Schemers of Sudan: not over, not just yet

A mildly edited version of this piece was published in Atar English 26.

The London conference of powers to arrange Sudan’s affairs on Tuesday 15.04.2025 proved a fiasco of poor preparatory diplomacy. Simply phrased, nothing came of it. The conference was timed to coincide with the two years mark of Sudan’s “senseless” war to use the apolitical if not dismissive orientalist term commonly used by external observers and many of Sudan’s politicos who share their outlook and feed their analyses. The United Kingdom government invited foreign ministers and senior representatives from Canada, Chad, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Norway, Qatar, South Sudan, Switzerland, Türkiye, United Arab Emirates, Uganda and United States of America, besides the League of Arab States (LAS), the European Union (EU) and the United Nations (UN) to deliberate on Sudan’s woes and reach some sort of consensus on a way forward as it were. The assortment of powers around the table is itself testimony to the degree of international meddling involved and its failure a witness of the deadlock at hand. 

Conspicuously absent from the workings of the conference were any domestic Sudanese political actors of credible standing or influence. But as the invitees were arguing in the halls of Lancaster House Sudan’s democratic politics were on display on the streets of London. Hundreds of Sudanese rallied on a working day to demonstrate against the Rapid Support Forces (RSF)’s devastation of the country, its peoples, their material achievements and their history and heritage, in short not the state as such but the entire social formation, and the UAE’s dedicated and through two years of war now well documented war effort sustaining its client RSF. The scale and scope of this effort which involves a transcontinental air lift of weapons, ammunitions and mercenaries from as far as Bulgaria and Columbia is beyond anything that Sudan has witnessed in its modern history in terms of military or propaganda technology for that matter save may be in proportion the successful British campaign to conquer Sudan in the closing years of the 19th century.

In proximity were however an assortment of Sudanese political figures who with some helping hand happened to be in London at the time, figures from the shattered politics of the ‘transitional period’ that followed the overthrow of former president Bashir’s rule in 2019/2020, who thanks to the same helping hand or set of hands continue to parade incessantly as Sudan’s civilian political alternative or the select guardians of this alternative. The Guardian neatly summarised in its editorial on the second anniversary of our “senseless” war the reasoning that informs the UK government and the set of Sudanese politicians who incidentally happened to be in London at the time of its conference. The same reasoning features in some form or another with variable adjustments in phrase or style in the writings and spoken opinions of a good chunk of Sudan’s “expert community”. This mujamala network joins a multigenerational crew of academics, humanitarians, diplomats and spooks and their “native” informants who through many years lived off Sudan’s crises, livelihoods that involve successful careers, academic positions and consultancies to powerful states and international organisations as generators of policy, but many of whom have failed to learn any useful Arabic for that matter any other of the languages spoken in Sudan. 

The main elements of the The Guardian’s view are a brutal power struggle between two generals, a population under global slaughter by the two sides, the interests of other states, wronged democratic civilian politicians evicted by the two generals from power in a coup, hardline Islamists scheming in the shadows to reclaim rule and increasing ethnic divisions. The order and merit of each of these elements is indeterminate, a witch’s brew that has crystallised into a dogma resistant to meaningful interrogation or investigation. And es events unfold, history works at leaps in time of war, this prism is adamantly employed in their interpretation as if nothing changes. In many ways, it is a prism that produces an orientalist drama of momentous events but no changes, no history. People are evicted from the record as passive victims of slaughter and destruction persevering in the corridors until something gives.

The variant conclusions drawn from this brew are ideological choices or inclinations, often but not always, to employ a bit of vulgar Marxism, informed by not so opaque occupational interests. Alex de Waal concluded with a flourish of Schadenfreude one month into the war that it was a reckoning with Khartoum’s 200 years history of rapacious plunder, a reckoning with the ravages perpetrated by the heirs of Zubeir Pasha, the 19thcentury slave trader, who turned the rest of the country beyond Khartoum into a “social and economic wasteland”. It begs some explanation to dismiss Sudan’s second largest city Nyala or the Darfuri capital Al Fasher or for that matter the sleepy towns of Al Gezira as wasteland. As Orientalism goes this would be a Bringi. One wonders what sort of reckoning is awaiting the current population of London, the heirs of Rhodes et al., in the crystal bowl of de Waal’s philosophy of history. 

Joshua Craze and co-authors argued with the Quran of impending and actual famine that Sudan’s sovereignty was no more, what was left was the authority of SAF, and that should be bypassed by an international humanitarian intervention from a regional centre, preferably Nairobi. It is indeed a nice city with many amenities. In a recent piece Craze, this time alone, declared Sudanese sovereignty like the destroyed Presidential Palace “empty”. Craze rightfully celebrated the initiative and resourcefulness of Sudan’s emergency response rooms who have shouldered some of the responsibility of organising food and health care in the absence the now “non-sovereign” state. Many others are involved too but are invisible to the international Sudan industry because like the resistance committees they organise largely horizontally, do not rely on USAID funds and do not speak the idiom of NGOs. Extended families, neighbourhood solidarities, village and town associations, occupational groups, tareeqa communities, traders’ guilds, farmers’ cooperatives, merchant and business lobbies to name some notable examples have all done and continue to do their bit, rallying across borders to sustain their communities, their schools and universities. Otherwise phrased, the resistance committees borrow and build on a longer and more entrenched tradition of mutual aid and solidarity that goes deeper and further than the state. Craze sees only the ears of the elephant as it were. 

Craze also made the recurring point of drawing the distinction between the response rooms and the militants of the resistance committees who took up arms to fight “next to the Islamists whom they pushed out of power” in his phrasing. He missed though what they are fighting against and what they are fighting for. The distinction is however a mute one if you consider that both, unarmed and armed, are motivated by the common necessity of resisting the violent onslaught of the RSF and their patrons, and are not distinguishable in social terms but are often the same individuals and not fifty shades of grey. It is also worth considering what the term “Islamists” refers to in this context, whether the Islamic idiom of the twenty something recruit who fights alongside the militants of the resistance committees is to be equated with the politics of the high priests of the National Congress Party (NCP) evicted from power in the revolutionary tide of 2019/2020, many of whom are now bitter pensioners in Istanbul. 

Obviously neither Alex de Waal, Joshua Craze nor many in the Sudan “expert community” can be blamed for giving up on the country and its peoples from their position of observation, it is not exactly a hopeful situation. Others were more outspoken and went the next step concluding in ambiguous or less ambiguous terms that only the strong arm of the international community, effectively an invitation for armed intervention with the “democratic” dressing of some Karzai or many Karzais, can save it from itself, i.e. a greater war. This Journal has a made a point of investigating and documenting every step in the other direction, the solidarity, the resourcefulness, the steadfastness, the generosity of a “sovereign” people with the contradictions and unexpected twists and turns involved as they resist a transcontinental campaign of subjugation. In the “wasteland” which now includes devastated Khartoum, every farmer who manages to reclaim his production and get some food to the constrained market, every worker who struggles to repair water and electricity supplies”, every health care provider who tends to the ill, every volunteer who keeps food kitchens running, every earner who donates little or much to sustain families, neighbours, communities or institutions, and every fighter who takes up a gun against this force of devastation and plunder is celebrated. And they scheme and Allah schemes, and Allah is the keenest of schemers!