Sudan, where roving bands of tribal and warlord armies savage each other over the carrion of a nation and apex predators of foreign empires hunt each other among the ruins.
And in the background, like shadow puppets in a theatre of darkness, a vast humanitarian failure of atrocities, war crimes, famine, and refugees speaks to us of the distance we have fallen in our duty of care for one another.
For one year as of today atrocities which define the limits of the human have been committed here on a mass scale, with intent and by design, wherein our dehumanization is industrialized by tyrants to enforce the wealth, power, and privilege of hegemonic elites through fascisms of blood, faith, and soil. Sadly, this is far from unique in human history, and we know where this leads.
No matter where authority begins with narratives of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, we always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Sudan, Gaza, Ukraine; symptoms of the same disease, now ongoing and appended to an endless litany of woes. Here I must signpost that the Sudan War is but one of several related conflicts in the African Theatre of World War Three as Putin attempts to re-found the Russian Empire. This is why the RSF is supplied with weapons from Russia’s client state in Libya, and why Ukrainian and other special forces are fighting the Wagner Group in Sudan.
As Alan Moore teaches us in the great film V For Vendetta; “Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away.”
As I wrote in my post of November 28 2023, The Failure of Empathy and the Fall of Human Civilization: the Case of Sudan; To remember, and bring a Reckoning; such is our duty of care for each other, without which we cease to be truly human and degenerate as atavisms of instinct in parallel and interdependent with processes of civilizational collapse.
A wise friend of mine, the poetess Aasifa Reshi has written; “Sudan has died, and nobody wrote the obituary.”
Here as in so many places we may see the abandonment of our humanity and of our empathy as a limit beyond which we may not pass without losing who we are, and a vision of the future which awaits us all if we cannot reverse course and act in solidarity to affirm our universal human rights.
Among the many horrors of the civil war in Sudan, become a theatre of World War Three now as Ukrainian and Russian special forces battle each other for the dominion or liberation of Sudan, is the apathy with which the world witnesses some of the most terrible atrocities of the twenty first century with none of the mass protests and peace marches which have made the Gaza War part of the lives of all of us and the history of the world. Some of this is because the global Jewish and Palestinian diasporas are enormous and so many people are personally involved through people who are part of our lives, often on both sides; some of it is simple racism.
Why are so many willing to immolate themselves on the funeral pyre of human civilization over the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and the moral collapse and delegitimation of the state of Israel, and so few placing their lives in the balance with the peoples of Sudan?
What can this tell us about the systems of unequal power in which we are ensnared, and how we might free ourselves and each other?
So I wrote half a year ago of the boundaries and interfaces between elite belonging and exclusionary otherness when identities of race and faith are weaponized as division in service to power by those who would enslave us, and of the degradation of our humanity and loss of our solidarity and guarantorship of each other’s universal human rights.
What is the situation in this war now?
As written by Nesrine Malik in The Guardian, in an article entitled For a full year, the bodies have piled up in Sudan – and still the world looks away; “One year ago today, Sudan descended into war. The toll so far is catastrophic. Thousands are dead, and millions are displaced, with hunger and disease ravaging all in the absence of aid. The UN has called the situation “one of the worst humanitarian disasters in recent history”, afflicting about 25 million people. The Sudanese people are suffering what has become the largest displacement crisis in the world.
The war was both sudden and a long time coming. The short history is that of a country where, following a promising 2019 revolution that overthrew the dictator Omar al-Bashir, the army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a powerful militia, ejected civilians from a power-sharing agreement between the three parties and then could not come to an agreement themselves. Their partnership broke down in April last year, and the RSF moved quickly, taking over the capital city, Khartoum, in an unprecedented moment in the country’s history. It then spread through the rest of the country, looting, assaulting and murdering civilians.
The army – and here is the long history – which established the RSF in the first place from remnants of the infamous Janjaweed troops it partnered with in Darfur to help it savagely suppress rebellion in the region – has so far been unable to prevail against its own creation. The result is a fluid situation, with gains and losses for both parties, no discernible frontline, and millions of Sudanese people caught in the middle.
It’s not so much a civil war as it is a war against civilians, whose homes, livelihoods and very lives have been the collateral damage so far. It is two tragedies overlaid. The first is of a country that until last year, although beset with conflict and dictatorship, had managed to maintain its integrity – and with it a sense that there was a way through its troubles, after which it could achieve its potential.
The war, despite all that led up to it, was not inevitable, was not the foreseeable fate of a country where ethnic differences necessitated conflict. It was the result of an economic model of centralisation where dominant parties in the centre preyed on, and extracted from, the periphery. One of the largest countries in Africa, with a sparkling coast along the Red Sea, fertile land across the Nile River, and the sort of cultural and ethnic diversity that could be harnessed into a powerhouse of Arab and African convergence, Sudan was always held back by an entitled few who wouldn’t share.
Added to the loss of what could have been are all the personal losses spread now throughout the country. The war unfolded and spread so rapidly that a mass dispossession took place, and with it an odyssey of displacement. Everyone I know in the country of my birth is scattered to different degrees, either within Sudan – sheltering, sometimes for the third or fourth time, with friends or relatives as the war reaches them – or outside of it. All, including my family, have left their homes, sometimes grabbing what they could before the RSF stormed in and took over their properties.
Even though it has been a year, there is still a sense of whiplash, of disbelief that it has actually happened, is actually happening. Every development expands the theatre of war and makes a return to peace more remote. Writing these words is a halting, painful process, like stepping on shards of broken glass. Something similar plays out on an almost daily basis, where one tries, and fails, to trace and keep track of all the individual and national tolls.
And more jarring is that the world has gazed with indifference upon this crucible of war. The “forgotten war” is what it’s called now, when it’s referenced in the international media. Little is offered by way of explanation for why it is forgotten, despite the sharpness of the humanitarian situation, the security risk of the war spreading, and the fact that it has drawn in self-interested mischievous players such as the United Arab Emirates, which is supporting the RSF, and therefore extending the duration of the war.
One of the reasons for this is Gaza and the escalating Middle East conflict, and how they have monopolised global attention and diplomatic bandwidth for the past six months. And another is that for those reporting within Sudan and the few who manage to get in, doing so is difficult and fraught with danger, limiting the output of images and details that can be broadcast consistently to galvanise attention. But the rest, I suspect, is down to what to most will seem unremarkable: this is just another African country succumbing to intractable conflict.
This is a different war from the one waged in Darfur, which drew in celebrities, politicians and even the international criminal court in previous years. And it is different from the war between the north and south, which also attracted so much advocacy and political pressure that a peace agreement and secession was secured. It is not, as in the past, a conflict resonantly framed as Muslims against Christians, or Arabs against Africans, stirring sympathy and outrage. It is the challenge of a new configuration of political and economic entrepreneurs who wish to displace the old military cluster of ruling parties – but with no experience and even less interest in actually running parts of the state captured in the meantime.
On a political level Sudan falls, and has always done, low on the list of priorities for power brokers in the west, who have few interests in the country. They either crudely isolated it through sanctions or, after the revolution, naively and hastily tried to marshal the two armed parties to agreement and a de-facto return to a militarised, centralised status quo.
This is the point where I would usually suggest some potential way through it all. But one year on there is nothing but mourning. There is comfort though, as infrastructure has collapsed, in how the Sudanese people have pooled their few resources and opened up their homes to each other, in how volunteers have set up community kitchens, and how resistance committees, local civil disobedience units that were set up before and thrived during the 2019 revolution have been repurposed to provide medical aid, food and shelter. In these acts, there is still a reminder that a country is not a place but a spirit. Not only is that very much alive, but it has proved to be, in even the most extreme circumstances, impossible to extinguish.”
What is to be done, as Lenin asked in the essay that began the Russian Revolution?
As written by Kate Ferguson in The Guardian, in an article entitled The RSF are out to finish the genocide in Darfur they began as the Janjaweed. We cannot stand by; “As conflict in Sudan escalates, it is becoming clear that the Rapid Support Forces has returned to Darfur to complete the genocide it began 20 years ago. The RSF is the Janjaweed rebranded, the “devils on horseback” used by the Sudanese government from 2003 to implement widespread and systematic crimes against non-Arab communities across Darfur. The RSF was, and still is, commanded by Gen Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo.
In recent weeks, what we knew was coming has been confirmed. Yale University’s Conflict Observatory, which uses a combination of satellite imagery, Nasa thermal-detection data and open-source analysis, found evidence of the “targeted destruction of at least 26 communities” by the RSF between 15 April and 10 July. Mass graves have been discovered, and satellite imagery shows entire urban neighbourhoods and villages have been burned down.
Sexual violence is once again an evident component of RSF strategy. Facilities necessary for survival are being deliberately destroyed, from homes, schools and hospitals to water, electricity and communications infrastructure.
What has been reported in Darfur is the first wave of a strategy that will become more extreme if left unchecked.
This is what you do when you want to permanently remove a people. And terrible as this evidence is, the public reports and verified cases will still represent a massive undercount of what is actually taking place.
This hellish trajectory will gather momentum, and there is a real risk the RSF will now take aim at larger targets, such as the town of El Fasher, where there are at least 600,000 displaced people now largely housed in three camps.
The RSF appears to be taking advantage of an international response to the crisis that is prioritising resolution between the warring generals – Hemedti and Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of Sudan’s armed forces – but so far is proving unable or unwilling to respond to the mass violence being unleashed across Darfur.
From the second world war and the Holocaust to the wars of Yugoslav succession and genocide against Bosnia’s Muslims, this deeply flawed assumption that ending armed conflict will also end campaigns of identity-based mass violence has meant catastrophic failures to protect vulnerable people and prevent massive losses of life. Failure to acknowledge these distinctions in Sudan will likewise be devastating for Darfur.
The deliberate violence in Darfur requires an urgent response. However, doing so confers no legitimacy on Sudanese armed forces, which have been committing human rights violations elsewhere in Sudan in pursuit of reimposing Islamist authoritarian rule.
What has been reported in Darfur should be seen as the first wave of a strategy that will become more extreme if left unchecked. The RSF command is watching what the world will do before it escalates. We have the narrowest of windows in which to act.
The nature, intent and perpetrators of atrocities must be named and condemned. Last week the UK’s development minister, Andrew Mitchell, said crimes against humanity was “entirely right” to describe what is taking place. It is surprising that other countries – in particular the US, which has an established mechanism to do so – have yet to follow suit. Global condemnation can give perpetrators cause to hesitate; this buys time, which saves lives.
The roles played by state leaders via back-channel diplomacy, and in leveraging bilateral and personal relationships, often make the greatest difference amid such delicate tipping points. Leadership from the British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, and the foreign secretary, James Cleverly, along with Mitchell, in publicly condemning mass atrocities in the strongest possible terms – and getting on the phone to urge their counterparts to do the same – is therefore critical.
The glare of the international spotlight allows perpetrators fewer places to conceal their crimes. As current president of the UN security council, the UK should be using every forum and mechanism to bring attention, investigation, documentation and media coverage. Impunity thrives in the shadows.
The UK must listen far more to the people who know and understand this violence best. I told the House of Commons foreign affairs select committee last month that the UK made a catastrophic error in trusting the men with guns rather than listening to the people who were feeling increasingly unsafe. It would be a graver mistake still to assume now that designing protective strategies is the singular purview of military experts in western capitals.
The UK needs to establish urgently an emergency communications channel between Whitehall and experts in Sudan, Darfur, Chad and the Darfuri community here in the UK, who will be among the first to know when the RSF advance or alters course.
Ultimately, as the chairs of both the international development and foreign affairs select committees have repeated, a protective wedge must be placed between people at risk and the RSF. The full spectrum of protective options must be fully considered, including but not limited to the rapid deployment of high-level international observers, the presence of UN political and human rights experts as “eyes and ears” on the ground, and peacekeeping forces that can protect civilians.
None of these options is easy – we know the UN security council is broken, and securing permission for access will be a diplomatic feat on its own – but difficulty cannot become an excuse not to persevere when any kind of international presence will help to pause attacks and buy time.
We knew the spectre of identity-based mass violence was returning to Sudan. We knew it when Hemedti instigated a massacre in Khartoum after the people’s revolution in 2019; we knew it when Burhan led the military coup in 2021.
If the UK’s policy is indeed “to maximise our ability to take effective action to prevent and respond to atrocities”, comprehensive action must be taken now. Otherwise, we will have to accept that we stood by 20 years after genocide began in Darfur, allowing the very same perpetrators to complete the crime.”
As I wrote in my post of July 15 2023, Genocide as a Symptom of Social and Political Collapse in Failed States: the Case of Sudan; Genocide can be read as a symptom of both social and political collapse; the hollowing out of values and relationships which sustain our humanity and the degradation of nations into regimes of authoritarian tyranny and state terror as they become delegitimized.
It is the ultimate crime, and the end state of authorized national identities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, of the weaponization of fear and faith in service to power through divisions and hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness.
In Sudan a civil war rages and devolves into the horrors of genocide, a war which is also a proxy Great Powers conflict between the Arab-American Alliance and Russia for dominion in this theatre of World War Three. Here the past swallows the future and cannibalizes our hope for a humankind united as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights.
Sudan is a classic example of the problems of faith as national identity and of the Double Minority as in Northern Ireland or Israel and Palestine, wherein both historically Islamic and Christian identities have been deployed in service to power. This is now compounded by having become a wishbone of empires.
Herein we play two bad choices against each other in hope of creating a free space of play for liberation and democracy, and at risk of either side consolidating power as a tyrannical regime, while whole peoples die.
The strategy and goal of the Arab-American Alliance is simple; overthrow the regime of Russia’s client state with our champion Hemedti, a key regional ally whose child soldiers enforce our power in Yemen and elsewhere, who also happens to be a warlord, slave raider, and mining robber king whose wealth and power are built on the lives of indigenous Black people. This means that we need him in the Great Game and cannot disavow him, but also that his campaign of genocide against the Black Christian peoples has destabilized the whole region, abetted Islamization and brought America into alignment with forces inimical to our political interests and long range goals, and subverted our goal in Sudan of a secular and multiethnic democracy.
Here is a parallel of why American abandoned Afghanistan; we needed the Taliban as a buffer state and counterforce to Iran, more than we needed the wealth from control of its heroin fields.
The use of social force is subversive of its own values in the enforcement of virtue.
For myself, I would dearly love to break the power of the Russian Empire and liberate Africa and the world from Putin’s colonialist tyranny and terror, but not at the cost of a genocide.
In Sudan we must change our strategy, envision a new path to a free society of equals, and bring the Chaos.
Let us send no armies to enforce virtue, but in liberation struggle only.
No matter where you begin with songs of the Elect and Others, of purity and contamination, virtue and monstrosity, obedience and transgression, identification of the Infinite with those who claim to speak in his name and enforce our submission to their will, with the idea that some of us are better and truly more human than others on the basis of any of this, with subjugation to those who claim to speak in our name and would enslave us defined as good and freedom from systems of force and control as evil, and with the use of social force in service to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
And this we must Resist, and give reply with the words found written on its death chambers after Liberation; Never Again!
As written by Simon Tisdall in The Guardian, in an article entitled China, Myanmar and now Darfur … the horror of genocide is here again: Each time it happens, the world insists: ‘never again’. But the political and moral blindspots that allow these atrocities will persist until the lessons of history are learned; “
It’s happening again. In Darfur, scene of a genocide that killed 300,000 people and displaced millions 20 years ago, armed militias are on the rampage once more. Now, as then, they are targeting ethnic African tribes, murdering, raping and stealing with impunity. “They” are nomadic, ethnic Arab raiders, the much-feared “devils on horseback” – except now they ride in trucks. They’re called the Janjaweed. And they’re back.
How is it possible such horrors can be repeated? The world condemned the 2003 slaughter. The UN and the International Criminal Court (ICC) investigated. Sudan’s former president, Omar al-Bashir, was charged with genocide and crimes against humanity along with his principal allies. The trial of one suspect, known as Ali Kushayb, opened last year. Yet Bashir and the guilty men have evaded justice so far.
It’s a familiar story. Throughout history, genocide, the most heinous of crimes, has often gone unpunished. The UN’s 1948 Genocide Convention defined it as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. It is universally proscribed. States are legally bound to prevent it. Yet there’s a tendency to look away. In Xinjiang, Myanmar and elsewhere, the convention’s “odious scourge” rages unchecked.
For its part, Sudan goes from bad to worse. The Janjaweed are allied to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) – paramilitaries warring with the army for control of the country. The RSF commander, known as Hemedti, was a Janjaweed leader in 2003. Like others, he has never faced justice. The UN warns with growing urgency that “crimes against humanity” are being committed in Darfur. It seems only too obvious where this is headed.
Genocide, typically, is a “never again” event. So terrible and long-lasting are its effects that survivors insist it cannot ever be repeated. The Holocaust – the murder of six million European Jews by Nazi Germany – is the supreme, modern example of genocidal evil. Yet even that abomination has not dispelled a more general amnesia (or deliberate forgetting) about the past, nor deterred present-day emulators. “Never again” never works.
The denial of recognition and justice to genocide’s historical victims helps explain today’s political and moral blindspots. In a powerful essay in the New York Review of Books last month, Ed Vulliamy, a former Guardian and Observer Bosnian war correspondent, highlights one such case of “invisibility”: the 19th-century drive to exterminate California’s Native American tribes.
“They were totally deprived of land rights. They were… treated as wild animals, shot on sight… enslaved and worked to death… Their life was outlawed and their whole existence was condemned,” an official report later admitted. Nowhere were efforts to destroy Indigenous peoples’ lives and culture more “methodically savage” than in California, Vulliamy writes. Yet who remembers now? Who even knew?
To his credit, the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has sponsored a California Truth and Healing Council to collect descendants’ testimony and formulate proposals for recognition, recompense and restorative justice. Newsom is clear about what happened. “It’s called genocide… No other way to describe it,” he said when setting up the council. Such candour is rare.
Most European countries, Britain especially, formerly exhibited genocidal tendencies. Australia, too. The genocide of the Herero, Nama and other Aboriginal peoples by early 20th-century German settlers in what is now Namibia is another instance of obliterated history recently brought painfully to light. Thousands were machine-gunned by the colonists. Pornographic photographs of sexually-abused women were sent home as postcards. Foreshadowing Nazi atrocities, macabre medical experiments were conducted on prisoners.
In 2021, a belatedly apologetic Germany agreed reparations with Namibia’s government. But the deal is on hold. Victims’ groups object, saying they were not consulted. As in other historical genocides, like that suffered by Ottoman-era Armenians in 1915-17, facts are disputed, responsibility is repudiated, and reconciliation remains elusive. Referred pain is just too powerful.
Genocide prosecutions make gradual advances. Last week, a court in Paris jailed for life a Rwandan military policeman, Philippe Hategekimana, for his role in the slaughter of 800,000 people, mostly minority ethnic Tutsis, in 1994. Following the Bosnian war, former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic and the Bosnian Serb leaders, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, were tried for genocide.
But national courts in Germany and France exercising “universal jurisdiction”, the much-undermined ICC (the US, Russia and China reject its authority), special courts (as in Sierra Leone) and ad hoc, Yugoslavia-style international tribunals, such as that urged for Ukraine, are struggling to keep up with the sheer scale of atrocious behaviour around the world.
Why, for example, is Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, not prosecuted for attempted genocide of Kurdish and Sunni groups under the terms of the 1948 convention? Russia’s Vladimir Putin should surely face similar action over Ukraine – in addition to the ICC’s war crimes warrant. Last week’s pizza restaurant bombing in Kramatorsk could be exhibit A, though in truth there are not enough letters in the alphabet to list all Putin’s crimes.
Treating genocide as a rare, usually historical occurrence is nonsense. It’s happening today in Darfur. It’s happening in Myanmar, where minority Rohingyas are persecuted and displaced by a vicious military junta. And it’s happening in China with the documented mass detention, forced labour, involuntary sterilisation, family separation and religious persecution of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
As the US government says, such cruelty exactly fits the definition of genocide with intent. So why not indict President Xi Jinping? The UN Human Rights Council’s shameful vote to ignore its own damning Xinjiang investigation shows why this suggestion is impractical to the point of absurdity. It shows the depth of the problem with genocide denialism that the world still faces.
It’s why impunity rules. It’s why the killers keep killing. It’s why the Janjaweed ride again.”
As I wrote in my post of April 16 2023, Chaos Is the Great Hope of the Powerless: the Case of Sudan; In Sudan the legacies of our history return to savage us with terror and cruelty, as consequences of the Darfur War and the tyranny of the monstrous Omar al-Bashir, for though he has been brought a Reckoning as the figurehead of atavistic forces of fascisms of faith and race and the nihilistic wanton capitalism of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, the forces which created him live on after he is fallen, conserving inequalities of power.
All use of social force and violence obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion, and creates its own resistance. This is both an existential threat to be feared, and an opportunity for transformative change to be desired.
Such are the true aims and means of politics as the art of the possible; to dream and make real visions of fear and desire, belonging and otherness.
Sudan began the Arab Spring, and was among its victims as failure of vision and the persistence of evil as unequal power.
In this moment the Rapid Support Forces led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, remnants of Omar al-Bashir’s army of madness and criminality, challenges the government of Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who has repressed the democracy movement with great brutality.
The fall of tyrants and seizures of power are goals and objectives of revolution, but we must also bring change to unjust systems if we are to free ourselves from the legacies of history and dream new and better ways to be human together. As proof of my thesis I offer you the case of Sudan, where warlords struggle for dominion in the wake of the collapse of the hope of democracy.
And this moment of chaos is also one of opportunity, for as Guillermo del Toro has written in his great telenovela Carnival Row, “Who is Chaos good for? Chaos is good for us. Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.”
Let us use the enemies of liberty against each other, and bring to Sudan a free society of equals who act as each other guarantors of universal human rights.
Let us bring the Chaos.
As written by Adam Fulton in The Guardian, in an article entitled Sudan conflict: why is there fighting and what is at stake in the region?
Power struggle between military factions erupted after faltering transition to civilian-led government; “Clashes between Sudan’s military and the country’s main paramilitary force have left at least 56 dead, while control of the presidential palace and the international airport in Khartoum is in doubt after disputed claims from both sides, in fighting that threatens to destabilise Sudan and the wider region.
What’s behind the fighting?
The clashes erupted amid an apparent power struggle between the two main factions of Sudan’s military regime.
The Sudanese armed forces are broadly loyal to Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the country’s de facto ruler, while the paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a collection of militia, follow the former warlord Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti.
The power struggle has its roots in the years before a 2019 uprising that ousted the dictatorial ruler Omar al-Bashir, who built up formidable security forces that he deliberately set against one another.
When an effort to transition to a democratic civilian-led government faltered after Bashir’s fall, an eventual showdown appeared inevitable, with diplomats in Khartoum warning in early 2022 that they feared such an outbreak of violence. In recent weeks, tensions have risen further.
How did the military rivalries develop?
The RSF was founded by Bashir to crush a rebellion in Darfur that began more than 20 years ago due to the political and economic marginalisation of the local people by Sudan’s central government. The RSF were also known by the name of Janjaweed, which became associated with widespread atrocities.
In 2013, Bashir transformed the Janjaweed into a semi-organised paramilitary force and gave their leaders military ranks before deploying them to crush a rebellion in South Darfur and then dispatching many to fight in the war in Yemen, and later Libya.
The RSF, led by Hemedti, and the regular military forces under Burhan cooperated to oust Bashir in 2019. The RSF then dispersed a peaceful sit-in that was held in front of the military headquarters in Khartoum, killing hundreds of people and raping dozens more.
A power-sharing deal with the civilians who led the protests against Bashir, which was supposed to bring about a transition towards a democratic government, was interrupted by a coup in October 2021.
The coup put the army back in charge but it faced weekly protests, renewed isolation and deepening economic woes. Hemedti swung behind the plan for a new transition, bringing tensions with Burhan to the surface.
Hemedti has huge wealth derived from the export of gold from illegal mines, and commands tens of thousands of battle-hardened veterans. He has long chafed at his position as official deputy on Sudan’s ruling council.
What are the faultlines?
A central cause of tension since the uprising is the civilian demand for oversight of the military and integration of the RSF into the regular armed forces.
Civilians have also called for the handover of lucrative military holdings in agriculture, trade and other industries, a crucial source of power for an army that has often outsourced military action to regional militias.
Another point of contention is the pursuit of justice over allegations of war crimes by the military and its allies in the conflict in Darfur from 2003. The international criminal court is seeking trials for Bashir and other Sudanese suspects.
Justice is also being sought over the killings of pro-democracy protesters in June 2019, in which military forces are implicated. Activists and civilian groups have been angered by delays to an official investigation. In addition, they want justice for at least 125 people killed by security forces in protests since the 2021 coup.
What’s at stake in the region?
Sudan is in a volatile region bordering the Red Sea, the Sahel region and the Horn of Africa. Its strategic location and agricultural wealth have attracted regional power plays, complicating the chances of a successful transition to civilian-led government.
Several of Sudan’s neighbours – including Ethiopia, Chad and South Sudan – have been affected by political upheavals and conflict, and Sudan’s relationship with Ethiopia, in particular, has been strained over issues including disputed farmland along their border.
Major geopolitical dimensions are also at play, with Russia, the US, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other powers battling for influence in Sudan.
The Saudis and the UAE have seen Sudan’s transition as an opportunity to push back against Islamist influence in the region. They, along with the US and Britain, form the “Quad”, which has sponsored mediation in Sudan along with the UN and the African Union. Western powers fear the potential for a Russian base on the Red Sea, which Sudanese military leaders have expressed openness to.”
As I wrote in my post of February 12 2020 Sudan: Justice for the Victims of the Darfur War; Pandora’s Box has been opened once again in Sudan today, this time signaling not the escape of evils but the rediscovery of hope as yesterday the government agrees to surrender the monster and outcast former tyrant Omar al-Bashir to the International Criminal Court to be tried for genocide and war crimes during the Darfur War.
Both slave revolt and revolutionary struggle by Black African tribal peoples against oligarchic Arab elites who traditionally have used them as a herd for slave labor, the Darfur War became a war of survival against the genocidal and horrific campaign of repression and ethnic cleansing which was the government’s response. It was a war of race and class marked by the worst aspects of both kinds of conflict, ending in April 2019 with the overthrow and arrest of the tyrant, first success of our Revolution in the Year of the Reckoning.
In the words of Annum Masroor writing in Huffpost; “In the Darfur conflict, rebels from the territory’s ethnic central and sub-Saharan African community launched an insurgency in 2003, complaining of oppression by the Arab-dominated government in Khartoum.
The government responded with a scorched-earth assault of aerial bombings and unleashed militias known as the Janjaweed, who are accused of mass killings and rapes. Up to 300,000 people were killed and 2.7 million were driven from their homes.”
As written by Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall in The Washington Post’s newsletter, in an article entitled Behind chaos in Sudan is a broader global power struggle; “The battles that have raged for three days in Sudan have all the markings of a potential civil war. Dueling armed factions — the country’s military, led by Sudanese president and top commander Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and a major paramilitary force known as the Rapid Support Forces, led by Vice President Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo — clashed in the capital of Khartoum and other cities.
The fighting, triggered apparently by disputes over how to integrate the RSF into the military, has even involved airstrikes against rival targets and has impacted dense urban areas, leading to the deaths of more than 180 people, according to a U.N. official, with the toll expected to rise. It has also claimed the lives of three Sudanese people working for the U.N.’s World Food Program, while there were reports Monday evening of assaults on Western diplomats.
The two feuding generals have cast a long shadow over Sudanese politics. They both built their careers waging a brutal counterinsurgency against an uprising in the country’s western Darfur region that began in 2003; the atrocities carried out against the rebellion are seen as acts of genocide. Dagalo, known universally as Hemedti, came to the fore as the leader of a notorious pro-government Arab militia known as the Janjaweed, which later morphed into the RSF.
After being part of the military establishment that decided in 2019 to oust long-ruling dictator Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Burhan and Hemedti would later collaborate in bringing down a fragile civilian-led government in 2021. All the while, their soldiers intimidated and brutalized Sudanese pro-democracy activists and dissidents and a constellation of foreign powers cultivated both as assets in their own regional games.
Warlords in a country long-riven by militias and insurgencies, the two are now locked in a classic internecine conflict. “Both sides have bases across the country,” said Alan Boswell, head analyst for the Horn of Africa at the International Crisis Group think tank, to the Financial Times. “Both see this fight in existential terms. This is a pure power struggle for who will control Sudan.”
Burhan and Hemedti were supposed to be stewards of a political transition back toward democracy, but they appear to have for their own reasons balked on that process. “The failure to form a government and the deterioration of the economic and security situation in the country, prompted the various military and civilian parties to sign a framework agreement in December 2022, which was widely accepted by civilians and important and influential parties from the international and regional communities,” explained a story in Asharq Al-Awsat, an influential Arabic-language daily.
Instead, unable to come to terms with the forging of an apolitical army, the two leaders came to blows. Boswell said that “this war is already dashing any hopes for the quick restoration of civilian rule,” and added that it “risks sucking in many outside actors and spilling across Sudan’s borders if not arrested soon.”
“Now, fighting could turn into a protracted conflict, with many fearing that the war could drag in regional patrons and neighbors such as Chad, Egypt, Eritrea and Ethiopia. In the end, nobody knows if the RSF or army will vanquish the other, but their quest could upend the region,” wrote Mat Nashed in New Lines magazine.
While it may ripple across borders, the chaos in Sudan also is fueled, in part, by outside players. The interim regime dominated by Burhan and Hemedti has been propped up by billions of dollars in Emirati and Saudi financing. Egypt has stepped up its support of Burhan’s forces, while Russia, and in particular the influential Wagner Group mercenaries, has developed apparent ties and contacts with Hemedti’s forces. Sudanese fighters, particularly from Darfur, have ended up on the front lines of both the Saudi- and Emirati-led war effort in Yemen, as well as the conflict in Libya, where a thicket of regional powers, including the UAE, Qatar, Libya and Russia, were all involved.
Various regional powers eye Sudan’s Red Sea coast including Russia, which has a potential deal in place to set up a naval base in Sudan that would give Moscow a path into the Indian Ocean. So, too, the UAE, which “hopes to protect its long-term strategic interests in Sudan, including the ability to project military and economic power into Yemen and the Horn of Africa from ports and other installations there,” noted a policy brief from the Soufan Center, a global security think tank. “In December 2022, coinciding with the Sudan framework agreement, the UAE and Sudan signed a $6 billion agreement for two UAE firms to build a new port on Sudan’s Red Sea coast.”
Hemedti’s RSF reportedly control the bulk of Sudan’s lucrative gold mines, which has given him an apparent independent line of financing fueled by an illicit trade of smuggled ore that analysts say winds its way through the UAE and into Russian hands. Western analysts fear the expanding footprint of Wagner, which has cultivated ties with coup-plotting regimes in Mali and Burkina Faso, and carried out counterinsurgency operations in the Central African Republic. French officials, in particular, have warned of the Kremlin’s growing clout in the restive Sahel.
“In the post Ukraine invasion-world, Hemedti’s more obvious relationship with Russian mercenary group Wagner has put him in the cross-hairs of international machinations across the Sahel,” wrote Kholood Khair, a Khartoum-based analyst. “For Cairo, the prospect of eliminating Hemedti is too good an opportunity to pass up, and the timing is right with western attention coalescing around halting the domino effect of former French colonies turning their backs on Paris in favor of Moscow.”
Egypt, which has in recent years supported Saudi and Emirati regional initiatives, is a more conspicuous supporter of Burhan, who Cairo sees as a bulwark of stability and a potential ally in geopolitical squabbles with Ethiopia over the construction of a major dam on the Nile. On Monday, there were reports of Hemedti’s forces detaining a contingent of Egyptian soldiers deployed in Sudan, a move that risks further expanding the arc of the conflict.
A host of foreign governments, including the United States, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, urged a cessation in hostilities. But both generals have vowed to crush the other and show little sign of backing down. “Western nations have little leverage right now. Sudan has been largely isolated since Hemedti and Burhan seized power in a coup in 2021 that ended a short-lived civilian government,” my colleagues explained. “The debt-laden Horn of Africa nation desperately needs tens of billions of dollars to shore up its moribund economy, but deals are unlikely as long as the two men remain in power and fighting each other. Sudan’s economy tanked after the oil-rich south gained independence in 2011, and hyperinflation fed frequent street protests.”
Bashir’s ouster led to Sudan, Africa’s third-largest nation, coming somewhat out of the cold. The U.S. State Department removed it from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, while both Burhan and Hemedti carried out tours of various world capitals. But Khair and other figures in Sudanese civil society argue that, in the current desperate context, neither military ruler should be backed as a figure to stabilize the situation.
“All the activists and civilians have been saying the whole time, do not trust these two. They are killers; they have been killing for 30 years,” Dallia Mohamed Abdelmoniem, a Khartoum resident and former journalist, told my colleagues. “This is who the international community has been placating.”
As I wrote in my post of May 27 2022, Theatres of World War Three: West Africa, the Sahel, and Lake Chad Regions; Here I offer insight and policy guidance into what I hope will be the last of the Theatres of World War Three; West Africa, the Sahel, and Lake Chad regions. Mali is the primary conflict now, but a general conflict rages throughout the whole region as Islamic State insurgencies contest with nations under the hammer of famine and drought, and Russia’s mercenaries exploit opportunities to seize dominion in defense of elite wealth and power.
Sudan is a pivot point and interface between bounded realms of sub-Saharan Africa as discussed here, and Libya with whose fate it is closely aligned. To disambiguate the Sudan and Libyan Civil Wars from the general regional conflict, Libya being a unique war of colonial European interests as a wishbone pulled between Russia and Turkey for dominion of the Mediterranean, where sub-Saharan Africa, including Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad, and Nigeria, is not yet a Great Powers proxy war and civil war but a struggle for power between variants of Islamic State Jihadist groups and the nations which control the resources they covet, with Russia leveraging this into regional dominion through the use of Wagner Group mercenaries as deniable assets.
It is now the presence of the Wagner Group defending elite interests in fighting Islamic State insurgencies and operating the mines for the governments which have become their proxies and front organizations which defines this theatre of war.
And it is the Wagner Group we must interrogate for insight into Russia’s plans and methods of world conquest and dominion when as in Syria there are willing surrogates to open the door of empire.
All of this is possible because France has abandoned her former colonies to their fate, because of the brilliant and visionary Islamic State strategy of delegitimation through provocation and implication in war crimes, some real and some false flag operations by elite IS units in French uniforms in coordination with infiltration agents inside actual French entities, and skillful propaganda. In parallel with blackening the reputation of France, ISGS has been successfully building a viable trans-national state in the region.
This means that the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, an independent operational arm of Islamic State West Africa Province created in 2015 with al-Sahrawi’s oath of allegiance to IS and split from al-Qaeda, and despite continued factional fighting between the two organizations, is now providing central Command, Intelligence, and Communications to jihadist insurgencies generally in its sphere of influence, as an emergent dominion to which Russia is the only balance. I describe this historical movement as the Syrianization of the conflict.
There are other possibilities for future Africas without foreign empires and their proxy regimes of brutal and kleptocratic tyrants and endless violence for control of resources, and in the long game this requires the free and open sharing of resources among her peoples and states which are guarantors of our universal human rights and secular democracy as a counterforce to fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
To win the liberty of the peoples of Africa one must begin with food, water, medical aid, and safety; the first requirements of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The political follows the humanitarian. Freedom from hunger, disease, violence, and labor exploitation; liberate a people from these, and tyranny will find no point of leverage.
Beyond this prescription I must give warning here; let us send no armies to enforce virtue, for the most likely result of challenging Russian influence in the region is another Great Powers war of imperial dominion between Russia and France which replicates that of Russia and Turkey in Libya. This will fail, because it plays directly into the hands of ISGS.
If you fight an insurgency with conventional forces, you will lose. ISGS has demonstrated a genius for this kind of war, and in large part it is not the kind of war our armies are designed to fight. In this arena, victory on the battlefield is irrelevant, because the victory you must win is within the human soul. And here we win love and loyalty by standing with, not against, our fellow human beings. We must offer the better alternative in meeting the needs of the people, both material and otherwise.
And in this arena we have clear advantage, for democracy is better than tyranny, equality as diversity and inclusion is better than tribalism, racism, and hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, truth is better than the lies and illusions of propaganda, justice is better than rule by the wealthiest robber baron or the most brutal and amoral bandit king, and a secular state is better than tyrannies of the authorized interpreters and enforcers of divine will, for who so ever stands between each of us and the Infinite serves neither.
A common enemy of humankind is the weaponization of fear by authority in service to power, especially as identity politics and divisions of faith. Gott Mit Uns; it is our most ancient and terrible battle cry, for it permits anything.
As Voltaire teaches us in his 1765 essay Questions sur les miracles; “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
The Dam film trailer
Inside South Sudan’s worsening refugee crisis – in pictures
For a full year, the bodies have piled up in Sudan – and still the world looks away | Nesrine Malik
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/15/sudan-conflict-war?CMP=share_btn_url
The RSF are out to finish the genocide in Darfur they began as the Janjaweed. We cannot stand by | Kate Ferguson
First Year of the Sudan War, a Retrospective
Sudan conflict: why is there fighting and what is at stake in the region?
Malign actors could ‘hyper-charge’ Sudan conflict, say ex-envoys
A war for our age: how the battle for Sudan is being fuelled by forces far beyond its borders
Sudan’s outsider: how a paramilitary leader fell out with the army and plunged the country into war – podcast
Why is the Darfur region so central to fighting in Sudan?
‘Khartoum was lit with savage fire’: five Sudanese writers on the country’s nightmare conflict
‘I believe this war will destroy Sudan’: the coup protesters now on the run
Monday briefing: Thousands killed, millions displaced – the conflict in Sudan, three months in
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/17/sudan-conflict-three-months-on?CMP=share_btn_url
‘All that we had is gone’: my lament for war-torn Khartoum – podcast
Sudan conflict: Khartoum landmarks in flames as battles rage across country
How I survived in Sudan: ‘We had one lightbulb. For two terrifying months, we gathered round it as battle raged
Oil-rich and extremely poor: inside the forgotten ‘Abyei box’ – a photo essay
‘When will people decide to choose the path of life?’: a Sudanese father’s letter to his dead son
Rape, murder, looting: massacre in Ardamata is the latest chapter in Darfur’s horror story
‘They told us – you are slaves’: survivors give harrowing testimony of Darfur’s year of hell
Ukrainian special forces ‘in Sudan operating against Russian mercenaries’
‘Here, there is no future’: ethnic cleansing and fresh atrocities drive exodus of thousands from Darfur
References
Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur, Ben Kiernan
The Washington Post newsletter
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/16/africa/sudan-military-clashes-explained-intl/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/17/opinions/sudan-revolution-to-civil-war-lynch/index.html
Sudan, South Sudan, and the Darfur War, a reading list
First Raise A Flag: How South Sudan Won the Longest War but Lost the Peace,
Peter Martell
South Sudan: The Untold Story from Independence to the Civil War, Hilde F. Johnson, Desmond Tutu (Foreword)
War of Visions: Conflict of Identities in the Sudan, Francis Mading Deng
For Love of the Prophet: An Ethnography of Sudan’s Islamic State, Noah Salomon
The Darfur Sultanate: A History, R.S. O’Fahey
The Wagner Group in Africa
https://morningexpress.in/russian-group-wagner-expands-area-of-%e2%80%8b%e2%80%8binfluence-in-africa
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/4/23/russia-putin-wagner-group-mercenaries-africa
Sahel region and sub-Saharan West Africa
Mali
Burkina Faso
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/11/thomas-sankara-trial-burkina-faso?CMP=share_btn_link
Nigeria
Niger
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/oct/30/african-apocalypse-review?CMP=share_btn_link
Chad
North Africa, a reading list
North Africa: A History from the Mediterranean Shore to the Sahara, Barnaby Rogerson
In Search of Ancient North Africa: A History in Six Lives, by Barnaby Rogerson
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36341137-in-search-of-ancient-north-africa
The Sahara: A Cultural History, by Eamonn Gearon
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12254466-the-sahara
Sahel: Art and Empires on the Shores of the Sahara, by Alisa LaGamma
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50130929-sahel
The Nomad’s Path: Travels in the Sahel, by Alistair Carr
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18464938-the-nomad-s-path
Horn, Sahel, and Rift: Fault-lines of the African Jihad, by Stig Jarle Hansen
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51062928-horn-sahel-and-rift
Torch of Liberty 
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