Roundup of the Best Pieces I’ve Read on Sudan’s Crisis

Since April 15, armed conflict has pitted two factions in Sudan – the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces – against one another, with devastating consequences for the people of Sudan. Here are the best pieces I’ve read so far, with some excerpts:

International Crisis Group’s April 20 statement is a good place to start if you need an overview.

Raga Makawi, “My desperate search for safety in Sudan,” The Economist (22 April):

The streets were deserted. After ten minutes we came to a checkpoint. I slowed down and arched my back trying to see which side the soldiers were on. The man lolling next to the checkpoint wore a dark-green uniform and carried an old ak-47, which suggested he belonged to the forces commanded by Burhan, the de-facto head of the junta. I smiled and said in a gentle, pleading voice: “good day, officer, may we pass here?” He didn’t bother to get up, but asked us brusquely where we were going. Other soldiers who had been standing nearby drifted towards us.

Azza Ahmed Abdel Aziz, “Sudan is at risk of unravelling from decades of injustice,” Middle East Eye (25 April):

At present, violence is no longer an abstraction for many Sudanese, since it has penetrated the heart of the nation, embodied in its capital city. This war is telling a resounding truth, which is just now finally being heard: Sudan is a nation that is unravelling under the weight of accumulated injustices, inequalities and unaddressed grievances of parts of its population, which have informed its history as a post-colonial nation state. The civil war raging in Khartoum lies on a continuum of violence to which the Sudanese state (in diverse forms) has subjected its citizens over the long term. 

Nesrine Malik, “The seeds of Sudan’s collapse were sown decades ago,” The Guardian (23 April):

Last week’s events started 20 years ago, in the marginalised western region of Darfur. A rebellion against the government was brutally suppressed by a group of fighters and raiders called the Janjaweed. [Former President Omar al-]Bashir, a military man who came to power through an Islamist-backed military coup in 1989, was unwilling to send his precious army into the fray, and instead stoked tribal and ethnic differences and supported the Janjaweed to act as his proxy. Hundreds of thousands died, women were systematically raped and millions were displaced…The Janjaweed formalised into the RSF and became more powerful under the warlord Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (known as Hemedti), whose ambitions grew as Bashir gave him free rein to accumulate influence and assets, as long as he protected him. Hemedti did not keep his side of the bargain and piggybacked on the demands for democracy in 2019 – and along with the army, pushed Bashir aside.

Roman Deckert has an interesting thread on how to allocate blame, historically:

A 🧵 with some thoughts on #Sudan & how we got here:

Many rightly blame Bashir for creating Himedti & his militia as well as Burhan as Islamist SAF officer. No excuses for Bashir – but who created him? I first came to #Khartoum in 1997 & NOBODY took him seriously then. 1/10 pic.twitter.com/7tpQPP7mkR

— Roman Deckert (@RomanDeckert) April 23, 2023

Joshua Craze, “Gunshots in Khartoum,” New Left Review (17 April):

What is clear is why this confrontation erupted. Tensions between the two sides had been mounting since the signing of an accord in December 2022, the so-called Framework Agreement, which was supposed to pave the way for a transition to a civilian-led government and the departure of the military junta that had ruled Sudan since October 2021. The agreement kicked all the difficult issues into the long grass. Crucially, it did not address the integration of the RSF into the army – a development that Burhan wishes to take two years, and Hemedti, ten. The political process it initiated had the rare distinction of being both extremely vague and entirely unrealistic. Delicate compromises that would have taken months to achieve were expected within weeks, according to a timetable largely created for international consumption. These demands heightened latent tensions between the two sides, prompting the RSF to believe that Egypt – a longstanding backer of the Sudanese military – would intervene. Hemedti deployed his forces next to the Merowe airforce base at the beginning of Ramadan, providing the catalyst for the current clashes.

Eliza Mackintosh and Jennifer Hansler, “How the West enabled Sudan’s warring generals,” CNN (26 April):

“It is a fight between two partners in one crime, [the] 25 October 2021 coup, over the spoils of their crime. This is a war between two evils who both don’t have the interest of this country in their hearts,” Amgad Fareid, a former adviser to the ousted Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, said in a recent blog post. He added that the international community helped to create the current situation unfolding in Sudan, by continuing to push for the formation of a government at any cost — lending legitimacy to Hemedti and Burhani as political actors even as they sought to thwart the process and avoid genuine reforms.

Zeinab Mohammed Salih, Jason Burke, and Patrick Wintour, “‘The worst of worst case scenarios’: western diplomats blindsided over Sudan crisis,” The Guardian (25 April):

In western capitals, there will now be difficult conversations about what could have been done more effectively to guide a transition from military to civilian rule after the fall of the veteran authoritarian ruler Omar al-Bashir in 2019 following months of popular protests.

One criticism is that sanctions should have been imposed on Hemedti and the RSF to send a strong signal after they massacred about 200 pro-democracy demonstrators in June 2019 as they moved to sideline civilians and consolidate their grip on power.

This short but blunt thread from a Swedish diplomat is worth reading:

🧵
I spent 5.5 years in #Sudan as a diplomat and a development/humanitarian head. First year was strange, the little I was allowed by then gov of Sudan to travel, it was all theatre and depressing theatre at that. The Revolution, to me, made Sudan come alive.

— Anna Saleem Högberg (@AnnaSaleemH) April 22, 2023

Nisrin Elamin with a brief but potent thread on how to assess external versus domestic causes of the war:

The Emiratis +Saudis have spent a combined $27 billion in Sudanese land, real estate + infrastructure projects during the latter part of the Al-Bashir regime +were the first to bankroll the coup regime, even if they play diff roles now. I am a researcher, I have receipts. #Sudan

— Nisrin Elamin (@minlayla77) April 19, 2023

Mat Nashed, “Sudanese left behind as foreign states evacuate citizens,” Al Jazeera (26 April):

Hamid Murtada, a Sudanese analyst and member of the grassroots pro-democracy movement, told Al Jazeera he believes the West is ignoring an opportunity to prioritise humanitarian needs while evacuating their own diplomats.

With a 72-hour ceasefire already shaky, Murtada said international actors should arrange safe passages to and from hospitals, or get some banks to operate so that people can access their money.

“Evidently, foreign governments managed to get both the army and RSF to stop fighting to a good extent in order to evacuate diplomats, which proves that they have leverage over them and can capitalise on the [ceasefire]. But it seems they are focused on safe passages for diplomats,” Hamid said.

I’ll close on that grim note. Most of the authors listed here are also on Twitter, where they provide frequent updates on the situation.

Some Thoughts on Blasphemy and Anti-Blasphemy Violence – for Foreign Exchanges

At Derek Davison’s Foreign Exchanges, I wrote last week about “the politics of blasphemy” (that’s also the title of the piece. I found the topic extremely hard to write about with the delicacy it merits, given that I neither want to excuse violence against innocents nor do I want to play into Islamophobia. The piece takes recent violence in Nigeria as a point of departure but also touches on incidents from Mauritania, Sudan, and elsewhere.

A Libyan Arrest Warrant for Chadian and Sudanese Rebels

In early January, the Libyan Attorney General’s office issued arrest warrants for twenty-one Chadian rebels, eight Sudanese rebels, and six Libyan nationals in connection with attacks in eastern and southern Libya. The full list of Chadian and Sudanese names is available here (Arabic) while the Libyan names are available here (also Arabic). The warrants have widely been depicted as an anti-Qatar move, and in fact it’s challenging to find straightforward reporting on the list. This is a decent English-language explainer, though.

In terms of the Libyan names, they include some very prominent figures, such as Abdelhakim Belhadj and Ibrahim al-Jadran. One figure I was unfamiliar with before this is Abu ‘Ubayda al-Zawi/Shaaban Hadia, whom you can read about here and here. The others are Ali al-Huni, Mukhtar Rakhis, and Hamdan Ahmad (my transliterations). Belhadj has already denounced the warrant against him as a political stunt.

On the Chadian side, figures such as Mahamat Mahdi Ali, leader of the Front pour l’alternance et la concorde au Tchad (Front for Regime Change and Harmony in Chad, FACT)*, have also protested the warrants. Ali said that his organization is uninvolved in Libya’s problems and does not act as mercenaries.

Here are the names of the Chadians, although my transliterations may not completely line up with how these names are rendered in the Anglophone and Francophone media:

• Ali Ahmad Abd Allah
• Hamid Juru Mariqi
• Muhammad Musa Adam
• Muhammad Ahmad Nasr
• Adam Husayn
• Muhammad Abd Allah Ahmad
• Umar Abkar Tijani
• Bashara Hajar Ayibu
• Muhammad al-Mahdi Ali (Mahamat Mahdi Ali)
• Abu Bakr Tuli
• Al-Ashi Warduqu
• Barki Yusuf
• Timani Erdimi
• Hammad Hasan Abd al-Rahim (name appears twice)
• Musa al-Hajj Azraq (name appears twice)
• Muhammad Nuri
• Muhammad Hasan Balmay
• Mas’ud Jiddi
• Kanqabi Tabul
• Muhammad Hakimi
• Musa Muhammad Zayn

And the Sudanese:

• Hasan Musa Kali
• Jabir Abu Bakr
• Arkumi Minawi
• Abd al-Karim Shuli
• Abd Allah Janah
• Uthman al-Quni
• Musa Hilal
• Ali Umar Takadim

Some Arguments for Easing U.S. Sanctions on Sudan

In January, the outgoing administration of U.S. President Barack Obama issued an executive order that would have triggered, six months later, the easing of some U.S. sanctions on Sudan. Before that six-month marker arrived on July 12, the new administration of President Donald Trump promulgated its own executive order putting in place a three-month delay.

I’ve seen two major reports from think tank/advocacy groups arguing for a rethink of the sanctions, as well as for a removal of Sudan from the State Sponsors of Terror (SST) list.

One report (.pdf) comes from the Atlantic Council’s Sudan Task Force. The report argues that sanctions have hurt ordinary Sudanese people rather than decisively affecting the ruling regime (p. 8). The report doesn’t quite come out and say “lift the sanctions,” but that’s the message I got from it. The report adds that “Continuing to maintain the SST designation without any evidence of sponsoring terrorism – and, in fact, with plentiful evidence of Sudan’s cooperation in countering terrorism as well as various commendations from members of the intelligence and diplomatic communities – undermines US credibility and leverage in Sudan, the region, and on wider US counterterrorism efforts” (p. 10).

From the perspective of actual Trump administration policy, it may be significant that the Atlantic Council’s Peter Pham, himself a member of the Sudan Task Force, is rumored to be a top candidate for Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, a position the Trump administration has not yet filled.

Another report comes from the International Crisis Group, and it’s a bit blunter:

Sudan’s government has gone some way toward meeting U.S. criteria for sanctions relief. But its progress, particularly on humanitarian access and ceasing hostilities in its internal conflicts, at best is partial and President Omar al-Bashir’s government remains autocratic, corrupt and abusive. To lift sanctions would reward a regime that must do much more to improve governance and end its wars; not to do so could lead to a reversal of advances made and discourage further cooperation. On balance, lifting sanctions is the better of two imperfect options, particularly if coupled with clear signals that far more is needed for the government to escape those sanctions that will remain in force and obtain debt relief. The U.S. should also make clear that it stands ready to impose new targeted financial sanctions should Khartoum renege on its commitments.

Personally, I’m swayed by the arguments that Atlantic Council and Crisis Group make. No one should deny the abuses that the Sudanese government perpetrates, but the current approach does not seem to be working, and maintaining the sanctions unchanged could undermine U.S. leverage and even engender backsliding on the part of the Sudanese government.

On 1967 and Islamism

Earlier this month, the fiftieth anniversary of the Six Day War evoked some great writing, including a piece by Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution. His piece is entitled “The end of Nasserism: How the 1967 War opened new space for Islamism in the Arab world.”

Maybe I’m reading too much into the words “Arab world” in the title, because Hamid focuses on Egypt, but at the regional level, I question the idea that 1967 was the turning point or even that 1967 was a major factor in trajectories of Islamism in some Arab countries.

Here is Hamid:

When Nasser, and by extension Egypt, lost, there was relatively little left to say. The starting premise of Arab nationalism had been fatally undermined, 15 years into the 1952 revolution…When Nasser died in 1970 at the age of 52, millions of Egyptians gathered to mourn him in a six-mile procession. It was perhaps the last unifying moment in Egypt’s modern history, before the resurgence of Islamism—and particularly the Muslim Brotherhood—opened up a new fault line in Egyptian society.

The first point to make is that Egypt does not equal the Arab world. If 1967 marked the end of Nasserism, why did not just one but three leaders clearly inspired by Nasser come to power after 1967? The three leaders were Muammar al-Qadhafi of Libya, Ja’far al-Numayri of Sudan, and Muhammad Siad Barre of Somalia (a member of the Arab League), all of whom came to power in coups in 1969. True, each of them had a unique relationship with Islam, and al-Numayri embraced Islamism by the late 1970s, but it is significant that multiple leaders in the Arab world were vying for Nasser’s mantle after 1967 and even after Nasser’s death in 1970. If Egypt followed a certain trajectory, that does not mean that Egypt set the pace for the whole region.

The second point to make is that key figures associated with with the “Islamist resurgence” were already up and coming before the 1967 war. The best example is Egypt’s Yusuf al-Qaradawi (b. 1926), who published his influential Al-Halal wa-l-Haram fi al-Islam (The Licit and the Prohibited in Islam) in 1960. Another example is Sudan’s Hasan al-Turabi (1932-2016), who first came to prominence in Sudan’s 1964 revolution. The point here is that after 1967, many of the leading figures were not converts from Arab nationalism to Islamism, but rather people who had been Islamists all along. Certainly the events of 1967 put them in a position to amplify their message, but that might tell us more about the relationship between Islamism and crises than it does about 1967 specifically. Moreover, much of the infrastructure of contemporary Islamism was built after 1967, but key components of that infrastructure were built before 1967.

Third, whatever impact 1967 had, it was not necessarily immediate, and it was only in combination with other factors. When we look at where Islamists actually came to power or nearly came to power, two of the most prominent cases occurred over two decades later – Sudan 1989, and Algeria 1991-1992. And in both of those cases, it was largely domestic factors that brought Islamists to the forefront.

I don’t want to understate the psychological, political, and spiritual impact of 1967 on the Arab world. But I don’t think 1967 was the watershed moment for Islamism in the entire region. Rather, I think that the trajectories of Islamism in the Arab world have been highly divergent, and that some of the most successful Islamist movements in the region were in countries much less affected by the 1967 defeat than Egypt was.

My last thought is a somewhat simplistic one, and it concerns Egypt itself. If 1967 was “the end of Nasserism,” then why has the Egyptian military regime been so enduring, so strong, since 1952? Perhaps the revolutionary aura and the Arab nationalist ideology fell away after 1967, but it still seems to me that Nasser and the Free Officers created a system that remains partly (largely?) in place to this day. Put even more simply: no Nasser, no Sisi. Viewed in that light, the Muslim Brotherhood’s ups and downs in Egypt since 1928 have only really brought it close to controlling the actual levers of the state on a few occasions and only allowed it to partially grasp those levers during one brief period. There have also been multiple moments of “resurgence” for the Brotherhood, just as there have been multiple moments of repression, disarray, and weakness. So was 1967 a turning point, or was it just one of several key moments in a long cycle – a cycle that always ends with military men in power?

Continued Rejection of the ICC in West and East Africa

It is not new to read of African governments ignoring or rejecting the International Criminal Court (ICC)’s claims to jurisdictional authority. But two stories this week reinforce the idea that many key players on the continent are willing to cross the Court.

First is Sudanese President Omar al Bashir’s attendance at an African Union summit in Abuja, Nigeria. The ICC issued a warrant for Bashir’s arrest in March 2009, in connection with war crimes in Darfur. His travel itinerary since then charts a map of ICC rejection across Africa and beyond. While Nigeria is the first West African nation to host Bashir, it joins a trend that includes several other countries and the African Union itself. From the BBC:

Mr Bashir has visited numerous African countries since the arrest warrant was issued – including Ethiopia, Kenya and Djibouti.

Only Botswana and Malawi have threatened to arrest him.

In May, the AU called on the ICC to drop war crimes charges against Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta after accusing it of “hunting” Africans because of their race.

Mention of Kenya brings us to the second news item from this week: Yesterday, the ICC rejected another request from Kenyan Vice President William Ruto, who like Kenyatta faces charges at the Court, to hold his trial in Africa.

The election, in March of this year, of Kenyatta and Ruto seemed a rebuke to the Court. Both men have been under indictment since March 2011 in connection with election/post-election violence in 2007-2008. David Bosco, writing shortly before Kenya’s most recent election, spelled out some potential consequences that a Kenyatta victory might have for the Court. One of these is particularly noteworthy in light of the Court’s decision on Ruto’s request for a trial location change:

That a freshly elected African head of state will bear the burden of ICC indictment would likely worsen already poor relations between the court and African officialdom. Many African leaders have argued that the ICC, which to this point has indicted only Africans, systematically ignores crimes committed in other parts of the world. At various points, African leaders have discussed withdrawing en masse from the treaty that created the court or, more likely, empowering a regional court to investigate atrocities, thereby displacing the ICC.

The ICC’s decision to keep Ruto’s trial in The Hague may strengthen such sentiments among some African leaders.

From both Nigeria and Kenya, then, I see fresh examples of the difficulty the Court is having in achieving legitimacy and recognition in Africa.

Africa Blog Roundup: Susan Rice, Mali, Darfur, Kenyan IDPs, and More

Africa in DC: “What Does Susan Rice’s Appointment as National Security Adviser Mean for Africa?”

Bruce Whitehouse:

As French troops hunted Islamist fighters in northern Mali this past winter, historian Greg Mann said that what was taking place in the region was not one war, but several. For a few months starting in January 2013, the various armed conflicts that had broken out over the previous year appeared to converge, as did French and Malian interests. But, as Gregreminded us in March, the French government’s war was not the Malian government’s war. And now it seems that Mali’s war — after a long hiatus — is starting up again, and breaking away from France’s war.

For weeks there have been rumblings of an impending resumption of armed conflict between Malian government forces and the MNLA separatist rebel group that controls the northern region of Kidal. Rumors of Malian troop movements north of Gao have been circulating since February. But this week these were joined by an army statement that government forces had massed midway between Gao and the rebel-occupied town, and by news today that Malian troops took the village of Anafi, 100 km southwest of Kidal. Areport on Malijet claims that Malian soldiers are within 35 km of the town, and that MNLA forces are retreating toward Algeria; a similar report has appeared on Reuters.

Amb. John Campbell: “Racism in Mali and the Upcoming Elections.”

Aly Verjee:

The second honeymoon of Darfur’s Doha peace process lasted just over a month. On April 6, Mohammad Bashar, leader of the Justice and Equality Movement-Sudan (hence referred to as JEM-Bashar) signed the Doha Document for Peace in Darfur (DDPD; English, Arabic) in the ballroom of the Doha Ritz-Carlton hotel.
In Doha, Bashar told delegates he was looking forward to going home. On May 12 he was dead, killed on the Sudan-Chad borderlands at the hands of his former comrades in the mainstream Justice and Equality Movement (JEM).

Internally Displaced: “Kenya and South Sudan – The Border Question Resurfaces?”

Africa UP Close: “Youth Farming and Aquaculture Initiatives Aim to Reduce Food and Political Insecurity in Senegal.”

Prisca Kamungi: “Municipal Authorities and IDPs Outside of Camps: The Case of Kenya’s ‘Integrated Displaced Persons’.”

What are you reading?

Africa Blog Roundup: Algeria, Somalia, Michel Djotodia, South Sudan, and More

The Moor Next Door: “Comments on Algeria.”

Baobab has a video analysis of the London conference on Somalia.

Missed this during my hiatus in April, but it’s still relevant: Louisa Lombard‘s biography of Michel Djotodia, the rebel-turned-leader of the Central African Republic.

Amb. John Campbell: “What Next for Nigeria’s Oil Patch?”

Dibussi Tande: “President [Paul] Biya [of Cameroon] Appoints Thirty Senators.”

Roving Bandit: “So What Exactly Just Happened to the Economy of South Sudan?”

Via Amb. David Shinn, the Spring 2013 bulletin of the Sudan Studies Association (.pdf).

Africa Blog Roundup: Kenya, Mali, Algeria, Ethiopia, and More

Ken Opalo gives some important information about the results of the Kenyan presidential election, as well as some things to look out for in the coming weeks.

Kate Almquist Knopf: “Send an Ambassador, Not an Envoy, to Khartoum.” (via Amb. David Shinn, who gives the idea his qualified support.)

Bruce Whitehouse on Mali: “The North, the Army, and the Junta.”

Amb. John Campbell: “Mali Intervention Becoming a Partisan Issue in France?”

The Moor Next Door: “Algeria Plays Defense.”

The Gulele Post: “Ethiopia’s ‘Jihad’ Film and Its Boomerang Effects.”

Dibussi Tande: “Cameroon’s New Senate: An Unnecessary (Anti)Democratic Anachronism.”

Baobab: “Laurent Gbagbo and the ICC: Watching and Waiting.”

Carmen McCain rounds up reviews of the novel Sin Is a Puppy, and asks, “How many Nigerian novels published in Nigeria get this kind of critical response? We need to do better.”

Africa Is A Country: “Dirk Coetzee Is Dead: The Legacies of Apartheid’s Death Squads and the TRC.”

Shelby Grossman with a few links on piracy in Somalia and poverty in Nigeria.

Africa News Roundup: Kenyan Elections, Jonathan in 2015, Meth, and More

The big news for the coming week will be, of course, the elections in Kenya on March 4. The BBC profiles the candidates here.

Reuters:

Opponents [of Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan] within his own party say since he has already been sworn into office twice, another term would break the constitutional two-term limit. Cyriakus Njoku, a member of the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP), brought the case.

But Justice Mudashiru Oniyangi of the High Court in Abuja rejected that argument.

“After the death of Umar Yar’Adua, there was no election. President Jonathan was merely asked to assume the office … in line with doctrine of necessity,” he said.

“He is therefore currently serving his first tenure of office and if he so wishes, he is eligible to further seek his party’s ticket … to run for office in 2015.”

Njoku did not say whether he would appeal to the supreme court.

In my view Jonathan is highly likely to win the 2015 elections.

AFP:

Efforts were underway Friday to confirm the killing of a notorious Al-Qaeda commander during fighting with French troops in Mali, with Washington calling reports of his death “very credible”.

Algeria’s independent Ennahar TV reported this week that Abdelhamid Abou Zeid, a chief of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), was killed in northern Mali along with 40 other Islamist militants.

In Washington, a US official speaking on condition of anonymity said reports of his death seemed “very credible” and that if Abou Zeid was indeed slain “it would be a significant blow to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.”

French officials have so far reacted with caution, with President Francois Hollande saying Friday: “Reports are circulating, it is not up to me to confirm them.”

Bloomberg relates that Sudan is reinforcing troop levels in Blue Nile State.

Jeune Afrique (French) on Gao, Mali.

Europe1 (French) reports that Boko Haram is attempting to recruit youth in Cameroon. “Today, dozens of members of the religious sect are in prison in Cameroon. It is to obtain their liberation that the group chose to kidnap seven members of a French family last week in the northwestern part of the country.”

VOA: “Methamphetamine ‘Growing Concern’ for West Africa.”

IRIN: “Why the Sahel Needs $1.6 Billion Again This year.”