Robert Rotberg.
Robert Rotberg is the founding director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s program on intrastate conflict, a former senior fellow at CIGI and president emeritus of the World Peace Foundation.
The civil war in Sudan – which has triggered the world’s most damaging and neglected humanitarian crisis – is being prolonged by intense personal antagonisms and the meddling of foreign states.
Ever since two military commanders and their armies started pummelling each other in April, 2023, as many as 150,000 Sudanese civilians have died, 25 million Sudanese are experiencing hunger, 2.5 million are starving, 10 million Sudanese have lost their homes and occupations and three million have fled into nearby countries. Food and potable water are scarce and millions have become impoverished.
Despite repeated U.S. attempts to negotiate a ceasefire, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) continue to bomb Khartoum, which has normally served as the country’s capital, to attempt to oust the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), an irregular militia that now holds the city. Meanwhile, in the beleaguered country’s far west region of Darfur, the RSF has laid siege to El Fasher, a regional capital.
The United Arab Emirates is backing the RSF by providing cash and arms smuggled from across Sudan’s western border with Chad. In recent weeks, the United Arab Emirates has both supplied drones to the RSF and used its own drones to monitor positions and fighting. Earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Wagner Group, a mercenary outfit of Russians (now renamed the Africa Corps), worked with the RSF and fought alongside its Arab legions. But Mr. Putin seems to have since switched sides to obtain the SAF’s support for a Russian naval base near Port Sudan on the Red Sea.
The SAF controls most of northern Sudan and the country’s entire Red Sea littoral, plus Port Sudan, which is being used as the de facto capital. That city is the terminus of a lengthy pipeline from South Sudan, which has major petroleum reserves and pays pumping fees. The RSF controls nearly all of southern and western Sudan (where the battle for Darfur continues), and Sennar State, the country’s breadbasket along the Blue Nile River. But a senior RSF commander in southeastern Sudan defected to the SAF this week, indicating that the SAF may be gaining against its rival.
Sudan’s senseless internecine conflict began when the SAF’s General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the RSF’s Lieutenant-General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (referred to as Hemeti), fell out. Together they had deposed the Sudan’s long-time dictator, president Omar al-Bashir, in 2019. Mr. al-Bashir had removed an elected government in 1989.
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Ruling Sudan together along with a powerless civilian prime minister for two years, Gen. al-Burhan and Gen. Hamdan then jointly ruled for two more years until the former demanded that the latter merge the RSF into the SAF and take orders from him. That was too much for Gen. Hamdan, who proceeded to launch attacks on the SAF stronghold of Khartoum, quickly capturing it as well as numerous other provincial towns where the SAF was previously presumed to be strong. Secret assistance from both the Wagner Group and the UAE was critical to these victories.
Once joined, the battle unexpectedly showed that the tactics of the 100,000-strong RSF were effective, and it pushed the 150,000-strong SAF out of big parts of Africa’s third-largest country.
The RSF looted, pillaged, maimed, raped and killed civilians as it captured Khartoum and major provincial cities. In those places and now in and around El Fasher, the Arab-composed RSF targeted Black Africans of Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnicity, just as its camel-riding predecessor, the Janjaweed, attacked Black Africans during the 2003 to 2005 genocide in Darfur. In those dreadful earlier years Gen. Hamdan, a leader in the Janjaweed, and Gen. al-Burhan, a regional SAF commander, led the ethnic cleansing that killed 300,000 Africans and forced three million to flee into Chad. Mr. al-Bashir, who had authorized the genocidal attacks, was indicted by the International Criminal Court in 2010. Now, another genocide is unfolding in the same place, led by Gen. Hamdan and facilitated by the UAE.
Sudan’s civil war would sputter to a halt if Washington could persuade Abu Dhabi to cease supplying the RSF and Moscow to withdraw its Africa Corps. The RSF would become much more pressed for cash, bullets, bombs and missiles. But Gen. al-Burhan and Gen. Hamdan went to war to gain personal power and to grasp the gold riches of Sudan’s mines in Darfur. Neither wants the other to win.
Washington’s negotiators now need to speak firmly to the UAE. That is the key to peace, and to the end of the immense human suffering in Sudan.