"Strong statements from, among others, African heads of state and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, have stressed that the future of Sudan lies with civilian leadership. But there’s no practical plan to make this happen.
It falls to Sudan’s civilians to set the agenda. The civilian parties have the legitimacy to claim what is theirs — the government — and demand recognition, funds, and the authority to convene.
It’s bold, better than the worn-out options on the international table, and could change the political landscape. The U.S. should change its nickel-and-dime policies towards Sudan and put its weight behind civilian institutions of state, independent of the warring parties.
If the Sudanese state is to be saved, Sudanese cannot count on the lethargic junior diplomats assigned to their case. Sudan’s civilian democrats need to seize the initiative themselves. The only card they have to play is their legitimacy. They need to play it now, before they get trapped in pointless talking shops.
The chance to be seized is speaking for the state. When al-Burhan’s delegation signed the Jeddah ceasefire, they did so as SAF—i.e. as a warring party co-equal with the RSF. They didn’t sign as the Government of Sudan. This means no one is representing the state.
The civilians could declare an interim government right away. That’s more than a symbolic act. They could take charge of the financial institutions of the state and bring material leverage to the table." Read more.
Analysis at ResponsibleStatecraft,org
Written by Alex de Waal
Dated Tuesday 06 June 2023 - full copy:
Sudan is bleeding to death and current triage is useless
Stop with the stale remedies. It’s time for civilians to claim control of the government, and for foreign powers to back them up.
Sudan is bleeding to death and its state failure is approaching the point of no return. The question is bigger than a civil war, more than a humanitarian calamity — it’s whether there can be any life in the Sudanese state for the coming decades.
Yet diplomats at the U.S. State Department, Saudi Arabia, the African Union and the United Nations still treat Sudan as a containable conflict susceptible to a package of off-the-shelf inducements and castigations. They are producing yesterday’s treatments for yesterday’s ailments — which didn’t succeed then and have zero chance today.
The formulae of ceasefires and humanitarian aid simply don’t do justice to the reality of state collapse in a country of 45 million people.
Strong statements from, among others, African heads of state and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, have stressed that the future of Sudan lies with civilian leadership. But there’s no practical plan to make this happen.
It falls to Sudan’s civilians to set the agenda. The civilian parties have the legitimacy to claim what is theirs — the government — and demand recognition, funds, and the authority to convene. It’s bold, better than the worn-out options on the international table, and could change the political landscape. The U.S. should change its nickel-and-dime policies towards Sudan and put its weight behind civilian institutions of state, independent of the warring parties.
Sudan’s most recent war erupted on April 15, pitting the Sudan Armed Forces, headed by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, against his erstwhile deputy and head of the Rapid Support Forces, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo, known as Hemedti. Seven weeks of intense combat in the national capital Khartoum have seen hundreds dead, massive damage to the infrastructure of the city, the emptying of that city of most of its middle class, and an escalating humanitarian crisis. The 100,000 who have fled abroad — thus far mostly to Egypt, to South Sudan and Chad — are but a small harbinger of what is to come as the national economy collapses. In the crisis before the crisis, there were already 13 million people — almost one third of the population — in need of food assistance to meet basic needs. That number is climbing by almost one million every week.
Ten days of intense U.S.-Saudi pressure on the two warring parties produced little. In talks in the Saudi city of Jeddah, the SAF and RSF signed a seven-day ceasefire that began on May 22, and which was renewed for a further five days. The stated rationale was to enable humanitarian aid to get in. The truce was partly respected — mostly because the two sides couldn’t sustain high-intensity combat. Last week, the mediators publicly castigated the warring parties for their failures and made it clear that their effort had run its course. At the time of writing, the war is set to escalate. The SAF appears set on a big offensive to drive the RSF out of its strongholds in Khartoum, while the RSF is mobilizing to attack other cities.
The U.S. announced targeted sanctions on four business conglomerates linked to the belligerents, two on each side. This included the main Hemedti family business, al-Gunaid Multi-Activities Company, and the sprawling Defense Industry System, run by the SAF. The sanctions could either be read as a sign that Washington is finally getting tough, or as a gesture of despair. Either way, sanctions will have an impact only with the cooperation of the generals’ foreign business partners, especially the United Arab Emirates, which buys most of Hemedti’s gold. Sudan’s generals have decades of experience in sanctions-busting. Both sides have links to Russia, which isn’t in favor of the war, but is viscerally opposed to American sanctions.
Sanctions are a tool, not a solution. Until the mediators have fastened onto a strategy, they are only a means of punishing people we don’t like.
The mediators in Jeddah faced three main problems. Most important, Hemedti and al-Burhan each hoped to land a knockout military blow on the other and didn’t want to forgo that chance. Second, the SAF side is a fractious coalition of army and paramilitary units and Islamists, united in opposition to Hemedti’s RSF, but not much more. The SAF delegates to the Jeddah meetings didn’t have the authority to make concessions on a ceasefire, and still less over any political issues.
Most important is that the battlefield is only the tactical arena. The strategic contest is financial — which side will have the resources to expand and consolidate their fighting coalition and to obtain the war material they need. The Sudanese call it “political finance.” Any mediation strategy that doesn’t revolve around political finance is a waste of time.
If Jeddah was the triage station before the emergency room, the duty doctors didn’t diagnose the patient before setting to work.
Much store was put in a meeting of the African Union Peace and Security Council on May 27, in large part because the 15 members met at heads-of-state level. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni was in the chair. He and several others, including South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, called for the setting up of a panel of high-level facilitators — implying current or former heads of state — to deal with the crisis. This would have allowed the AU to seize the initiative, in part because others would have deferred to the seniority of the panel members.
The AU has no material leverage over the warring parties. What it has is the legitimacy that derives from its principles and the fact that all the major powers — including China and Russia — will defer to an African consensus position, if articulated by a credible African leader. It knows exactly how to do this.* [*Sudan Watch Ed: full copy below incase hyperlink breaks].
There were positive elements in the AU PSC communiqué; for example, its stress on the need for a humanitarian response that maintains and restores basic services such as electricity and telecommunications.
But the key decision at the summit was to maintain the status quo. The same actors will focus on the same agenda as before. The chairperson of the AU Commission, Moussa Faki, kept his own chef de cabinet, Mohamed el-Hacan Lebatt, as special envoy to Sudan — a post he will supposedly fill alongside his other assignments, which already include the Democratic Republic of Congo and Libya. Opinions are divided over Lebatt’s record since he was given the Sudan file four years ago. He insists that he is personally responsible for the August 2019 Constitutional Declaration and every other triumph. With remarkable unanimity, Sudanese actors condemn him as vain, biased, and inept. Democratic activists say he hijacked their revolution to side with the military.
Meanwhile, UN Secretary General António Guterres is sticking with his Special Representative, Volker Perthes — in part because SAF said they wanted him out, and Guterres didn’t want to be seen to be caving to pressure. And, reportedly, Faki didn’t want Guterres to appoint a new envoy — such as a former foreign minister — who would outrank his own staffer.
Sudanese blame Lebatt and Perthes for the failures that led to the crisis. Whether this assessment is fair or not is beside the point. A basic precept of conflict resolution is that the mediator shouldn’t be a problem, and the AU and UN are violating that.
In short, the AU-UN diagnosis of Sudan’s affliction hasn’t changed. The AU’s “roadmap” is a carousel of consultations with Sudanese parties and neighboring countries. It has working groups on security (headed by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia), humanitarian issues (headed by the UN), and the political process (under the AU). In short: nothing new, nothing commensurate with the stakes.
If the Sudanese state is to be saved, Sudanese cannot count on the lethargic junior diplomats assigned to their case. Sudan’s civilian democrats need to seize the initiative themselves. The only card they have to play is their legitimacy. They need to play it now, before they get trapped in pointless talking shops.
The chance to be seized is speaking for the state. When al-Burhan’s delegation signed the Jeddah ceasefire, they did so as SAF—i.e. as a warring party co-equal with the RSF. They didn’t sign as the Government of Sudan. This means no one is representing the state.
The civilians could declare an interim government right away. That’s more than a symbolic act. They could take charge of the financial institutions of the state and bring material leverage to the table.
Similar things have happened elsewhere. In Libya, for example, the central bank remained independent of the warring militias, receiving dollars from the sale of oil and paying salaries across the country. Sudan’s independent banking institutions would need technical, diplomatic and financial support from the U.S. and other donors. This would be a test of Washington’s seriousness in halting state collapse and supporting democracy.
Sudan needs bold thinking commensurate with the scale of its crisis. The ideas are there. What’s lacking is leadership to make those ideas real.
IMAGE Sudan's General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan stands among troops,in an unknown location, in this picture released on May 30, 2023. Sudanese Armed Forces/Handout via REUTERS THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY. MANDATORY CREDIT
View original: https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/06/06/without-bold-new-diplomatic-approaches-sudans-state-will-collapse/
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*It knows exactly how to do this
ANALYSIS at ResponsibleStatecraft.org
Written by Alex de Waal
Published 20 April 2023 - here is a full copy incase in future the link breaks:
Sudan is tearing itself apart and Washington lost its capacity to help
The truth is that no one was doing the basics of multilateral diplomacy to prevent the bloody power struggle we’re witnessing today.
Sudan is tearing itself apart, and Washington is watching, seemingly unable to do anything to stop the carnage. America’s diplomats lament that the U.S. has lost leverage. The truth is that no one is doing the basics of multilateral diplomacy — coordinating disparate actors.
Two Sudanese warlords are intent on destroying one another, and in the process are destroying the nation’s capital Khartoum. A city of more than seven million people is wracked by street fighting. Two rival armed forces — the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF), a passable imitation of a professional army, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary of comparable size and combat capacity — are battling for control.
It’s a simple power struggle between two generals. Abdel Fattah al Burhan is the chairman of the Sovereignty Council and de facto president. He commands the SAF and has the support of most of what Sudanese call the “deep state” — the network of crony capitalist companies entangled with the army, intelligence, and Islamist networks. Mohamed ‘Hemedti’ Hamdan Dagolo is the leader of the RSF and sits atop a transnational conglomerate that includes gold mining and export, supply of mercenaries to neighboring countries, and other business interests, including a partnership with Russia’s Wagner Group.
The two men collaborated in the 2019 overthrow of long-standing military kleptocrat President Omar al-Bashir when a non-violent popular uprising led by an alliance called the Forces for Freedom and Change (FFC) made his rule untenable. The soldiers cooperated to thwart the democratic movement. But each wanted to rule Sudan.
The fighting in Khartoum came as no surprise to close observers.
A complicated international mediation process had adopted a “Framework Agreement” and was winding its way towards finalizing a document that would bring a civilian prime minister and resolving the question of security sector reform. The crux of this was whether Hemedti would agree for the RSF to be integrated under SAF command in two years, or whether he could retain them as a separate force for ten years—long enough for him to make a bid for power at some future date.
Any mediator knows that the most dangerous moment in a peace process is the last moment, and the most explosive issues are the security issues.
The Sudanese mediation involved no fewer than seven diplomatic actors. The “tripartite” of the United Nations, the African Union and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), an eight-country regional grouping, convened the talks involving the FFC and the military. The “tripartite” was supported by the “quad”, consisting of the United States, Britain, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
With all those diplomatic eyes on the ball, why wasn’t the conflict stopped before it erupted to such devastating effect?
The answer is, it was a low-level diplomatic traffic jam. All the actors were going in different directions. No one wanted what has now transpired — but no one was coordinating the signaling to prevent it from happening.
Sudan is no stranger to wars, and diplomats have experience in preventing them. It’s salutary to compare other instances when diplomats averted all-out war.
In April 2011, just two months before South Sudan’s scheduled independence day, fighting erupted in Abyei, a disputed region between Sudan and South Sudan. Each side blamed the other for firing the first shots, and the Sudan Armed Forces launched a military operation that drove out the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (the army of the south) and burned and looted Abyei town. The South’s independence was in peril.
Aware of the perils of the separation process, the African Union had set up a High Level Panel of three former presidents — Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Abdulsalami Abubaker of Nigeria, and Pierre Buyoya of Burundi. In turn, the United Nations and western governments deployed experienced diplomats with a sharp political sense.
When Abyei exploded, a joint delegation of AU Panel, UN representative (Haile Menkerios) and the U.S. Special Envoy (Princeton Lyman) intervened with both sides, insisting on de-escalation. Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi called an emergency summit and, when the negotiations stalled on the question of security, he offered to dispatch a brigade of peacekeepers, provided it was mandated by the UN Security Council.
The Sudanese Government had confidence in Ethiopia’s neutrality and in the effectiveness of its peacekeepers but distrusted the western countries. The U.S. secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, personally assured the Sudanese assistant president, Nafie Ali Nafie, that — contrary to normal procedure for UN peacekeepers — the mandate and specifics of the UN Interim Security Force for Abyei would be exactly as agreed in the agreement in Addis Ababa. The peacekeepers were dispatched. War was avoided.
A year later, fighting erupted on the border between the Sudan and newly independent South Sudan at a nearby place called Heglig. Again, all-out war threatened. Guided by the AU Panel under its Chairperson Thabo Mbeki, the African Union immediately convened its Peace and Security Council and issued a communiqué, setting out a roadmap for a peaceful resolution of the conflicts — and all the underlying disputes that had led to the crisis.
While the PSC’s communiqués don’t have the same legal standing as UN Security Council resolutions, a united African position, coordinated with the UN and the U.S., and outreach to Russia, China and the Arab League, created the formula for the UN to act. At a time when the Security Council was paralyzed by U.S.-Russian sparring over Syria, it unanimously adopted resolution 2046, copied almost word-for-word from the PSC’s communiqué.
Mbeki’s panel, working with the UN and the U.S., then facilitated the negotiations that led to the two countries signing a raft of cooperation agreements.
It wasn’t a question of trust or leverage. Al-Bashir was paranoid, and no U.S. official could even speak with him after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against him. The key was diplomatic tradecraft.
As well as frequent meetings and phone calls, Mbeki wrote often to the Sudanese leaders, precisely framing the issues, principles and proposed steps. Formal correspondence is often underrated. But it can challenge often-impulsive military men to respond with equal thoughtfulness—helping to restrain their worst impulses.
That kind of coordination now seems like a dream. The current AU Chairperson, Moussa Faki, has undermined his own institutions. On the Ethiopia war, for example, he and his High Representative, General Olusegun Obasanjo, kept the mediation as their own personal initiative, cutting out the PSC and thwarting any discussion at the UN Security Council.
The UN’s representative in Khartoum, Volker Perthes, is a technocrat without the political savvy of his predecessor. A decade ago, U.S. Special Envoy Lyman was in regular — sometimes daily — contact with Secretary Clinton and then-Senator John Kerry (at the time, Chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, who visited Sudan at key moments) and could get them to intervene at crucial moments. The Biden Administration has deployed no one of remotely comparable stature to the region for more than a year.
The Trump Administration delegated its policy to the Horn of Africa to its main Middle Eastern allies — Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. After the peaceful uprising in Sudan in April 2019, it worked with the Saudis and Emiratis to help secure the deal between the FFC and the generals that led to a civilian-led government.
But the idea that the Saudis and Emiratis wanted democracy in Sudan was wishful thinking. Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi wanted a junior version of himself in power in Khartoum, and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu got what he wanted from General al-Burhan — recognition of Israel, in return for which the U.S. finally lifted Sudan’s designation as a state sponsor of terror.
For the Biden Administration, Sudan was never such a sufficient priority that it would push its Middle Eastern allies to support democracy in that country. Eighteen months ago, al-Burhan and Hemedti launched a joint coup, sweeping the civilian leaders into prison. The two generals were confident that their backers in the region would overrule any strong U.S. reaction. They were right. After a brief period of diplomatic activism, U.S. policy reverted to a low-wattage policy of “stability,” and that meant dealing with the de facto strongmen. Washington supported the “tripartite” mediation to restore the democratic transition, but it was little more than a box-ticking exercise.
Each of the outside power brokers has its own preferences. Egypt backs al-Burhan. The UAE leans towards Hemedti. But none of them want a war that will cause millions of refugees, destroy their investments and cause mayhem in their backyard. Russia has ties to the RSF but it has a bigger stake in keeping Egypt onside. Ten years ago, China and the U.S. agreed that they had complementary interests in Sudan, and that reality should not have changed.
There’s no doubt that the U.S. has lost a lot of leverage over the last decade. What’s tragic is that it seems to have rationed its diplomacy as well, and left Africa adrift.
Alex de Waal served as an advisor to the AU High-Level Implementation Panel for Sudan and South Sudan, 2009-2013.
View original: https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/04/20/sudan-is-tearing-itself-apart-and-washington-lost-its-capacity-to-help/
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