Photo by the blowup on Unsplash
Who knows if Sudan’s General Abdel Fatteh al-Burhan will be heading off to New York to address the UN General Assembly this week, but if he does, it will probably with his civilian prime minister, former UN official Kamil Idris, in tow. Will they have anything different to say from last year? It might be advisable.
Last year the war was 18 months old; this year it’s 30, and since then the Sudanese conflict has continued its descent into hell on earth, with characterisations of it oscillating between worst humanitarian crisis in living memory and the forgotten war, while serving as a very discomfiting reminder to the international community, well, that part of it which cares, of how, in the face of human catastrophe, big-power politics and realism have reduced multilateral institutions to a degree of paralysis that permits only the wringing of hands.
Addressing the General Assembly last year, Burhan, after his ritual denunciations of unnamed powers, and the parroting of phraseology around human rights, humanitarian aid, protecting civilians and democratic transition, laid down preconditions for an end to the conflict which, in the context of the conflict’s dynamics as they were then, and which have only deteriorated since, are simply unachievable. And all this while saying he and his regime had done everything [they] could to put an end to this war. Forgetting, of course, the peace talks he had failed to show up for in Geneva two months before. But that aside…
His preconditions included the withdrawal of the Rapid Support Forces from all of the areas they control, and surrendering. But the Sudanese Armed Forces were willing to work with groups which were still carrying weapons and who were willing to sign the Juba agreement.
This has an air of profound unreality about it. The Juba Agreement, signed a year after the popular revolt which overthrew the Bashir regime, was a perfectly respectable stab at the first principles of a secular, democratic dispensation for Sudan. But the RSF did not sign it, because it was already an integrated part of Sudan’s security apparatus and government structure at the time.
In other words, the RSF, which has since set up its own parallel government, was by definition excluded by Burhan from participating in talks on a transition to civilian rule while it had not disarmed. And that’s pretty much how they fell out in the first place. As a British Foreign Office report from earlier this year recalls: ‘Fighting broke out on 15 April 2023, after days of escalating armed manoeuvres by the rival forces [SAF and RSF]. Tensions had run high for days amid a dispute related to demands from the army that the RSF dissolve, with its members to be integrated into regular military ranks.’
Of the major Juba Agreement signatories, three, JEM-Ibrahim, SLM-Minawi, and SPLM-N Agar, remain aligned with Burhan’s government. JEM has clear Islamist ideological roots, tracing back to Sudan’s Islamic revolution and the Muslim Brotherhood tradition, and analysts agree that Burhan’s government has become increasingly dependent on Sudan’s wider Islamist movement, including banned NCP networks, which they describe as the most significant political force supporting his administration. A fourth signatory, SPLM-N Al-Hilu, defected to the RSF and the secular-democratic Tasis movement. All told, if you’re armed and Islamist, you’re welcome to talk. If you’re armed and not-Islamist, sorry, you’re out, disarm, and surrender your territory. Which, for the RSF, whatever you think of their role in the conflict, hardly conveys any sense of guarantee that they won’t be wiped off the map unless they fight on.
This just isn’t a practical approach to reaching any kind of ceasefire. And a ceasefire is a necessary precursor to any attempt to negotiate a longer-term peace and a transition to civilian government.
In his recent reshuffles of the army command, Burhan appears to have been making moves to put some distance between himself and the Islamists in his government, in order perhaps to free up his hand to offer some level of guarantee to the RSF that it can come to a peace table with a viable, durable stake in any negotiation process. But the ground he’s standing on is shaky: the Islamists within his regime are determined on an Islamic republic underwritten by military force (viz. Iran), and persist in imagining this war is winnable by military means.
It is clearly not. And if there’s one useful thing that might happen in New York this week, it’s that the middle and major powers around this conflict club round and bang some heads together, very hard.
