Only a United Civilian Coalition Can Bring Peace to Sudan
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| People chant slogans during a protest in Khartoum, Sudan, Oct. 30, 2021 (AP photo by Marwan Ali). |
The current conflict in Sudan between the armed forces and the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group is a security and humanitarian crisis. But more importantly, it is a political crisis, one that grows out of the failure to build a sustainable democratic transition after the popular uprising that removed former dictator Omar al-Bashir from power in April 2019.
That failure can be traced through the various transitional deals that have been signed and then either ignored or violated since 2019. In that time, the civilian political actors in Sudan’s transition have been unable to overcome their deep divisions, giving free rein to the armed forces under Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the RSF under Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo—known as Hemedti—to seize and now compete for control of the country. Tragically, the same thing is recurring now, meaning that when the guns are finally silenced, Sudan’s civilian political actors will be unable to play a meaningful role in steering the country to a sustainable peace.
Sudan’s first transitional agreement was a power-sharing constitutional declaration between the military and the Forces of Freedom and Change, or FFC, the civilian alliance that led the negotiations with the army after the removal of Bashir’s regime. The declaration laid the groundwork for the formation of a joint military-civilian government whose goal was to ultimately guide Sudan back to civilian rule by 2022. But it failed to achieve the uprisings’ demands because of political disputes between rival groups among the civilian participants.
The FFC represented a broad range of political parties that opposed the Bashir regime as well as rebel groups from Darfur, Blue Nile and Southern Kurdufan. That and its unity gave it a powerful position in leading the uprising that erupted in December 2018 and negotiating with the Transitional Military Council, TMC, once Bashir was deposed. However, differences started to emerge between the FFC’s civilian members and the rebel groups, who criticized the Khartoum-based FFC parties’ decision to begin talks with the TMC before the rebels were able to participate.
After signing a peace agreement with the transitional government in October 2020, representatives of the rebel movements were able to return to Khartoum, where they were incorporated into the transitional governing institutions as political actors. But the distrust that was created within the FFC only increased, due to serious concerns among the rebel groups over how the structures of the power-sharing government benefited the group of parties that negotiated the transitional agreement with the military.
As a result, the FFC split into two factions. The first, known as the FFC-Central Committee, or FFC-CC, compromises the Umma Party, the Unionist Assembly and the Sudanese Congress. The second faction, which included the rebel groups and the Unionist Party, called itself the FFC-Democratic Bloc, or FFC-DB. In addition, the Baathists and communists left the coalition entirely and created a new front called the Radical Alliance. The resulting political disputes combined with the country’s economic deterioration opened the door for the military takeover in October 2021.
Instead of finding a common position to propose a political roadmap out of the current crisis, Sudan’s civilian actors are busy repeating their previous mistakes.
These divisions were exploited and leveraged by Hemedti, who has proved to be a skillful political operator. Hemedti initially sought to inherit Bashir’s political machine, appointing many Bashir loyalists as advisers during the first months of the transition. He also sought the backing of Sudan’s tribal chiefs and traditional institutions by showering them with gifts and financial favors.
But after the military takeover in 2021, Hemedti also sought to mend fences with civilian actors by publicly apologizing for supporting the coup in the months that followed. He subsequently moved closer to the FFC-CC and eventually became an ally. In September 2022, he announced his support for the interim constitutional draft proposed by the FFC-CC to guide the country back to civilian rule, putting him at odds with the armed forces’ position of supporting only initiatives that included all political stakeholders in Sudan and not only the FFC-CC.
Meanwhile, the United Nations-led political process to facilitate talks between the FCC-CC, FCC-DB and the military initiated after the October 2021 military takeover further exacerbated the divisions among Sudan’s civilian factions. The U.N. Integrated Transition Assistance Mission in Sudan, or UNITAMS, deliberately designed the talks to exclude other important civilian actors, such as the Resistance Committees—the neighborhood groups that have led Sudan’s pro-democracy movement since 2019—and traditional tribal chiefs, and sidelined the FFC-DB from the outline agreement signed in December 2022.
That agreement ultimately served as the catalyst for the current conflict, because it called for integrating the RSF into the Sudanese armed forces, which has been a critical national security fault line ever since the 2019 uprising. Created during the Bashir regime’s war in Darfur, the RSF subsequently maneuvered between several institutional umbrellas. After the war in Darfur subsided in intensity, Bashir used the RSF to protect against potential military coups by the armed forces. Hemedti used that privileged status to gain control of lucrative commercial interests, including gold mines, front companies and banks. After Bashir’s ouster, the RSF further expanded militarily and financially.
The disagreement over the timeline for integrating the RSF into the armed forces—the military proposed a two-year transition, while Hemedti argued the process should take at least 10 years—intensified pre-existing tensions between the two sides as the deadline for signing the finalized UNITAMS-brokered agreement approached. Soon after the deadline was postponed in April, both forces mobilized their troops in Khartoum, with the fighting beginning on April 15.
But if Hemedti sought to leverage the FFC-CC in his rivalry with al-Burhan in the run-up to the conflict, the FFC-CC had similarly aligned with the RSF in an effort to play the different armed services against each other. In September 2022, for instance, Yasir Arman, an FFC-CC leadership council member, said that “the RSF represents a force to build the national army,” giving the RSF equal institutional status as the armed forces. And since the outbreak of war, the FFC-CC has refused to denounce Hemedti’s move to seize power.
There is now an urgent need to stop the war, which has left at least 900 civilians killed and 1.3 million displaced and risks triggering a regional conflagration. So far, talks between the armed forces and RSF hosted by Saudi Arabia have struggled to achieve more than shaky cease-fires and intermittent humanitarian access. In the meantime, instead of finding a common position to propose a political roadmap out of the current crisis, Sudan’s civilian actors are busy repeating the same mistakes. Several Resistance Committees have announced their withdrawal from the FFC-CC-led Civilian Coalition to Stop the War due to the FFC-CC’s neutral stance in the war as well as its narrative equating the RSF with the armed forces.
Above all, Sudan urgently needs a new broad national front to correct the errors—in particular, the narrow and divisive political process—that led to the war. To be effective, however, any new political alliance should stand with Sudan’s remaining state institutions and insist that ultimately Sudan’s civilians must decide the fate of their country, for only that will sustainably end the war.
Yasir Zaidan is a doctoral candidate at the Jackson School for International Studies at the University of Washington.
View original: https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/conflict-sudan-crisis-civil-war-democracy-rapid-support-forces/
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