Sudanese citizens have fought for democracy, but the last week’s hostilities threaten the transition process.
After more than a week of vicious fighting between two entrenched military generals in Sudan, international personnel are being rapidly evacuated by foreign governments, and in some cases foreign nationals are attempting to make their own escapes from the capital of Khartoum.
Around 100 US embassy personnel and a few foreign officials were evacuated in a mission that was described as “fast and clean” by Lt. Gen. Douglas A. Sims II and included three MH-47 Chinook transport helicopters. The operation, in the early hours of Sunday, local time, occurred as many other countries, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, France, the UK, and China evacuated their own personnel.
As many as 16,000 Americans not employed by the government are believed to be in the country, though the embassy announced it would not evacuate those individuals. US officials have been in touch with some, attempting to provide guidance on evacuation routes over land.
Meanwhile, a convoy of United Nations personnel and members of international aid groups left Sunday morning in buses, minivans, and SUVs on the 525-mile trip to Port Sudan from Khartoum, according to reporting from the New York Times.
Fighting began in the early hours of Saturday, April 15, between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), the country’s military, run by Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) a government paramilitary organization, controlled by Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, commonly called Hemedti. Hostilities arose after an agreement between the two sides to negotiate a transition from military to civilian-led government and a timetable for integration of the RSF into the regular army fizzled amongst rising tensions between the two sides.
Following a week of many failed attempts by numerous countries, the African Union, and the UN to mediate a ceasefire, at least 420 people have been killed and more than 3,700 have been injured in the conflict, according to the World Health Organization.
Sudan has struggled to transition to civilian rule after overthrowing dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019; the week’s clashes cast a long shadow on the country’s hopes for democracy.
The violence is a further setback to democratic transition
Despite strong civil society participation and the express wishes of the Sudanese people, the transition to democracy after decades of Bashir’s authoritarian rule has been enormously challenging; Saturday’s violence is just the latest breakdown in the transitional process.
Power struggles, too, are nothing new in Sudan; since its independence in 1956, Sudan has undergone the highest number of attempted coups of any African nation, the New York times reported Saturday. That kind of entrenched instability tends to breed further coups, too.
The RSF is an officially recognized independent security force made up of about 100,000 troops, according to Reuters. Though the group’s relationship with the regular military has at times been uneasy, the groups did work together to oust Bashir, and the integration of the RSF into the SAF is a tenet of the democratic transition.
Bashir, Sudan’s authoritarian former leader, utilized Janjaweed paramilitary groups, made up of Sudanese Arab fighters including the forces that would become the RSF, to put down an uprising in the Darfur region in the early 2000s. That conflict displaced an estimated 2.5 million people and killed 300,000, according to Reuters; prosecutors with the International Criminal Court subsequently accused Sudanese government officials and Janjaweed leaders of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in that conflict.
But the relationship between the two groups hasn’t been easy, Sudan conflict zone analyst Mohammed Alamin Ahmed told Al Jazeera. “It’s a power struggle that began a long time ago and it has escalated to direct clashes today,” he said.
Still, the SAF and the RSF worked together to overthrow Bashir, with the significant support and mobilization of the Sudanese people, which resulted in a power-sharing agreement between the military and Abdalla Hamdok, the now-deposed former prime minister, who was chosen by the Forces for Freedom and Change, Sudan’s major pro-democracy civilian coalition.
Under Hamdok, whose leadership was intended to move Sudan toward elections, the government instituted stringent economic reforms to successfully garner support from the International Monetary Fund, and lobbied the US to remove Sudan from the list of state sponsors of terror to open up access to international funding. Hamdok was a firm supporter of the transition to democracy and proposed to bring some of the military’s business interests under civilian control.
Burhan and the SAF, with the help of the RSF, ousted Hamdok in late 2021; after a month under house arrest, Hamdok was released and agreed to resume the power-sharing agreement. However, the Sudanese people protested the secretive arrangement in favor of full civilian rule, which resulted in more than 125 deaths. Hamdok resigned his post in January 2022 and Sudan has since been under military leadership, with Burhan as the head of the ruling Sovereign Council and Hemedti as his deputy.
In the near term, the risk for continued conflict is significant, according to Ahmed. “There is an exchange of accusations on who started this, and the fighting has extended, not just in Khartoum, but also in the strategic city of Merowe where the Sudanese armed forces have a strong air force,” he told Al Jazeera. “And it looks like the RSF is trying to neutralize the capacity of Sudanese army [and] air force there to pull them towards a ground battle.”
In Darfur, too, the presence of multiple armed groups increases the possibility of a prolonged and potentially devastating conflict should fighting persist in that region.
In the longer term, the prospect of Sudan achieving the peace and democracy its people have been working toward seems dim. Blinken, on a recent diplomatic visit with Vietnam, told reporters that though the situation was “fragile,” a transition to a civilian government was still possible though some groups “may be pushing against that progress.”
Sudanese civil society groups supportive of a transition to civilian rule and who had signed on to a new transition agreement in December told Reuters in a statement, “This is a pivotal moment in the history of our country. This is a war that no one will win, and that will destroy our country forever.”
Update April 16, 9:30 a.m. EST: This story has been updated with developments that occurred in Sudan overnight and during the early morning, including number of dead and areas of conflict.
Update April 16, 4:00 p.m. EST: This story has been further updated to include new details about the African Union and other regional organizations planned responses.
Update April 23, 11:00 a.m. EST: This story has been updated to include events from the past week, including details of evacuations of international personnel that have occurred.
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