Sudan and not only Sudan: eliminating the root causes of the civil conflict – Part One

Looking at the latest facts from Sudan, we will notice that the main concerns of Western media focus above all on the massive humanitarian aid crisis, with hunger tending by now to worsen day by day due to the conflict. While being a rather common attitude in the face of grave geopolitical crises like the Sudanese one, one can perceive the strong weight played by humanitarian organizations, whose press releases constitute a primary source for many bloggers and journalists of the Africanist and Third Worldist galaxy. Moreover, precisely in the ranks of NGOs, many of these individuals have often started their careers. And certainly in Sudan, hunger represents a grave tragedy, as witnessed also by the World Food Programme (WFP), alarmed by the cuts that will hit millions of civilians in areas such as Darfur and Kordofan. According to media such as Al Jazeera and Foreign Policy, which cite reports prepared between December 7 and 17, at least 25 million people need food assistance, with over 4 million children exposed to the extreme risk of malnutrition. However, however meritorious it may be, turning our attention solely to the humanitarian aspect, neglecting geopolitical analysis, can lead us to partial evaluations, dominated only by pietistic or philanthropic approaches; that is, to giving up on understanding the dynamics that cause and drag out the conflict, and the interweaving that at the regional and international level links it to others underway on the Continent, from the Great Lakes to the Sahel, up to the Horn of Africa.

Furthermore, Amnesty International itself accuses Mohamed Dagalo Hemedti’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of grave war crimes, such as summary executions, sexual violence, and ethnic attacks in Darfur, with cases like El-Fasher among the most recent and blatant but certainly not unique. Just to give an example, last December 5, one of their bombings in Kalugi, South Kordofan, saw the death of 116 people, including 48 children. That for which the RSF are responsible is in fact a true ethnic cleansing, as already happened years ago in Darfur when they were more commonly known to the world by the name Janjaweed. It is a moment in which the civil war seems to have met a funereal “second youth,” with the RSF back on the offensive after weeks of retreats. Last December 2, for example, the SAF (the Sudanese Army, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan) suffered a significant defeat with the loss of the headquarters of the 22nd Division in Babanusa, the last city still surrounded in the west of the country. Meanwhile, Hemedti’s forces have consolidated their grip on areas like Nyala and El-Fasher, strong with a renewed arsenal based on drones and armored vehicles munificently supplied by the United Arab Emirates, their main promoters. We are now at 150,000 victims caused by the conflict, according to estimates that are unfortunately always rather “prudent.”

Last December 13, a drone hit a logistical base of the UNISFA mission (United Nations Interim Security Forces for Abyei) in Kadugli, South Kordofan, causing the death of six Bangladeshi peacekeepers and wounding eight others. Africa, unfortunately, is literally “stuffed” with UN missions that so far have achieved very little to alleviate the various regional crises for which they had been deployed: think of the famous case of MONUC/MONUSCO in the Democratic Republic of Congo, concluded precisely at the beginning of the year with the advance of the M23 and the record for the longest and most expensive mission in the history of the UN. These missions have so far not obtained convincing effects, even exposing their personnel to grave risks of a military nature: it is no coincidence that the attack of December 13 indicates the robust recovery of the RSF, today willing even to strike international humanitarian personnel in order to find themselves with areas totally under their control, without uncomfortable witnesses. The conduct of the RSF, similar in its temerity to that of Israel in Gaza and Lebanon, should not surprise: after all, both have in Abu Dhabi their connecting link, their common friend and ally.

However, in the face of the relaunch of the RSF, the rest of the region does not stand still watching; and it never has. In this article, for the length of which I apologize, I will in fact explain the many reasons for their relaunch and how the SAF, supported by various allies, are adapting their actions to contain them. On December 15, Burhan visited Riyadh, meeting Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Saudi Arabia has always followed the fate of the conflict, never hiding its support for Burhan’s Transitional Sovereignty Council, the only and legitimate Sudanese government despite Hemedti’s attempt to present himself to the international community with his own “Government of Peace and Unity” whose ambition is to lead above all the east of the country, creating a de facto secession of the areas of Kordofan and Darfur over which he is accentuating control. Since the meetings in Jeddah, aimed at proposing a mediation between the two parties, Riyadh has sought to heal a conflict that is today unfortunately incurable: any attempt to stop hostilities today would translate into a freezing of the clash between RSF and SAF, preserving the current risk of a rupture of Sudanese national unity. That risk, absolutely to be avoided, means that no agreement aimed at preserving the causes of today’s civil conflict (namely, the role of the RSF in Sudan as a “state within the State,” such as to constitute a fundamental threat to national and regional security) can be taken into consideration by Burhan. Only by recognizing and facing such causes, and eradicating them, will it be possible to definitively and stably conclude the Sudanese civil war. It is also the reason why the agreement proposals advanced by the Quad (formed by the United States, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) have punctually collided with the firm “no” of the SAF. Much time has passed between the Jeddah mediations and the most recent proposals of the Quad: during the time that separated them, Riyadh has taken note that no solution that safeguards the underlying causes of the conflict can be accepted by its Sudanese ally.

Shortly before Burhan, the person who went to Riyadh was Isaias Afewerki, President of Eritrea, a key ally of both the Saudis and the Sudanese. We have already recounted, on other occasions, how essential Eritrean support is to Sudan in intelligence, military consultancy, and diplomacy: and indeed, this time too, Asmara presents itself as a connecting link between the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, guarantor and point of convergence of the stability interests of both sides. In Riyadh, in addition to discussing relevant regional projects such as the port hub of Assab (at the center of Ethiopian nationalist claims, but upon which the Saudi government also aims to direct important investments in cooperation with the Eritrean one), Afewerki and bin Salman discussed the Sudanese question. Before reaching Riyadh, Afewerki had gone on a visit to Port Sudan to meet Burhan, making a long journey by land that the RSF had been careful not to disturb. That meeting, for Hemedti’s men, was an unwelcome development, like others that occurred previously, because it witnesses the Eritrean determination not only to remain at the side of Sudan, considering its disintegration a lethal threat; but even, given the importance of what is at stake, to further raise the level of the clash, leading it to an increasingly close regional confrontation. Burhan, an important Saudi ally, found it even easier to meet bin Salman after Afewerki’s visits to Port Sudan and Riyadh, finding in the great Arab country even more understanding and determination to support his needs than he had already found. Also in those days, the Crown Prince met the U.S. President Donald Trump, placing him before a serious imperative: to act promptly on Abu Dhabi, a strategic ally of Washington with which Riyadh is increasingly at odds due to a parallel and competing foreign policy, so that it pulls the plug on the RSF. The alternative, sic et simpliciter, is that billions and billions of dollars in Saudi investments in the U.S. economy remain suspended indefinitely. The same applies to the reaching of a Palestinian State, a stab at the interests not only of Israel but also of its allies among whom, as already mentioned, the Emirates stand out.

Finally, Burhan went to Egypt, another country with which both Sudan and Eritrea have profoundly increased their relations in the last two years. And there, President al-Sisi, alongside his counterpart Burhan, launched not one but three serious warnings to the international community: Cairo will not allow Sudan to lose political stability, national unity, or a secure government. Whoever crosses these three red lines will face Egyptian weapons, which in reality, albeit with discretion, are already partially active in the conflict. The quartet that can truly bring the civil war to an end is not the U.S.-led Quad, but the Saudi-Egyptian-Eritrean-Sudanese one, capable of drawing the United States to itself and isolating the Emirates, among other things also intercepting other actors who in the Sudanese crisis do not play a marginal role at all, from Turkey to Iran, they too close to Khartoum with significant military supplies. The increasingly intense efforts of the international community to bring an end to the civil conflict in Sudan are one of the reasons, but not the only one, for the relaunch of the RSF by Abu Dhabi: if a peace were truly to be reached, Hemedti’s forces would at that point have more margins for negotiation and shares of the country to hold to their advantage, increasing the possibilities that no negotiation provides for an eradication of the causes that on April 15, 2023, led to the outbreak of hostilities. Precisely for this reason, the internationalization of the conflict that the U.S.-led Quad has so far attempted to carry forward does not appear to be the most convincing formula for healing the Sudanese conflict. Interrupting the conflict while preserving the causes that led to its explosion, so as to be able to resume it with interest in the future, is what their primary financier, the Emirates, and their other regional allies, Ethiopia, Chad, and Libya, aim to obtain today for the RSF.

The destabilization of Sudan, Somalia, and Yemen, with the support for the separatism of their internal realities such as Darfur, Somaliland, and Southern Yemen, belongs to the Israeli-Emirati strategy of geopolitical control from the Nile Valley to the Red Sea, together with the smuggling of gold and critical minerals that through local groups and partners Abu Dhabi and Tel Aviv conduct today not only in these regions, but also in the Great Lakes and the Sahel, always finding in the Horn of Africa the main but not the only transport route. But of this, and of other things, we will speak in the second part of this article.

(Second Part here)