من هو سيد البرادو: عن الإسلام السياسي واقتصاد السوق في السودان

Sudan: prisons, jockeys and contraband cars

A short note on trade in debts and incarceration published on ROAPE website.

Sudan’s Minister of Interior, Izz al-Din al-Sheikh, inaugurated on 17 June a new prison in Soba, a sprawling suburb south of the capital Khartoum. The new prison has the capacity of hosting 3600 inmates and is designed to accommodate minors of both sexes. The new prison complex is the third in recent years. Two similar prisons were opened in Gedaref and the White Nile in 2020. A police officer boasted that the new prisons would even allow wives to enjoy an intimate hour with their inmate husbands. As a side note the officer declared that the new prisons are equipped with ‘massive workshops’. Sudan’s prison population is estimated at around 36 000 inmates, including the former president Omar al-Bashir and many senior members of his defunct political party, the National Congress Party (NCP).

Excluding the newly built prisons, Sudan’s inmates are crammed into some 125 establishments with an occupancy level of 255%. The country’ prison population has been increasing steadily over the past three decades, from some 7000 inmates in 1990 to around 20000 in 2011 at the time of the breakaway of South Sudan. Like most available statistics in the country, the accuracy of these figures is not guaranteed but the trend is clear. At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 the Sudanese authorities decided to release all prisoners held in relation to public prosecution offences, mostly people incarcerated for burglary, robbery, drugs crimes and prominently bounced cheques. Over 4000 inmates were released from one prison in March 2020. The inmates left behind mutinied, and one was shot dead by the police in the chaos. Copycat mutinies followed in the Port Sudan and Nyala prisons.

The Sudanese penal code introduced in 1991 as part of the legal scaffolding of the privatisation and austerity assault of former president Bashir’s government, punishes insolvency with a fine or a maximum of 5 years imprisonment. Repeated offenders could be jailed for up to 7 years. The practice of the courts often meant that default on loans resulted in a situation of perpetual imprisonment, in the parlance of court verdicts ‘imprisonment until payment’. Sudan’s minister of justice in 2016 said there were around 4000 debtors behind bars in al-Huda prison alone, a major prison complex north of Omdurman. At the time the percentage of non-performing loans from gross loans in Sudanese banks was estimated at 5.2% after an all-time high of 26% in 2007. Imprisonment for insolvency was already a feature of Sudan’s debt ridden mid-1980s in the twilight years of Jaafar Nimayri’s rule when an article of Sudan’s civil procedures code was used to justify the pretrial detention of debtors.

Non-performing bank loans are however only a fraction of the debt crisis that lands people behind bars in Sudan. Cheques function as promissory notes in cycles of trade to the detriment of new market entrants, often those trying to escape the crushing regime of agricultural labour through attempts at enterprise after liquidation of meagre assets, a stretch of farmland or a few animals. These start-up retailers, novices in a cut-throat market economy, acquire merchandise from wholesalers on debt and at often stunning interest rates but are unable to survive in a perpetually stagflating market. The peculiar situation often arises in which the naïve novice is forced to sell the merchandise at a ‘fraction’ of the price – meaning far below market price – to remain out of jail, at times to the same cheque-weaponised dealer or associates.

Eventually, a market in debts emerged involving the transaction of defaulted cheques between a new class of traders, known as ‘jockeys’. A jockey buys debts in the form of draft cheques at a lower price than their nominal value from their cash-keen holders and uses the drafts to buy tradeable commodities, greater debts or ideally urban land or real estate in cycles of speculation. The neatest example is probably the car market. Cars acquired through bank loans with the security of real estate or draft cheques are sold at a ‘fraction’ of the price in return for hard cash and resold for draft cheques with a high profit. The jockey is the risk-ready middleman. Sudan’s auditor general estimated the volume of circulating debts in the form of bounced cheques in 2019 to be some 44.7 billion (approximately US$100m) Sudanese pounds including some 3.6 billion (US$8m) Sudanese pounds in draft cheques submitted to the tax authorities.

The power of jockeys should not be underestimated. Back in 2010 trade in ‘fractions’ and debts became a security crisis in al-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur. In May 2010 the open market in fractions imploded and the local government was faced with some 3700 angered claimants who had traded actual cash and real property for toxic debts. Protests ensued and the police resorted to gunfire. Four people were killed, and fifty others injured in the process. The clean-up proved a political nightmare for the central government. Two prominent jockeys were allies of the long-time governor of North Darfur Osman Mohamed Yusif Kibir and were elected to the regional parliament on the ruling party’s ticket. The crisis cost the governor his position. He was fired from the job in 2014 in a major reshuffle but remained too influential to ignore and was eventually parked in the presidential palace as a deputy to Bashir in September 2018, a few months before the collapse of the regime.

The market in debts did not disappear with the demise of Bashir’s regime in 2019 and fused into the market in cash forcing the authorities to effectively surrender. In May 2020 the Bank of Sudan suspended an article of a memo issued back in 1997 instructing banks to shut-down the accounts of clients who dishonour three cheque payments or more in a period of six months.

Jockeys and dealers of sorts were instrumental in inflating the ballooning market in smuggled cars through toxic debts from around 2015. Thousands upon thousands of used cars were smuggled through Sudan’s turbulent western frontier, mostly from post-Gaddafi Libya and Chad bypassing the country’s porous customs regime and fuelling a bonanza of speculative debts trading. The initial signal was a government decision that offered Sudanese expatriates returning from war-torn Libya customs advantages in the import of cars. The famed loose cars acquired the name ‘Boko Haram’ in reference to their origin outside the bounds of law and order. In February 2021, the authorities estimated the number of Boko Haram cars in Khartoum alone to be some 300 000 vehicles.

The government’s interventions oscillated between attempts to capture some of the value of the cars through post-hoc customs arrangements and licensing with perpetually shifting deadlines and hollow threats of confiscation at gun-point. The latest immediate confiscation order in this salvo of official edicts was issued by the governor of North Kordofan on 14 April 2021 after another deadline had passed on 1 March. Similar orders were issued back in 2017 by Sudan’s former vice president, Hassabo Mohamed Abd al-Rahman. At the time he told the regional parliament in North Darfur that the government had decided to confiscate all Boko Haram cars without compensation with immediate effect.

World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) experts, international NGO cadres, ambassadors of great powers and government officials prefer to perceive Sudan’s chronic economic malaise through statistical summaries that are supposed to reflect economic performance: Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, current account balance, external debts, foreign direct investments, purchasing parity, poverty lines, poverty head counts and so on and so forth.

These and other notions constitute a powerful vocabulary of economy, finance and social management on a global scale but shed eloquence and utility when juxtaposed against the conundrums facing a Darfurian farmer who trades his meagre crop at a ‘fraction’ of its value to a jockey in al-Fasher to address a health crisis in the family. The language of international finance is not particularly illuminating when attempting to comprehend the fate of the thousands of insolvent petty traders and inept drug dealers in Sudan’s prisons. Its syntax does not accommodate the moral economy that underwrites the ties and relationships which flow with savings in the form of ‘Boko Haram’ cars through international borders.

Prisons, contraband markets and isolated customs checkpoints might not appear at first glance to be the most suitable places to understand an economy. The social contradictions and conflicts that play out in these locations are easily lumped together under the designation ‘corruption’ as some sort of pathological feature external to the workings of the ‘real’ economy.

The contention is which realities count? IPC (Integrated Food Security Phase Classification) findings from the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and other partners show that an estimated 7.3 million people in Sudan (around 16% of the population) are going hungry and are forced to sell limited livelihood assets as a result, a goat may be or the odd piece of furniture. Of these 1.8 million are already in the clutches of malnutrition and are dying excessively as a consequence. These figures are expected to increase to 9.7 million people (21% of the population analysed) in the lean season (June to September), the period between planting and harvesting when work is hard to come by and incomes drop.

The new prison complexes in Sudan’s major towns are a securitised response to the manifestations of the social conflict, the hunger, the hustling, the jockeying, the wheeling and dealing, that offers no avenue to address them.

حوار عن القمح والعمل الزراعي وبرنامج التحويلات النقدية المباشرة أبريل ٢٠٢١ ج٣

 

حوار عن القمح والعمل الزراعي وبرنامج التحويلات النقدية المباشرة أبريل ٢٠٢١ ج٢

 

حوار عن القمح والعمل الزراعي وبرنامج التحويلات النقدية المباشرة أبريل ٢٠٢١ ج١

 

Writing from afar: memory and reluctance in the diaspora

This essay was published in 2018 in a volume of the series Bayreuth Studies in African Politics and Societies.

Authors often speak of ‘writing block’, a term invented in the realm of psychiatry to describe a breakdown of ‘creativity’ that is amenable to psychological therapy. The condition has been described in the clinical language of disorder and symptoms. Years ago, in my home country of Sudan, I enjoyed the providence of prolific writing, being engaged and passionate at a time of intense political struggle. As I write today, reluctance is the tone, indeterminate and vague. The sharp, decisive pronouncements of yesteryear have been replaced by cautious remarks and often subtle references. Writing takes place in an ecology of purpose and meaning and is transformed by the stripping of habitat that results from dislocation. The tilt of horizon that accompanies dislocation engenders a parallax view that the writer has to contend with as his new access to an old world. This essay is an attempt to comprehend the coil in the mind of the diasporan author and includes a runaway rendition of racial drama in the age of Trump and Aquarius. 

Memory works in unexpected ways, particularly under the conditions of a diasporan existence where home and time are disjoined. Home exists in a ‘frozen’ time dimension, punctured or rather swollen by the seamless continuum of communication with family, friends and colleagues. The frozen time of home is the time of the real from the perspective of the expatriate, while the diasporan existence in a foreign land, actual as it is, has the features of a false dream. It is a time within the tension of ambiguity, one that is accepted as it flows, as the children grow, and the features of age take their toll, the time of domestic concerns as it were. Nevertheless, it is a time that one rejects and fights against, continuously nursing memories of ‘home’. Writing from this perspective, writing from afar, is a struggle against forgetfulness, a struggle to nurse memories of home, to maintain the life that one has left behind or even reinterpret it. Since I have taken more or less permanent residence in Germany back in 2010, writing for me involves to a greater degree a reworking of my own memories of ‘home’, for myself and tangentially for a niche audience of mostly Sudan pundits and postgraduate researchers who for one reason or another are interested in reading an analysis of Sudanese affairs in English.

The diaspora as such is a place and a time; the diasporan, if the word can be justified, is thrown out of joint in both a spatial and a temporal sense and has to reconfigure these dimensions anew as she charts existence and negotiates survival. Disjoined time and place exposes home for the fallacy that it is, an invention that can be replaced by another invention, the first delivered in the realtime of upbringing and habit and the second assembled in the workplace of global labor and mapped by the icy contours of European racism, or to use Mbembe’s more ambitious term ‘nanoracism’. If writing from the abode of home has a cathartic function, phrasing the frustrations with all that is wrong, writing in the diasporan abstinence is a dead-end escape route from the banality of nanoracism to a non-address. Whatever the form or content of writing, somewhere in the subconscious of the text is a message of love draped in irony, a longing, a homage, a reckoning on occasions and a pathetic burst of blame, home why hast thou forsaken me, hurled at an absent addressee. 

From this perspective, I have been bothered mostly by my country’s recent history, in a way also with the forces of history that have delivered me to where I am now. The attempt to answer the question, where am I where I am now, i.e. why am I an expatriate academic servicing one of the world’s most advanced economies when I could theoretically be doing much more personally interesting and even scientifically rewarding work with my alma mater, the University of Khartoum, I am forced to get my head around a web of issues that can be subsumed under the heading of Sudan’s integration into the capitalist world market. This is a process that to my mind continues to unfold as the capitalist penetration of all spheres of life in Sudan deepens, as capitalist relations of production and a capitalist rationality spread and entrench themselves and a consumption culture that operates as a form of chauvinist nationalism with Arabism and Islamism as its elemental features flushes out the array of cultural particularisms of which Sudan’s many peoples are proud. My attempt to understand this process fed my interest in 18th and 19th century histories of Sudan, a long and foundational period of great convulsion, terrible suffering and bloodshed that is reduced in schoolbook accounts to a caricaturist celebration of proto-nationalist heroes. I came to learn something about popular accounts of this history, in folktales, fables, songs and family histories, including snippets of my own family’s history. I am not a social scientist, neither historian nor anthropologist, and I cannot claim any authority on these subjects; this in any case is my running excuse whenever my rumblings on these matters seem amiss. 

My attempt to tackle this central question has forced to me to rethink the way political Islam in Sudan has functioned, initially as an oppositionist idiom and subsequently as a ruling ideology. Sudan’s experience in that regard is probably more relevant today as governments, politicians, observers and academics grapple with the new crop of Islamic militants spread across the globe. Drawing on the Iranian and Tunisian examples, Asef Bayat proposed the notion of ‘post-Islamism’ to account for the social and political condition where, following the initial period of experimentation, the appeal and legitimacy of Islamism is exhausted and Islamists are forced to confront the anomalies and contradictions of their systems of government. A more positive definition involves a conscious attempt to conceptualise and rationalise strategies to transcend Islamism and forge some form of amalgam between political Islam, pluralism and personal rights, a liberal Islam if you like, the type of Islam celebrated in the West when a woman imam leads men in prayer to name a colorful example. Suspiciously absent from this formulation is any notion of social justice, economy or class rendering political Islam in its liberal(ising) formulation a ready tool of neoliberal dogma couched obviously in cultural exception. 

Writing from memory can be a very tedious task. One is often forced to make the memories as it were, to reorder people and events and texts and experiences and distill new meanings from their once assumed natural flow and sequence. This resequencing is an interpretative operation full of surprises at times. Cut off from her source, the diasporan writer has to to develop the skill and wit of recycling and turning water into wine to quench the thirst for meaning. It is the memory of (im)possibilities that haunts the expatriate, all the alternatives missed in the act of ‘shurad’, a precise Arabic Sudanese formulation for the folly of cowardly escape, the primary sin of the expatriate in his daily re-membering of the tragedies of home. Guilt is renewed in the psyche of the expatriate with every communication with home, a communication turned into a stream thanks to digital media. The expatriate monitors and is equally monitored by family, relatives and friends in an incessant flood of messages, calls and shares. A constant refrain in these exchanges is the introductory phrase “Do you remember…?” Memory is here continuously mined for details that sustain the self as it were. 

How do you write under these conditions? How do you write when you are miles away from the actual experiences that nourished your writing if you are not to descend into melancholy, repetition or the assumed wisdom of the distant observer, or possibly even worse, the expert of no expertise. How do you write when you are plagued by reluctance, reluctance to accept that the world you know has changed while you are away, reluctance to admit that the memories you cherish are just that, memories, reluctance to reconcile with your actual status as an emigrant, a status of unsatisfactory in-between. The in-between of the emigrant is not only spatial or cultural. If you like, it is also temporal. The emigrant’s mental calendar does not easily accommodate ‘now’. What it knows best is a past that is irrecoverable and a future of ‘return’, in the wishful thinking to precisely that lost past. Time in the mind of the emigrant is a messy order, all imagination. One route to that ‘irrecoverable’ past is the obituary, a form that I personally find refuge in. You might have noticed that I have shifted from the term expatriate to the term emigrant as I write. It is a status that one only admits with a grudge. In the receiving countries of Europe, one is implicitly expected to express a permanent gratitude. 

Now that I have spelled it out, it is gratitude that is implied whenever integration/assimilation of foreigners in a European country is demanded in public speech and also arguably in many of the private encounters of the emigrant in ‘Fortress Europe’. And here in the eyes of the ‘native’ beholders, the African or Arab or Muslim emigrant, in my personal case a combination of all three, is the inhabitant of the terrains of the savages beyond ‘Fortress Europe’, the lawless prairie of Hobbesian chaos that is transmitted to ‘Western’ (un)consciousness through medial images and fragments, who by act of luck or providence has been rescued, plucked out and delivered to the now and here of civilization. The emigrant is hence expected to assume a permanent condition of gratitude, absent which she is condemned for moral failure. And this gratitude is not only gratitude for opportunities but for the bare fact of life. Western politicians developed the notion of ‘integration’ to convert the expectation of gratitude into official policy. What is integration? The intuitive idea suggests conditions that when integration is complete and thus satisfied, mundane matters such as speaking the language of the host country, surrendering one’s labor to its job market, acknowledging and interacting with its cultural particularities and traditions, renouncing the ‘backward’ behaviors and cultural norms of the mother country and possibly adapting the more exotic versions of the same to Western tastes and possibly their modification into a marketable item (Falafel and hummus..., etc.). 

However, my claim is that integration is actually a space or a dimension where emigrants are parked, not a barrier that they can cross. If the metaphor of barrier seems more attractive, it is a shifting border, a mirage forever displaced. As an emigrant one has to prove credibility for integration with each and every encounter. The voice of the emigrant is perpetually inspected for accent (or the lack thereof), its volume subjected to scrutiny, her physical being is screened for smell and size and proportions in that old art of physiognomy, her dress and attire itemized and immediately fetishized, her movements rigorously examined for impulsivity, crudeness, dullness and lack of initiative, her expressions, gesticulation and mimics inspected and mined for subversive meaning... and so on. The emigrant’s whole being rarely if ever escapes from this solemn gaze, since it is eventually internalised, much like an omnipresent god. Those familiar with Frantz Fanon’s theses on the distraught psychic life of the colonised would readily recognise this line of argumentation. 

How did this ‘Western’ gaze emerge? The answer is readily available in the long and terrible history of Western domination over humankind, it is a product of power. It is power in its most sublime and intricate. How does it relate to medial images of Africa? These I argue are the creations of the ‘Western’ gaze, an ideological construct of power, which in its quest for control can only see Africa and Africans in relation to its commanding demands. Three main figures are readily recognisable as constructs of the ‘Western’ gaze, and they fall rather neatly into categories that only make sense in relation to ‘Western’ demands of Africa: the victim, the ornament and the threat. The first is the product of the humanitarian industry, the second of the tourism industry and the third of the military/security industry. I think these figures and possibly subcategories thereof pervasively structure medial representations of Africa and Africans, often in a manner dramatised as to serve the combined function of informing, entertaining and marketing with the overdetermining accent on the third item. 

No wonder, then, that it is the documentary film among other forms of media representation that has become the favorite genre where Africa and Africans are concerned. The standard documentary of Africa allows the audience to ponder over the plight of Africans, deplore the villains among them, praise the heroes who rise to challenge those villains and admire the scenery against which these life dramas are enacted and eventually make enlightened conclusions about this continent of rich opportunities and tragic disappointments. These operations are performed with the assurance, if not arrogance and satisfaction, of European ‘civilization’ as opposed to the abundant mess outside ‘Fortress Europe’. This, to be very blunt, is the colonial outlook par excellence. The documentary film is the heir of the European travel book, an ideological form clayed with fantasy even when it calls upon witnesses to tell the story just as it is. Stories are burdened with history by their very nature, and value in the age of terror, the terror of capitalism and the futile terror of ‘terrorism’, is none other than marketable value, exchange value to use Marx’ term on his bicentenary. The documentary of Africa, crafted for the only audience with a purchasing power, the Western aka global audience, promises the possibility of retreat from the colonial gaze, but can only fail since what it delivers is often fictional solidarity as a form of entertainment, an ideological exercise of no reward. It is destined to miss its ‘good’ aim. 

The engineered sympathy of the Western beholder is framed in nanoracial logic. As she sympathizes, she condones the ‘other’ into her lesser category with the possibility of communication thwarted by the very attempt at communication. This becomes more acute the nearer the camera moves towards its object. Reports from the ‘ground’, accounts from the ‘field’ and the stories and images of ‘experiences’ collated and processed in Western newsrooms and transmitted to audiences in the enclosure of their living rooms heighten an ‘envy in reverse’ and render it ever more meaningful by providing old evidence in new garb of Western exceptionalism. In this age of the war on terror and migration-angst, the lesson of Africa is to shun Africa, shut it away and escape its ‘darkness’ using all means. The sympathetic report of African women entrepreneurs, to name a favored example, is not situated in a vacuum but in an account of the world as seen from ‘Fortress Europe’, where Western politicians decide to drop a bomb here, drone-kill there and punish all around, erect fences, build walls, evict unwanted bodies and mine the existences of those ‘foreign’ bodies in their ‘national’ realms for signs of treason, a covered head, a bearded face, and that evil, evil burka! 

The friendly report of Africa is a representation, but of whom? Of those who dream of coming here or are already on their way here and hence cannot help but prod what is now the almost instinctive reflex of how to keep them there in a world frantically globalizing and fanatically balkanizing in one and the same instant. In this Trumpian world where ‘pussy-grabbing’ is an electoral advantage, fencing borders a popular demand of ‘democratic’ nations and solidarity an article of political shame and national disrepute, representing the ‘other’ is a tall order, so much so that approaching this question in earnest would require revisiting questions as unfashionable as the conundrum of ‘socialism in one country’. 

To actually see the other and listen to her speech and engage with her writing is to revolt against this world and build a new one. In this ecology, the diasporan author is called upon to plant her proverbial stick in the imperial eyeball, to paraphrase another precise Sudanese Arab proverb whereby an assaulting evil gaze is thwarted by a counterassaulting twig in the eye. What does this mean though? It means that the memory so much cherished by the diasporan author is her desert. There is no escape from the struggles of the world into a memory of the world as wished. Contemplating the world in the mode of memory is surrendering to its dictates, an evil philosophy of the status quo, a ‘shurad’ in reverse. The tilt in the horizon of the diasporan author is not a mental distortion to be overcome but a revealing parallax to be explored. It is from this vantage point that the ‘Moor’ wrote the world to change it. His legendary ‘writing block’, of course, is a matter of world consequence.

Tel Aviv and Khartoum exchange gifts

A slightly edited version of the piece below was published on Middle East Eye. 

In a telling exchange of gifts in Khartoum on 25 January Israel’s minister of intelligence, Eli Cohen, brought his host, Sudan’s minister of defence Yassin Ibrahim Yassin, citrus fruits and olive oil from Palestine and received in return an imitation M-16 rifle, produce of Sudan’s Military Industry Corp. The symbolism requires no grand interpretative effort: Tel Aviv delivered markers of its settler domination over Palestinian land and resources and Khartoum responded with a weapon to consolidate the reality of Israeli occupation.

The Israeli minister said he was captivated by the “warmth” of the reception in Khartoum, feelings that translated into a memorandum of understanding on security and intelligence cooperation “to work together to stop terrorism and exchange defence strategies and knowledge”. Moreover, the Israeli minister discussed with the Sudanese head of state, Abd al-Fattah al-Burhan, the possibility of Israel joining the Red Sea alliance, a new security and defence block launched by Saudi Arabia in January 2020 under the title of the ‘Council of the Arab and African Countries of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden”. The block includes Sudan, Djibouti, Somalia, Eritrea, Egypt, Yemen, and Jordan and officially seeks to secure the Red Sea corridor from piracy, smuggling and regional threats, Saudi Arabia’s standard coding for Iranian interests. 

The Sudanese government had signed on 7 January 2021 to the “Abraham accords” in whispers, whilst maintaining the claim that a final decision on the matter would rest with a still non-existent transitional parliament. Sudan’s justice minister Nasr al-Din Abd al-Bari and the former US treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin autographed the deal in Khartoum; the immediate reward was a US commitment to provide Sudan with a bridge loan to clear 1 billion USD of Sudan’s arrears (a total of 1.3 billion USD) to the World Bank and eventually access around 1.5 billion USD in annual development assistance via an initiative for heavily indebted poor countries. 

The US had formally rescinded Sudan’s designation as a ‘state sponsor of terrorism’ on 14 December 2020 after the Sudanese government agreed to establish relations with Israel and to pay 335 million USD to victims of the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen in an out of court settlement. The government of Sudan however remains liable for potentially billions of dollars in additional payments to the families of those killed in the 11 September 2001 attacks.

The transitional government in Khartoum, burdened with an economy in tailspin, was for all practical purposes strongarmed into acquiescing to Washington’s quid pro quo irrespective of mandate or domestic concerns. The mightiest country on earth with a government budget of 4,79 trillion USD for the fiscal year 2020 boxed one of the poorest, shackled with a total external debt (60 billion USD) of over 190% of its GDP in 2019, and an inflation rate currently at 140%, the third highest globally (superseded only by Venezuela and Zimbabwe) into political subservience.

However, there was no paucity of willing partners in Khartoum, hence the warmth of Cohen’s reception in the Sudanese capital. Sudan’s military establishment had openly declared its agenda with the surprise meeting between al-Burhan and Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on 3 February 2020 in Entebbe. At the time, politicians of the Forces for Freedom and Change (FFC) who comprise the civilian arm of the ruling coalition, including prime minister Abdalla Hamdok denied prior knowledge of the meeting. Significantly, a media campaign was unleashed to sing the merits of ‘normalisation’. Pundit after pundit including turbaned sheikhs appeared on television with ready made pro-Israeli fatwas and inked column after another in the written press to market the case of peace with Israel as it were. Already under former president Omer al-Bashir a clamour in the media had introduced the possibility of normalising relations with Israel as a route out of Sudan’s international isolation but with misgivings. At the time, Palestinian speakers such as Usama Al-Ashgarwere invited to argue the opposite. 

The arguments fielded by protagonists of “peace with Israel” can be summarised in three main points: one intrinsic and the other extrinsic to Sudanese affairs and between them a racial alibi to disqualify the Palestinian cause altogether. 

Realpolitik, it is maintained, obliges Sudan to pursue “normalisation” of relations with Israel in order to satisfy the demands of the US and to comply with the injunctions of powerful patrons in the region, primarily Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This position is then presented as a long overdue awakening to Sudan’s strategic interests and an instance of ‘independent’ national decision-making. 

The tide had turned anyway, it is further argued, and the consensus of the 1967 Khartoum summit in the wake of the Six Days War, “no peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel and no recognition of Israel”, is a relic of a bygone age. The frontline states, Egypt and Jordan, have long made their own separate peace deals with Israel; and the Palestinians themselves have signed settlements the Israeli power thus aborting their own cause. 

The first argument rests on the assumption of a uniform body politic subsumed under the marker of a nation, an assumption that is designed to overwrite the conflicting interests that define any society and translate into divergent and contradictory political biases and pursuits. Upon interrogation, what is claimed to be a strategic interest of the nation reveals pipeworks of brute authoritarianism. Normalisation of relations with Israel is sought after by Sudan’s military-security establishment and its new allies as the surest doorway to access the benefits of the mighty and their technology of oppression. 

Indeed, once Sudan’s realists had joined the Abraham Accords the US military began phasing in an agenda of cooperation and exchange. Deputy to the US Africa Command Commander for Civil-Military Engagement, Ambassador Andrew Young, and Director of Intelligence, Rear Adm. Heidi Berg, spent 25 to 27 January in Sudan to discuss “strategy”. On 24 February the USS Carson, an expeditionary fast transport ship of the US Military Sealift Command, arrived in Port Sudan in what was hailed as a “moment of fundamental change in the bilateral relationship between the United States and Sudan”. On 2 March, jubilant Sudanese navy officers welcomed the USS Winston Churchill, a destroyer of the US Sixth Fleet, in Port Sudan. 

Now, if examples in the region are anything to judge by the umbrella of the US military is not precisely the conducive environment for the democratic will of a people to transpire. 

The second argument conflates the Palestinian people, in the murderous grip of Zionist occupation, with the long expired political princes of the Oslo Accords and the club of cronies in government against whom the multitudes of the recent Arab revolts took aim. It is these circuits of power that Sudan’s realists aspire to plug into. The rationality of “they did it too” is particularly unsustainable when presented as an indicator of an independent Sudanese political will. The Palestinian cause in that regard is instrumentalised as a bone of contention in the the politics of vexation between Sudan’s now defeated Islamists and their adversaries. One common line of reasoning is that Sudan’s Islamists wish to maintain the policy of boycotting Israel while their patrons, Qatar and Turkey, both cultivate relations with Israel. From this premise, it is claimed, Sudan’s conversion to the axis of Israel, the US, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, is evidence of Sudan’s emancipation from Arab hegemony over its political choices. In this imaginative twist of logic, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are but well-wishers paving the way for Sudanese emancipation. 

The complement to these two arguments is a loud Freudian slip. Protagonists of peace with Israel trade the view that the Palestinians are unworthy of solidarity since they perceive the Sudanese as their racial inferiors, wannabe Arabs of African stock. And anyway, Sudan’s Arabs are elopers when it comes to their claims of Arab identity and are actually better described as Arabised Africans or Arabophones in another rendition of the same. 

What goes unspoken in this identitarian twist is the actual experience of Sudanese asylum-seekers in Israel, some of whom were hunted down by racist mobs in Tel Aviv chanting the slogan “the people want the Sudanese deported”. A Likud Member of the Knesset (MK) stated candidly: “the Sudanese were a cancer in our body”. As talks between Khartoum, Washington and Tel Aviv were underway, Israeli media reported that the normalisation deal would involve plans to repatriate some six thousand Sudanese asylum seekers currently in Israel. Only one asylum application from a Sudanese has actually been granted by the Israeli authorities; 600 received refugee status as a result of an ad hoc ministerial decision without examination of their applications and another 800 were granted temporary residence for humanitarian reasons. The remainder occupy a bureaucratic limbo. 

Paradoxically, Benjamin Netanyahu would have none of the identity piety of Sudan’s reborn “Arabophones”. For the purposes of the Zionist entity, Sudan is an Arab country. Following a joint phone call on 23 October 2020 with former US president Trump, Sudan’s head of state al-Burhan and prime minister Hamdok, he declared: “Today we announce another dramatic breakthrough for peace. Another Arab state joining the circle of peace. This time, it’s normalization between Israel and Sudan.” The three ‘No’s’ of the 1967 Khartoum summit might seem irrelevant to Sudan’s pro-Israel camp but to Netanyahu at stake was a cudgel at last splintered apart. “(..) today Khartoum has said, ‘yes to peace with Israel, yes to recognition of Israel and yes to normalization with Israel,’” he triumphantly asserted. 

Strategic interests, the Oslo Accords and racial categories are understandable as alibis, the operative functions of which are to strike at the very idea of solidarity, caricature the very possibility of liberation and denigrate the emancipatory potential of a people under occupation. Sudan’s rulers are better served by simply recognising the forces dictating their political choices rather than conjuring up arguments that fly in the face of the revolutionary potential of the popular will that catapulted them to power.