Sudan stuck in search for peace
A year and a half after the start of the conflict, the Sudanese have become unwitting protagonists of a forgotten conflict. The obfuscation of the parties and the interests of numerous external actors complicate a short-term solution.
Riots on the Nile” was the name of a temporary exhibition organized at Casa Arabe in Madrid, between March and June of this year, which included an important sample of Sudanese art. Its curator, Rahiem Shadad, told in an interview with News Now Nigeria (see MN 703, pp. 46-50) how the exhibition left Khartoum, by chance, just three days before the conflict began on April 15, 2023. Thus, the war gave the exhibition a new meaning, because they considered that they had an obligation to advocate for the people of Sudan and tell their situation. Furthermore, the war would have endangered all the works of art that were exhibited in Madrid. Indeed, the fighting of recent months has significantly impacted Sudan’s art and heritage. There are already complaints of looting in the National Museum of Sudan, one of the most important in the region, according to the digital edition of Nigrizia and denounces the professor of Archeology at the University of Khartoum, Mohamed Albdri Sliman Bashir, in an article for The Conversation.
Since April 15, much has changed in Sudan. Or maybe less than we imagine. The title of the exhibition did not refer to this latest war, “but to the turbulence experienced in Sudan in the last 30 years and how they have influenced art,” as Rahiem Shadad explained. We could say the same about these lines, because the current situation experienced – or rather suffered – in Sudan cannot be understood without the ups and downs of recent decades. In addition to internal factors, there are other long-term regional and international factors that are causing the conflict to have no signs of being resolved in the short term.
Described by the United Nations as “one of the worst humanitarian crises in our recent memory,” the numbers of the conflict are staggering. In a year and a half of fighting, the number of civilians suffering the consequences of the war is staggering, further aggravated by recent flooding and a cholera outbreak. More than 11 million internally displaced people – of which five million are children; 2.3 million refugees in neighboring countries; more than 20,000 dead according to various sources; 25 million people, more than half of the country’s population, at risk of famine – some organizations warn that more than 2.5 million people could die of hunger before the end of the year; or the lack of access to basic educational or health services reveal a conflict about which, far from Sudan, another piece of information also sheds light: more than half of the people who are in the fields of Calais (France) waiting the opportunity to enter the United Kingdom are Sudanese.
The testimonies that come from Sudan, collected in The Continent, speak of the lack of food, the prohibitive prices, the harshness of the fighting: «Life in recent months can be summarized in a mixture of horror, anxiety and fear » says Iman, from El Fasher; “Honestly, at any moment I expect that I will lose part of my body, my life or my loved ones,” says Mugahid Alnour Ali in the same medium.
The origins of the civil war
This war mainly involves the Sudanese Army (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Both Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who leads the SAF, and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, Hameidti, who heads the RSF, were already influential within the former regime of Omar Hassan al Bashir, with implications for the Darfur genocide at the turn of the century. Taking advantage of the civil mobilizations that broke out at the end of 2018, in April 2019 Al-Burhan and Hameidti carried out a coup d’état that caused the fall of Al Bashir. A few months later, in August 2019, they agreed to share the transitional government with the civilian coalition Forces for Freedom and Change (FFC), naming Abdallah Hamdok as prime minister, with Al-Burhan president and Hameidti vice president of the Government. However, in October 2021, the Military Junta agreed to a self-coup d’état to exclude civilians from the transitional government, removed Hamdok from office and opened a negotiation process with the political opposition to agree on a transitional civilian government that would have to begin its journey in April 2023.
The treatment of sensitive issues during this negotiation process, fundamentally those related to the integration of the Armed Forces, caused the confrontation between the two generals and Hameidti decided to enter Khartoum to attempt a coup d’état. However, Al-Burhan managed to take refuge, resist and initiate a counteroffensive. From this moment on, the fighting has been rapidly expanding to other parts of the country, even leading to local conflicts with the participation of other smaller armed groups. Iván Navarro, in an analysis for the Africaye portal, tells how several of these groups have gone from a neutral position and opposition to the war to taking sides in the hostilities, pushed by the advance of the confrontations between the SAF and the RSF, and putting the 2020 Juba Peace Accords at risk.
International actors
One of the key elements to understand this war is the internationalization of the conflict, in which the presence of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) stands out. According to international cooperation sources in Sudan, Dubai’s interests rest on four fundamental issues: the gold trade, the exploitation of uranium, guaranteeing food security and geostrategic interests in the region. In fact, the UAE’s presence in Sudanese issues has been growing in recent years. After the start of the war, it has also become one of the main supports of the RSF. Although they deny any type of participation in the conflict, there are various sources that affirm that the support of the UAE is being key in its development. Along with the Government of Dubai, the RSF is also receiving support from Russia through the former Wagner Group, now called Africa Corps, although Russia’s role in the conflict is considerably more complex. In a recent article by Álvaro Sánchez-Rey for the Spanish Institute for Strategic Studies, the duality of Russian foreign policy in Sudan is analyzed and how Putin’s Government is strengthening relations with the Sudanese Executive, which may have been receiving support from Ukrainian agents to counter Africa Corps’ support for the RSF. Furthermore, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iran are providing services to the SAF, in clear evidence of how regional and international factors are behind the war.
Neither Gaza nor Ukraine
“Why is the conflict silenced?” Mohamed Mustafa al-Kasalawi asked this question in the April issue of News Now Nigeria (see MN 701, pp. 8-9). There have been many initiatives to try to stop the conflict, but all of them have been unsuccessful and no solution is in sight. The last one, last August in Switzerland, failed because neither the SAF nor the RSF appeared at the dialogue table. Moises Chrispus Okello, researcher at the Institute for Security Studies in Addis Ababa, stated in an article for African Arguments that “the inflexibility of all parties is transforming Sudan into a hybrid of Libya and Somalia, with implications for the entire Horn of Africa.” , something that May Darwich, a professor at the University of Birmingham, warned about last year, who warned in The Conversation of the risk of a regional war.
Efforts are currently being directed at allowing humanitarian aid access to displaced persons camps in Sudan, where famine has already been declared. At the moment, the economic and political interests of the different parties involved are prolonging an unsustainable situation for the population of Sudan, and it is these interests that keep the situation in the country silent. «If the war continues, our fate is unknown. Our current journey is one of displacement. All the essentials of life no longer exist. There is no possibility of returning to our homes and there is no possibility of returning to our past life – a stable life, a safe life, free from the sound of weapons, free from all the tragedies and horrors that we experienced. Will they stand firm or lose us? Iman wonders.
To know more
By Oscar Mateos
Sudan became, during a brief parenthesis, one of the most exciting contexts on the entire African continent. At the end of 2018 and beginning of 2019, there was a feeling that the revolution led by Sudanese women could crystallize in a promising political transition after decades of dictatorship led by the ineffable Omar Al-Bashir. Sudan thus showed that the desire for political change driven by the multiple Arab Spring throughout the region for years was leading to a hopeful scenario. That spirit was frustrated, however, a few months later when the Sudanese revolution was hijacked again by the rivalries and aspirations for power of different sectors of the Army. The moment of hope suddenly turned into a nightmare for the entire citizenry. Sudan is currently going through one of the worst war and humanitarian crises on the entire planet, further exacerbated by a global attitude of indifference and indolence in the face of the systematic perpetration of crimes and human rights violations against the civilian population. The horror of Gaza occurs under the media spotlight around the world and in the face of scandalous international inaction. Sudan has neither the spotlight nor the interest of almost anyone.
To capture that feeling of frustration, of what could have been and (perhaps, for the moment) has not been, it is worth watching the documentary, recently released at various international film festivals (including Venice), titled Sudan, Remember Us (2024), directed by the Franco-Tunisian journalist Hind Meddeb. The reporter was a direct witness of the Sudanese revolution in the spring of 2019, an experience from which she contributed to the book Soudan 2019, year zero (2021), which presents descriptions, comments and photographs about the weeks leading up to the “Khartoum massacre” in June of that same year. With Sudan, Remember Usthe director puts images and testimonies of the protagonists (most of them invisible) of the different Sudanese revolts of the last four years, highlighting the political capacity of the citizens, while crudely exposing the result of military repression and the fading of hopes for change.
To expand historical knowledge of this context, it is worth taking into account two enormously suggestive bibliographical references. The first comes from the hand of one of the great experts on some contexts of the Horn of Africa region, Alex De Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School, Tufts University in Massachusetts. De Waal has recently written, together with Willow Berridge, Justin Lynch and Raga Makawi a book that delves into the same aspects addressed by Hind Meddeb’s documentary: the hope for political change led by the people and the frustration, anger and pain over the current scenario. Sudan’s Unfinished Democracy: The Promise and Betrayal of a People’s Revolution (Hurst and Oxford University Press, 2022) is more than an interesting resource to land on the future prospects of a country that faces a bleak present. Along these same lines, and from a sensitive and combative journalism, the report by Patricia Simon and Ricard García Vilanova for the 5W Magazinewhich is titled «Sudan: the war that does not matter».
For those who wish to go deeper and document themselves with both primary and analytical information, there are two virtual files accessible to any user: the Sudan’s Open Archive (sudanarchive.net), from the Rift Valley Institute (an organization that we have already mentioned on occasion in this section), as well as the Sudan Peace Archive (csf-sudan.org/library/sudan-peace-archive), prepared by the World Peace Foundation.
