Photo by Yusuf Yassir on Unsplash
There is no denying that peace cannot come soon enough to the suffering Sudanese people. They have paid a huge price in the civil war that has raged across their country since 2023. But the question now is: What price will they pay for peace? Is any price payable?
As the Council for Foreign Relations’ Global Conflict Tracker reminds us, “death toll estimates widely. A former U.S. envoy for Sudan suggests as many as four hundred thousand have been killed since the conflict began in April 2023. More than eleven million have been displaced, giving rise to the worst displacement crisis in the world. Over four million displaced Sudanese have fled to unstable areas in Chad, Ethiopia, and South Sudan, overwhelming refugee camps. And the UN continues to plead for more support as more than thirty million need humanitarian assistance, and deteriorating food security risks are triggering the “world’s largest hunger crisis.”
Given the scale of this horror, which has taken the international community far too long to bring into focus, it would be no surprise to hear ordinary Sudanese men and women say, ‘we don’t care how peace comes, or who brings it, or what it comes with’. And, helpless as they are, innocent bystanders in a clash between two heavily armed adversaries, they can be entirely forgiven for reaching that conclusion.
But the international community, though deeply anxious to relieve the humanitarian catastrophe, has other responsibilities as well, and perhaps, this week, as talks progressed in Washington between the Trump Administration and Saudi Arabia, both partners along with Egypt and the United Arab Emirates in the Quad negotiations, the international community needs reminding of those. Because choosing sides in this conflict, as recent statements by Secretary of State Marco Rubio have seemed to imply, will banish any prospect for an inclusive longer-term settlement and ultimately a civilian-led administration. And with that, the likelihood that peace will be fleeting, and indeed little more than a chimera.
To speak of disarming one side of a civil war, in this instance the Rebel Support Forces, has profound implications. One is that it would hand a military victory to their rivals, the Sudanese Armed Forces, which have repeatedly avowed that they will be satisfied with no less than the eradication of the RSF or any associated militia. Any attempt to disarm the RSF by cutting off their weapons supplies will likely lead them to store caches and continue their struggle by other means. Sudan and its armed forces will find themselves fighting an insurgency that would be as brutal for the civilian population as this current phase.
Another implication is that the Sudanese Armed Forces’ claim to sovereign power and the right to decide Sudan’s future will have been to all intents and purposes legitimised—despite the fact that they have no mandate from the people for this, and indeed contrived to rob them of the gains they had made in bravely confronting the Bashir regime in 2019 and overthrowing it.
Since the armed forces usurped the fledgling civilian administration of Abdallah Hamdok in 2021, popular aspirations for freedom from the Khartoum-Nileside Islamist elite that has held sway over Sudan’s people for decades, have been utterly sidelined. And they will remain sidelined while the Sudanese Armed Forces remain in the saddle, because the Islamists who underpin it will settle for nothing other than an Islamic Republic, with all that entails for Sudan’s racial and religious minorities, and for regional stability and security.
To date, as talks about a ceasefire have waxed and waned through various capitals, Jeddah, Geneva, Washington, over the past two years, it has always been the SAF that said no, or placed conditions that were tantamount to making negotiation a non-starter. They have no interest in peace, only victory, because in that way they achieve their Islamist ambitions, and will evade any accounting for the decades of oppression to which they and their political allies have subjected the Sudanese people.
Who knows, perhaps all this is a negotiating tactic, these days the United States likes to talk tough before it changes tack. But it’s not the RSF’s feet that have to be held to the fire here. Firstly, the entire country is awash in weapons; if you’re going after the RSF’s, why not those of others who have committed atrocities? Secondly, the SAF is set to betray the democratic aspirations of its people, that’s clear enough from its so-called roadmap, which promises consultations but little else. If the international community thinks that’s okay, then it’s saying in effect, ‘Government is not a matter for ordinary people; just be grateful you’ve been left alive.’
The international community should be warned: if the link between a ceasefire and inclusive internationally supervised negotiations, backed by enforcement, is broken, Sudan will rue the day.
