Showing posts with label Zayed. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Zayed. Show all posts

Monday, March 02, 2020

In Sudan, Hemedti leads the fray (Gérard Prunier)

  • In reality, it is Hemedti, the brutal and cunning general who organised the harsh crackdown in Khartoum last June, who wields the real power in Sudan, writes Gerard Prunier
  • After arresting Bashir, Hemedti became vice-president of the Transitional Military Council and was effectively its real boss
  • The RSF's military and technical equipment in fact come from the United Arab Emirates
  • The overthrown regime seemed to embody all the mistakes of the past. Read full story:
In Sudan, General Hemedti leads the fray
Analysis from The New Arab - www.alaraby.co.uk
Dated 5 February 2020
By Gérard Prunier (Former chief of the Centre français des études éthiopiennes in Addis-Abeba, member of the Centre d’études des mondes africains of Paris and author of several articles and books on Sudan)

Since the overthrow and arrest of President Omar al-Bashir on 10 April last year, there has been a fragile cohabitation between civil society and the semi-privatised "armed forces". 

Indeed Prime Minister Abdallah Hamdok, who represents the civilian side of the set-up, told a visiting US congressional delegation in Khartoum in January that "the civil-military partnership in Sudan could serve as a model for other countries." 

The idea, far from just being a piece of triumphalist braggadocio, raises the question of what has been going on in Sudan in recent months.

A return to civil society
After 25 years of dictatorship, the Islamist regime in Khartoum had nothing more to offer than further failures and mounting corruption. The economic crash was the last straw. In 2018, the price of a kilo of lentils went up by 225 percent, rice by 169 percent, bread 300 percent, and fuel 30 percent. 

There was no cooking gas, or even running water. At the same time, the 2018 budget of Sudanese pounds (SDG) 173 bn (about $27 bn) allocated nearly SDG 24 bn to the military and security sectors, but only just over SDG 5 bn to education and less than SDG 3 bn to health.

Civil society responded to this descent into hell with a spontaneous mobilisation whose roots went back to October 2012, and which now gathered momentum. Workers' groups began setting up professional organisations.

Today there are 17 of them, federated under the umbrella Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA). This clandestine unionism operated with an organisational rigour worthy of the pre-1917 Leninists, but without any particular ideology apart from an embryonic democratism and a rejection of violence.


The slogan "Silmiyya!" (Peaceful!) was to become the rallying cry of the protestors. Political parties which had become more or less forgotten under the 30 years of military-Islamic dictatorship regained at least a little strength, brought together in the Forces for Freedom and Change (FFC).

Despite its extraordinary popularity, this democratic movement had three weak points: it was very urban in nature, it grouped essentially the Awlad al-Beled (the Arabs of the central provinces), and apart from the trade unionists of the SPA, it was very divided.

A general backed by the UAE
The situation at the beginning of 2019 was thus somewhat special. The Islamic-military regime was no longer Islamic, and the regular army had been set into competition with paramilitary forces which had become autonomous when then-President Bashir deployed them into overseas conflicts. The dispatch to Yemen of the "volunteers" of the Rapid Support Force (RSF) by their commander, Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Daglo aka Hemedti, was crucial.

After arresting Bashir, Hemedti became vice-president of the Transitional Military Council and was effectively its real boss, rather than its official president, Gen. Abdel Fatah Abderrahman Burhan. Significantly, these volunteers are better armed than Burhan's regular army. The RSF's military and technical equipment in fact come from the United Arab Emirates.

Cunning, brutal and intelligent, if little educated, Hemedti became a millionaire through the "muscular" exploitation of the gold mines in western Sudan. He was the Janjaweed militia chief in Darfur, where he committed massive violence before overthrowing President Bashir, who saw him as his protector. 

Hence the ambiguity of the situation: was this a military coup d'état, or a democratic revolution? 

The popular uprising was a mixture of jamboree, open-ended political forum and social solidarity display. Everybody was looking after children - there are lots of them - women were everywhere, and the people came to the capital from afar. The basic slogans: "Silmiya!" (Peaceful!), "Hurriya!" (Freedom!), "Thawra!" (Revolution!), "Didd al-haramiyya!" (Down with the thieves!) and "Madaniyya!" (Civilian!). 

A camp, a festival, a space for joy and celebration, the sit-in was essentially revolutionary.

But while some soldiers were fraternising with the crowd, others, especially in the provinces, were killing or injuring the supporters of change. Those who opened fire on the demonstrators were not soldiers of the regular army, the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF), which was doing its best to protect them. It was either mercenaries of the RSF who came from Darfur, or an operations unit of the National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS) - the secret services, set up by Salah Gosh.

The uprising in Darfur had already destroyed the image of a "homogenous nation" led by a radical version of Islam, and had exposed the reality of a mafia regime which had deviated into illegal commerce during its dream petrol period between 1999 and 2011.

The "deep state" created by the Islamists had established itself as the ideological - and financial - flipside of a Sudan which had become phoney. For many in Sudan, the events of 2019 were an occasion to go back over developments since independence in 1956. Everything was brought out in the popular debates: the "civil war" with the disparate South, the coups, the empty rhetoric of a democracy lived in fits and starts, Islamism as the magic solution, the colonialism of the centre over all the outlying areas.

Even Arabism did not escape criticism. In this amazing thirst for demystification, the overthrown regime seemed to embody all the mistakes of the past.

Symptoms of the nostalgic revolution
This "nostalgic revolution" has been very ill understood by the international community. There are, of course, parallels with the various "Arab springs" - the same hostility to dictatorship, the same aspiration to democracy, but with no illusions about political Islam, which aroused obvious hostility among the protestors, no doubt because of Sudan's ethnic heterogeneity.

The killer General Hemedti hails from the outlying Darfur area and he has rallied to the RSF flag many soldiers straying from the wars of the Sahel-Chadians, Nigerians, Central Africans, and even some Boko Haram deserters.

He does not harbour hostility to Islam because it is too much part of Sudanese culture to be rejected. But the Islamists who prefer the Islamist "deep state" to their Sudanese homeland have lost control of the population. That is why the attempt by the Saudis and the UAE to preserve an Islamist regime without the Muslim Brotherhood has little chance of success.

Clean up at the NISS barracks
The UAE leader, Sheikh Mohammad Bin Zayed (MBZ), realised this more swiftly than his Saudi "allies", as indeed did General Hemedti. When on 14 January semi-demobilised elements of the NISS mutinied in two of the barracks where they were cooling their heels, Hemedti's reaction was immediate: his men attacked the barracks, and fighting went on late into the night. 

The mutineers had just learned that their operations unit, which was involved in racketeering, kidnapping and illegal taxation, had been disbanded.

The NISS groups got the worst of it, and their dead were written off. But the General had to make a trip to Abu Dhabi to explain to MBZ precisely what he was up to. He may be the UAE's ally in Sudan, but he is far from being a passive tool in the region, as MBZ realised when Hemedti declined to send reinforcements to Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar in Libya, stalled outside Tripoli without being able to take the city. 

The Emiratis were reduced to recruiting "security guards" through small ads using Black Shield Security Services, a UAE front company.

Another example of the Darfur General's autonomy came on 11 January, when groups linked to the Islamist "deep state" tried to organise antigovernment demonstrations at Wad Madani, in central Sudan. Hemedti did nothing to help them, and they had to pay unemployed agricultural workers to swell their ranks.  

So was Prime Minister Abdallah Hamdok justified in portraying civil-military relations in Sudan as a model to the Americans? Half. By "military" one means Hemedti, because the regular army no longer controls the situation, either politically or militarily. When there were negotiations in Juba with the Sudan People's Liberation Movement-North (a guerrilla faction which still exists in Kordofan, in the south of Sudan), it was Hemedti who took charge of the talks and won SPLM-North agreement to a framework accord which may be ratified on 14 February.

PM accused of sluggishness
Under the power-sharing agreement signed in Khartoum on 5 July last year, there will be no elections until 2021, and those involved in the current transition will not be allowed to stand. 

PM Abdallah Hamdok is certainly doing what he can. But he is doing it at a pace which is irritatingly slow for a population which had struggled with astonishing determination until June 2019. He has only just dismissed the foreign minister, whose incompetence was a drag on Sudanese diplomacy, resurgent after 30 years of paralysis and corruption.

It remains for the World Bank to be begged for aid which the Americans continue to block on the basis of sanctions imposed earlier on the Islamist regime, and which are now obsolete.

Hemedti appears to maintain correct, but not warm, relations with the prime minister. He has talked to old political parties such as the Ummah of Sadeq al-Mahdi, and more discreetly with others. His men are involved in distributing free food and medicine. Nowadays he recruits his soldiers not just from his native Darfur, but also from among the Awlad al-Beled, the inhabitants of the country's central Nile Valley regions.

What about the people of Darfur, whose relatives he may have massacred? They are queueing up outside his offices in Khartoum. "At least he's someone we know, we know how to handle him. And it would be nice to have one of our own in the presidency, after having been colonised." 

How far will the camel trader turned militia chief go? 

People may object to his lack of education, and to his non-Sudanese origins, but that has not prevented him becoming a key player on the national and regional scenes.

Gerard Prunier is a French academic and historian specialising in the Horn of Africa.
This article was originally published by our partners Orient XXI
Join the conversation: @The_NewArab
Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.

Sunday, August 11, 2019

TMC VP RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Hemeti Dagolo: One of most powerful and richest in Sudan


  • The money that Hemeti has acquired in recent years is all Sudanese national wealth: it has come to Hemeti primarily for his killing of civilians in Darfur, and more recently in Khartoum and El Obeid. And the killing will not end until Hemeti is brought under control and removed from any governance plans for the future of Sudan. 
  • One key off-shore “money storage unit” is the large industrial conglomerate Al Junaid Industrial Group, based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and run by Hemeti’s brother Abdelrahman. 
  • Other “investors” include some of the richest members of Sudan’s National Intelligence and Security Services, largely responsible for the decades of torture and repression under the al-Bashir regime and continuing under the Transitional Military Council (TMC) junta.  Read full story here below.
Article written by Prof Eric Reeves
Dated 01 August 2019
“General” Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (“Hemeti”): One of the Most Powerful Men in Sudan—and One of the Richest

As the international community dithers, obfuscates, and contents itself with “grief” and “outrage” at the violence and massacres for which Hemeti’s Rapid Support Forces are conspicuously responsible, it must be pointed out that not only has Hemeti become the most powerful military figure in Sudan, but one of the richest. His vast wealth money comes from control of the Jebel Amir gold mines of North Darfur (which Hemeti took with inordinate amounts of bloodshed, particularly that of the Beni Hussein); his mercenary activities over the past six years in Darfur; the funds from the European Union’s disastrously conceived “Khartoum Process” to stanch the flow of African migration to Europe; and from the discretionary “political budget” that permits unrestricted and unrecorded diversion of national wealth to NISS, army, and RSF leaders—chiefly Hemeti.

Where has Hemeti’s wealth gone? How does he hide it? How does he ensure he will be wealthy whatever changes there are in Sudan?

One key off-shore “money storage unit” is the large industrial conglomerate Al Junaid Industrial Group, based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and run by Hemeti’s brother Abdelrahman. Other “investors” include some of the richest members of Sudan’s National Intelligence and Security Services, largely responsible for the decades of torture and repression under the al-Bashir regime and continuing under the Transitional Military Council junta.

The significance of Hemeti’s holdings in the Al Junaid Industrial Group is twofold: it shows just how close Hemeti is to the UAE leadership is, preeminently Crown Prince Mohamed bin Zayed; and it makes clear that if the international community wishes to pressure Hemeti, it should impose immediate sanctions on Hemeti and all his off-shore holdings. If the UAE resists such efforts, they themselves should be subject to sanctions, especially banking and travel sanctions.

We should recall that despite the public relations campaign by the UAE—which has attempted to make Dubai and Abu Dhabi destination resorts of the most luxurious sort, with promise of exotic and unrestricted tourist opportunities—the Emirates are, with Saudi Arabia, responsible for the unfathomably brutal and destructive war in Yemen against Houthi rebels. The war has created what is regularly (and I believe rightly) described as the greatest humanitarian crisis in the world, if one rendered largely invisible by Saudi denials of access.

Hemeti and General al-Burhan (chief of the Transitional Military Council) have been willing warriors in Yemen’s bloodbath, including in some of the deadliest fighting along the Yemeni coastline, through which humanitarian access is required. The Saudis have richly rewarded Sudan—but particularly Hemeti and al-Burhan—and unsurprisingly Hemeti’s RSF forces are now deploying to “intervene” in Libya’s ghastly civil war, joining the forces of General Khalifa Belqasim Haftar. Haftar’s forces are battling to unseat the UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli. His forces recently gained notoriety for the bombing attack on a migration detention center outside of Tripoli, a bombing that left “at least 44 dead and more than 130 severely injured, [the UN] describing the attack as ‘a war crime and odious bloody carnage [ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/03/air-strike-kill-libya-tripoli-migrant-detention-centre.’”

Whose Money Is It?
The money that Hemeti has acquired in recent years is all Sudanese national wealth: it has come to Hemeti primarily for his killing of civilians in Darfur, and more recently in Khartoum and El Obeid. And the killing will not end until Hemeti is brought under control and removed from any governance plans for the future of Sudan.

Moreover, that Hemeti has chosen to take this Sudanese wealth abroad—to the very actor that has done most to enable the Transitional Military Council, the UAE—is particularly outrageous. Sudan itself is desperate for such investment of national wealth, and such large diversion of that wealth by Hemeti, his brother, and NISS officials should make clear to all that they have no interest in Sudan and its collapsing economy, but only in their self-enrichment.

The international community, as well as the activist community, should target Al Junaid Industrial Group—and the UAE—in all ways possible ways. Products should be boycotted, bank transactions blocked, travel to the UAE should be limited in all possible ways.

I provide here the publicly available contact information for Al Junaid Industrial Group:
Al Junaid Industrial Group
Office #9Industrial Area# 13Sharjah, UAE
Landmark: Behind Tasheel
P.O. Box 61401, Sharjah
Tel: +971 6 5440233
Fax: +971 6 5440302


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eric Reeves has been writing about greater Sudan for the past twenty years. His work is here organized chronologically, and includes all electronic and other publications since the signing of the historic Machakos Protocol (July 2002), which guaranteed South Sudan the right to a self- determination referendum. There are links to a number of Reeves’ formal publications in newspapers, news magazines, academic journals, and human rights publications, as well as to the texts of his Congressional testimony and a complete list of publications, testimony, and academic presentations. LEARN MORE