrier to Khartoum’s emergence as a business crossroads. Governments under pressure make for paranoid governments. Who would want to spend a holiday at Khartoum’s Hilton knowing that their phone calls and e-mails are monitored by the secret police?

One man working (rather profitably) toward a more inviting Khartoum is Osama Daoud Latif, a second-generation Sudanese businessman with bushy eyebrows, a mild voice and impeccable English honed during years of living in Britain. He doesn’t wear the long white robes and knit cap common to Sudanese men, but instead sports an orange-and-white plaid shirt that could have been made by Ralph Lauren or Tommy Hilfiger.

Latif is the owner of the Ozone cafe, a trendy new shop here, which he built last year on a weed-choked traffic circle near his home. His company also owns a giant flour mill, a dairy, a car importer and Sudan’s Coca-Cola distributorship.

At the new international baccalaureate school built by Latif’s company, the children don’t chant Quranic verses. Instead, they sing that homage to Western capitalism, “I’d like to buy the world a Coke.” (Even the Pepsi distributor sends his son there, Latif says, with a smile verging on smugness.)

His dreams are still more grand. Along with the Khartoum state government, Latif’s company is attempting to build what amounts to a new city – complete with its own water system, electric generation and zoning rules – on 160 acres where the Blue and White Nile rivers merge to begin their journey north to Egypt. Called Almogran (Arabic for “where the rivers meet”), the $4 billion project is designed to include luxury hotels, corporate headquarters, office towers, entertainment, parks and a massive residential section with houses overlooking the wide and beautiful White Nile.

The commercial sections of the project are selling, Latif says, but the main barriers to realizing his vision – not just for Almogran but also for Khartoum – are the war in Darfur and Sudan’s tight government restrictions on speech, politics and personal behavior.

Latif maintains that Sudan’s Big Brotherish tendencies have eased somewhat, but in Khartoum I found mostly fear, both of the secret police and of extremist Muslim groups. During my time in Sudan, an allegedly blasphemous newspaper editor was beheaded, several other newspapers were closed, and a Canadian television crew was roughed up, many here believed, by the secret police.

The situation in Darfur seems, if anything, more intractable. In Khartoum, it’s safe to walk outside at midnight; in Darfur, girls who leave camps in search of firewood in the middle of the day are raped. In Khartoum, the wide streets boast new traffic lights and concrete overpasses; in Darfur, there is one major road through an area the size of Texas. In Darfur, people are so poor that only international aid groups are keeping millions from starvation. In Khartoum, there is hope; in Darfur, despair.

Sudanese in Khartoum often say that the death and destruction in Darfur is not so unusual. Angola, Congo, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe (to name just a few) have endured massive human tragedies fueled by conflict over the past couple of decades. Measured against them, perhaps Darfur is not so shocking. But measured against Khartoum, it surely is. What Latif has realized, and the leaders of Sudan’s government apparently have not, is that however different Khartoum and Darfur may be, their fates are intertwined.

“There is no future,” Latif says, “without settlement in Darfur.”