To take the measure of the lure maintained by the UN around the hopes of democratization of Sudan since the overthrow of dictator Omar Al-Bashir four years ago, it is instructive to read the remarks made only a month ago by Volker Perthes before the Security Council. If tensions remain high, said the UN special representative for Sudan at the time, it nevertheless remains that “the return to peace is close”. Thus, the diplomat claimed to have high hopes that a civilian government would be formed “before mid-April” and “to reach a final political agreement” inaugurating a two-year transition period accompanied by a commitment by the army to to leave politics.
Terrible mistake: the merciless war between the two generals who shared power is entering its second week, with hundreds of deaths at stake and a humanitarian situation that is worsening day by day. However, it is enough to dig a little bit into the information to understand how tense the cohabitation was between Abdel Al-Bourhane, head of the army, and Mohammed Hamdan, alias Hemetti, paramilitary leader of the Rapid Support Forces (FSR). Moreover, to lend them the will to participate in the construction of a State worthy of the name, in a context of over-militarization of the country, was downright insulting to the intelligence of the Sudanese men and women, who were a capital driving force of the popular uprising of 2019.
Chronology of events, at a run: several months of popular demonstrations lead, in April 2019, to the military overthrow of the Islamist dictator, who had been raging for thirty years. An image goes around the world, that of a young woman draped in white, Alaa Salah, 22, haranguing the demonstrators, standing on the hood of a car. Under pressure, Al-Bouhrane immediately accepted the formation of a civilian transitional government. Quickly exasperated, Al-Bourhane expelled him in October 2021 by putsch carried out jointly with Hemetti. Their “collaboration”, which Mr. Perthes congratulated himself on having succeeded in supervising, has just been shattered because of a dispute over the integration of the FSR into the Sudanese army.
Al-Bourhane and Hemetti: two predators fighting for power and resources. Coming from the military elite of Khartoum, the first made a career stuck to the dictator, before letting go. Four years later, those who worked under Al-Bashir, read the Islamist oligarchy, are still pulling the strings.
Hemetti is the sinister leader of the Janjawid militias (now the RSF), known for the massacres and abuses committed in the early 2000s with the support of Al-Bashir in the never-ending war in Darfur.Having made a fortune smuggling gold in Darfur and selling his services to the Emirati-Saudi coalition in Yemen, Hemetti has grown in power, capable today with his FSRs of transforming Khartoum into a battlefield. Unprecedented threat for the kleptomaniac military elite installed in Khartoum as in a fortress, built historically on the exploitation of the resources – oil, mining, agricultural… – of the marginalized peripheries.
The cross-border ramifications of the conflict are clear. It is the entire Horn of Africa and a good part of the Middle East that are challenged by this serious crisis. Bordering seven countries, strategically positioned commercially with its coast on the Red Sea, Sudan is the object of multiple and competing desires. Nobody wants to see the country sink into Somali-style chaos at the same time as everyone defends their own interests, against a backdrop of inevitably shifting partnerships. Vultures are everywhere — all allergic to the idea of democratic development. They are less American and European, in the current order of things, than Egyptians, Libyans, Chinese, Russians, Saudis, Emiratis… It is, on the one hand, the Egyptian dictator Abdel Al-Sissi who, by community of spirit, argues Al-Bourhane; on the other, it is the Russian paramilitary group Wagner which controls, thanks to Hemetti, gold mines, the income of which is useful for financing the aggression of the Ukraine.
The United Arab Emirates, whose interests intersect with those of Russia, is another particularly important player – an emirate that is actively swarming along the Red Sea and the coasts of East Africa, for economic and military purposes. . Worried about their food security, they have notably seized hundreds of thousands of hectares of land in Sudan, an appropriation whose implications for local populations, and on the fragile environment of the Sahel, have been swept under the carpet.
Tragic situation for Sudanese civil society — reputed to be dynamic, politicized, competent. She is a spectator and a victim of this war between generals, after having been a victim of an alleged democratic transition which boiled down to “politico-laundering” on the part of the UN authorities.