War has broken out; there is much to lament. Just four years ago a peaceful uprising ousted dictator Omar El-Bashir and ushered in a civilian-military government in hopes of transitioning to fully civilian democratic rule in two years. The Transitional Government – ill-equipped, lacking experience, and faced with a colossus of formidable challenges – quickly managed to get Sudan out of the ‘pariah countries’ club of sanctions and global isolation, put the economy on the long road to recovery, and begin to dismantle the deep structures of the Bashir regime. The level of euphoria in the country was unmatched.
Alas, on October 25th 2021, Abdul Fattah El-Burhan, head of the Armed Forces, and M.H. Dagalo Hemedti, leader of the Rapid Support Forces militia, put an end to that hopeful aura by seizing power and putting down civilian protests with a campaign of killing and detentions. For more than a year, they failed to form a new government because of unrelenting opposition. But, with two rival armies vying for power, the inevitable happened: on April 15 a deadly clash erupted in Khartoum and other major cities. Thousands of civilians have now been killed, injured or are missing. UN agencies estimate that more than a million people have been internally displaced or fled to neighboring countries. The destruction of homes, business districts, and infrastructure, and damage to hospitals, banks, and other facilities will set back the country’s economy for years to come. What a devastatingly quick fall from the peak of our optimism about Sudan’s future just two years ago.
The conflict in Sudan is steeped in a complicated history and cannot be fully grasped apart from global and regional power dynamics and interests in the country’s natural wealth and geographical location. It is a Sudanese conflict imprinted with external meddling and geopolitical calculations that range from US national security concerns and EU anti-migration policies to Arab-Israeli-Iranian rivalries in the Middle East and Russia’s efforts to blunt the impact of Western sanctions on its economy. But, in the end, the war also carries the imprint of our collective failure as Sudanese – in the homeland as well as the Diaspora.
Bashir remained in power for three long decades, in which he methodically demolished the civil service, education, the media and other critical institutions by replacing qualified personnel at every level with political loyalists, saturated the land with weapons of war, and created his own private army (the RSF) from the Janjaweed militia that has terrorized Darfur for the last twenty years. Many Sudanese died in Khartoum and elsewhere in resistance to his brutal regime; many scattered all over the globe in forced or chosen exile. But, once Bashir was ousted, one could say we failed to protect the remarkable December Revolution that brought him down. Among many missteps, the pro-democracy movement abandoned the Transitional Government then couldn’t get behind a unified leadership to defeat the remnants of Bashir’s Congress Party and security apparatus. Civilians all too easily trusted soldiers to give up power willingly and on time. In the Diaspora many of us actively joined the revolutionary tide inside Sudan from dozens of cities across the world but didn’t sustain the same level of energy and pressure to help keep the transition on course.
The ransacking of Khartoum by RSF hordes today is our reckoning for having failed to rise up against Bashir’s genocidal war on Darfur. Yet, it is heart-wrenching to witness the “Sudan Armed Forces” failing to protect the national capital despite all signs of eminent danger as Hemedti mobilized his troops around the city months in advance. Was it military ineptness? tactical miscalculation? Or complicity as some have suggested? We may know the reasons in time. For now, our beloved Khartoum – the triangular capital – is a city under siege and its people are overrun by wild Janjaweed mobs.
