In early December 2023, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD)1 — the regional bloc mediating negotiations between Sudan’s de facto leader, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan — and the head of the Rapid Security Forces (RSF), Mohamed “Hemedti” Hamdan Dagalo, seemed to be making progress toward both a ceasefire and preliminary peace talks in light of a nine month long civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) who back al-Burhan and the RSF who back Hemedti.
On December 9, 2022, the current chair of IGAD and al-Buhran met in Djibouti and agreed “to a one-on-one meeting with Hemedti.” As reported by Alexis Mohammed, adviser to Djibouti’s president, “Hemedti and al-Buhran accepted the proposal of meeting within fifteen days in order to pave the way for a series of confidence-building measures between the two parties that lead to the launch of a political process.” However, on December 19, Hemedti’s RSF launched a surprise offensive against key SAF sites. Four days later, the RSF would succeed in gaining territorial control over the city of Wad Madani in east-central Sudan, “a major city in [the country’s] agricultural breadbasket.” That said, the strategic interest in taking a city like Wad Madani is not simply due to its population size or proximity to the capital, Khartoum: “the current fight is also for control of the country’s resources” as can be seen in the case of Darfur (west Sudan).
The people of Darfur have been subjected to “a systematic policy of genocide” that has killed upwards of “300,000 people.” In addition to the psychological and physical experiences of living under the condition of genocide, the people of Darfur now have to “deal with new and heightened anxieties from the escalation in violence associated with the presence of the Wagner Group on their lands.”
With Darfur’s history of genocide and heightening tensions between the SAF and RSF, bringing about an end to Sudan’s various armed conflicts appears to be an unlikely possibility, and not simply because the SAF and RSF have previously agreed to meet for preliminary negotiations only to have said talks suspended due to a surprise military operation by one of its partners. Rich in gold and uranium, Darfur alone accounts for 40% of Sudan’s exports coming from the country’s gold mining industry; gold that “is thought to be smuggled out of the country, via the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and then on to Russia.”
What is more, “the RSF runs gold mines, particularly in Darfur, which help to fund the tens of thousands of troops at Hemedti’s command.” According to Reem Abbas, Nonresident Fellow at The Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, the RSF’s two main sources of funding are,
“First, a business owned and utilized by Hemedti’s family. As a result, the RSF’s top commanders are Hemedti’s siblings and the main players in the RSF’s business ventures are also his direct family members. Second, the RSF has a broad socio-ethnic base of nomadic tribes in Western Sudan due its composition along ethnic lines and this makes the force very loyal to Hemedti whose work intersects with the interests of their communities and their ability to survive in difficult terrains.”
Despite the likelihood of the transformation of Sudan into a mere theater of an out and out proxy war between the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and in light of rapidly escalating tensions in the Red Sea and the continuation of Israel’s more or less belligerent regional military strategy, as long as the natural gas and mineral deposits keep leaving their ports, the “international community” seemingly needn’t know of the people of there and under what conditions they have managed to live. Thus, the economic extraction of raw materials for foreign markets continues suggests little hope for the liberation of the Sudanese people by any of the country’s rival armed groups and their respective leaders, for “capital comes [into the world] dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”1
The following provides a brief overview of some key events in the history of Sudan, beginning with the period of British Occupation and up to the present.
A Brief Timeline of Events From British Occupation to the Present
1863-1879: This period marks the era of Khedive Ismail who ruled both Sudan and Egypt until British occupation forces successfully ousted him from power in 1899. The preconditions for British Occupation and Ismail’s ousting, however, were laid by Ismail’s employment of Samuel Baker to lead a military expedition to the Nile as part of his project of commercial and civilizational expansion southward.
1899-1956: The [British] occupation resorted to sowing the seeds of identity strife between the people by unfairly distributing agricultural land, particularly in Darfur. Large areas of land were given to non-Arab African tribes that practiced agriculture, while Arab Bedouin tribes were marginalized. The inter-ethnic tensions eventually led to the First Sudanese Civil War in 1955.
January 1 1956: The Republic of Sudan is established as an independent, sovereign, nation-state.
1956-1972: First Sudanese Civil War fought between Arabs and Fur amidst a drought that eventually forced Arab tribes to flee to Fur areas, further escalating ethnic tensions.
1972: After national independence, the Sudanese government continued the economic policies established by the British, enshrining in law a practice that discriminated against pastoral and agricultural production relations, and effectively favored pastoral production and marginalizing agricultural production in Darfur and further improving agricultural production in the north, which established the pretext for the Second Sudanese Civil War in 1983.
1983-2005: 1983 marked both the start of the Second Sudanese Civil War and the beginning of Islamic sharia as the primary jurisprudential source regulating civic law and Sudanese society.2 During the Second Civil War, various militias formed with some being labeled as ‘rebels,’ which engaged in “open insurgency against the Bashir regime, demanding social justice and an end to deliberate marginalization and injustice. The Bashir regime mobilized Arab tribes against these rebels, including “Al-Baqara” led by Musa Hilal, to turn the conflict into a tribal affair.
2003-2020: With the outbreak of the war in Darfur, al-Bashir solicited Hemedti’s help and assigned him the task of crushing uprising of Musa Hilal, the leader of Darfur’s Um Jalul tribe and de facto leader of the Janjaweed — which was an Arab militia active in western Sudan, particularly Darfur, and eastern Chad, and precursor to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) — who were actively fighting the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army and Justice and Equality Movement between 2003 and 2020. After succeeding in repressing the armed fighters from the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army and Justice and Equality Movement, al-Bashir passed a law to allocate funds from the state budget to establish the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), and placed the new found armed organization under Hemedti’s command. Moreover, al-Bashir also promoted Hemedti to the rank of brigadier general in the Sudanese Army and provided his troops with weapons. As for Musa Hilal, he would only spend four years in prison after his arrest in 2017 and would be pardoned and released from prison in March 2021. However, despite his pardon and release, Hilal and Hemedti remain political and economic rivals — both men belong to the Rizeigat tribe and maintain “gold mining interests in the region.”
2015: In 2015, the United Arab Emirates enlisted the help of the RSF in its war against the Houthis and provided them with a fleet of cars that were made into military jeeps and used to suppress protestors during the 2019 protests. But just as UAE backs Hemedti and the RSF, Saudi Arabia has sided with al-Burhan and the SAF as to all but secure the possibility of a full blown proxy war between Dubai and Riyadh in the near future.
2018-2019: On December 19, 2018, Sudan witnessed a months-long wave of mass, nationwide, protests. While the protests’ proximate cause was an increase in the cost of living expenses, protestors demands quickly transformed into calls for al-Bashir’s resignation. As months of protests heightened the tension between Sudan’s government and the Sudanese people, al-Bashir would eventually declare a State of Emergency on February 22, 2019, thereby dissolving national and regional governments altogether. On April 6-7, Sudan witnessed the first wave of mass protests ever since al-Bashir’s declaration of a State of Emergency. On April 10, there were reports of several scenes of Sudanese military shielding protestors from the RSF. On the very next day, April 11, the Sudanese Military successfully ousted al-Bashir from power and brought an end to his 26 year rule. With al-Bashir no longer in power, a two month period of negotiations ensued regarding a transitional government took place between the then-ruling Transitional Military Council (TMC) and the ‘civilian opposition’, but was abruptly suspended after June 3 Khartoum Massacre wherein the RSF killed 128 people, raped 70, and injured countless others. Thus, from June 9-11, the civilian opposition held a three-day general strike. However, rather than extending the general-strike into a fourth day, the civilian opposition opted for its termination in light of the TMC’s concession of freeing political prisoners. And on July 17, the so-called “The Political Agreement” was signed, establishing a shared government between the TMC and the civilian opposition, Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC) that would obtained until the mid-2022 elections.
2020: On December 31, the United Nations-African Union Hybrid Operation in Darfur (UNAMID) completed its “mandate.” Adopted by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on April 3, 2014, Resolution 2148 requires UNAMID’s Mission to “protect civilians, without prejudice to the responsibility of the Government of Sudan; Facilitate the delivery of humanitarian assistance and ensure the safety of humanitarian personnel; Mediate between the Government of Sudan and non-signatory armed movements on the basis of the Doha Document for Peace in Darfur; and support the mediation of community conflict, including through measures to address its root causes.”
2021: On October 25, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of the Military Council, put an end to the military’s adherence to a power-sharing government and arrested the leaders of the power-sharing Transitional Council. Later that day, a State of Emergency is declared amidst large scale protests and condemnation from the ‘international community’ while the RSF kills seven protestors and the U.S. and World Bank place sanctions on Sudan and suspend the flow of humanitarian aid into the country.
2022: The Darfur Bar Association (DBA) released a report, which holds both the Wagner Group and the RSF responsible for the continued raids and violence in Darfur’s key mining areas. Published on June 24, 2022, the DBA report found the Wagner Group responsible for attacks on artisanal gold miners and the looting of gold-mining sites. On June 27, 2022, Eric Reeves, a fellow at the Rift Valley Institute, tweeted the following remarks regarding the DBA report on the collusion between the Wagner Group and Hemedti’s RSF: The DBA report “makes clear that RSF commander Hemedti is helping Russia’s Wagner mercenaries, who are a key source of support for Putin. Perversely, Putin’s war against Ukraine is making food less available for Sudan — Darfur in particular — as famine looms.”
2023: On November 16, “Sudan asked the UN to end the mandate of its country’s political mission. The next day, the UN Security Council appointed a personal envoy on Sudan, which would significantly reduce UN scrutiny over the situation. On December 1, the UNSC issued a press release announcing that it had terminated “the UN Integrated Transition Assistance Mission in the Sudan (UNITAMS) under resolution 2579 (2021)”, after a vote of 14 in favor to none against and one abstention (Russian Federation). Thus, from December 3 onwards, UNITAM will begin “winding down its operations over a three-month period slated to end on February 29 2024.”
1. According to Al Jazeera English, on 20 January, the “government of war-ravaged Sudan [led by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan] says it has suspended its membership in the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), the east African regional bloc that has tried to broker talks between the country’s warring parties.”
2. Karl Marx, Capital vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Penguin: 1976), 926.
3. “Sharia law was first imposed in Sudan in 1983, and maintained by the now deposed president Omar al-Bashir for the duration of his 30-year-long Islamist rule.” (Source: Reuters; Washington Post).
