After 17 months of civil war, the very last thing Sudan needs is another bloody battle. Yet that is exactly what its unfortunate people got last week when the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) launched air and artillery attacks aimed at regaining lost ground in the capital, Khartoum. Heavy fighting with rival troops from the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) was reported around bridges linking the centre of the city to Omdurman and Bahri. It’s claimed the SAF have the advantage. But the broader reality is that the two sides are locked in a destructive stalemate across much of the country.
The latest clashes closely followed a renewed assault by the RSF on the besieged city of El Fasher in western Darfur region. This siege has continued for months, accompanied by reports of horrifying atrocities against the population, including widespread sexual violence. The RSF, led by Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, or “Hemedti”, was formerly the Janjaweed. A notorious Arab nomad militia, it was behind the regime-backed genocide perpetrated against black African pastoralists that occurred in Darfur in the early 2000s.
Omar al-Bashir, Sudan’s then president, was indicted by the international criminal court for genocide and war crimes in Darfur and was subsequently deposed in a revolution in 2019. Yet it was Bashir’s toppling that led, eventually, to the SAF leader, Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, seizing overall power in a 2021 coup. Burhan styles himself Sudan’s legitimate leader, although he has never won an election or faced voters. Dagalo and the RSF dispute his ascendancy.
Burhan told the UN general assembly last week that he supported peaceful efforts to stop the war – if the “occupation” of large chunks of territory by RSF forces ended. In effect, he appeared to be asking the international community to do what he has failed to do: vanquish his rivals. A diplomatic solution looks remote. Burhan boycotted peace talks held in Switzerland last month. And so this devastating, unnecessary war goes on.
Although Sudan’s disputes and divisions – ethnic, racial, religious, economic, geographic – are historically entrenched, the country represents in several respects a very modern problem, reflecting key challenges of the age. The most obvious is chronic mis-governance over many decades, arguably rooted in the fundamental dislocations and distortions of the imperial era. Sudan was never formally a British colony, but it was more or less treated as one during the Anglo-Egyptian condominium that lasted until 1956.
Self-interested interference and meddling by foreign powers is an enduring problem. Burhan told the UN that regional states were providing funding, weapons and mercenaries to the RSF. What he did not say is that competing countries are arming the SAF. Burhan bears great responsibility for the fact that about 25 million people are experiencing acute hunger. That a preventable humanitarian disaster is unfolding also points to familiar failings in the UN system and among wealthy donor countries. As elsewhere, agencies and charities do their best, but resources are inadequate. Famine linked to climate change is another common factor. And the knock-on effects of Sudan’s crisis fuel other ubiquitous issues such as uncontrolled mass migration and spreading Islamist radicalisation in the Sahel.
Both Keir Starmer and Joe Biden alluded to Sudan in their UN speeches. António Guterres, the UN secretary general, wants an immediate, nationwide ceasefire to avert an imminent “catastrophe”. But for all that, decisive, concerted, concrete action by the international community is absent – a perennial lament. Andrew Mitchell, the former UK international development secretary, says “humanitarian intervention” should be “on the table”. He’s right. It should. But words aside, and with the Middle East and Ukraine in flames, who is willing to save Sudan?
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