Commentator Muhammad Elamin begins a multi-part discussion on the background of the war and genocide in Sudan. How do narratives fuel continued neo-colonial control of Sudan’s polity, and can unpacking Sudan’s history through a non-Western paradigmatic view bring about a politics of transformation?[i] In this first of a series of pieces, the author looks at the rise of ‘modern’ Sudan, colonial control, political decolonisation and the role of the post-colonial Sudanese elite in reproducing neo-colonial control over Sudanese resources whilst simultaneously collapsing the functioning state.
There are a number of the problems about the understanding of the current war in Sudan and advocacy around it: one is the failure to look at the deeper roots of conflict, not just the relationship to what has happened in Darfur in early 2003. This requires understanding where the modern borders of the state came from, how colonialism has disrupted previous forms of governance and kinship across the region. It requires some sort of acknowledgement of the geography of the state, of environmental factors, some natural, some exacerbated by colonialism and neo-colonialism, regional instability and the failed state. It also requires the removal of ‘westernised’ frames of analysis around ethnicity, religion, political affiliation and aspiration in the ‘Sudanese’ context.
The myopia around Sudan analysis is not just a matter of people from outside Sudan or non-Sudanese finding it difficult or struggling to grapple with what this all means and how it has all come to be. Arguably even many of Sudanese themselves struggle to understand much of what’s been going on, even though it’s been a crisis in the making for decades, the roots of which even precede the independence of Sudan in 1956.
This is not a critique of ongoing advocacy inside Sudan or the sincere and moving support of people worldwide for the victims of genocidal and extreme violence in Sudan. It is about opening a space wherein narratives of genuine liberation, without resort to imposed discourses of sovereignty, liberation, and governance, can operate. It is a call to accept that imposed narratives, whether as ways of understanding or as ways of conflict resolution, have not been effective in the context of Sudan and the wider SWANA region (indeed across Africa), but have also actually hindered peace and prosperity.
What follows is a list of terms and narratives to problematise if we are to rethink Sudan and the region’s future.
Borders and geography in the longue durée
Until 2011 Sudan was the largest country by area size in Africa, in the Arab world, and pretty much in the SWANA region.
If you look at a non-political geography map that focuses on the land and terrain of Africa, you will find that there’s a very broad and long belt extending from the shores of the Red Sea all the way to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean in Western Africa, which is called the Sudan. And literally, this is what historically Sudan was what was. And that’s what the word Sudan means. In Arabic, it’s just the land of the blacks, Bilad al-Sudan. It just means the land of the blacks based on the colour of their skin. And this is why you have what came to be known as Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, which is basically modern-day Sudan: it wasn’t the typical colonial administration that was in all the colonies. It was a unique condominium between Egypt and Britain (1899-1956), although Egypt was effectively under British military occupation for much of this time. You also have the French Sudan, which is modern-day Mali.
Imbalance or inequity in the distribution of resources and power via this ‘bordering’ process not only disrupted long held ties of kinship, they also impacted the development of the new state. Development in Sudan was concentrated initially (particularly the civil service, and the railway system built to facilitate the export of cotton and natural resources by the British) along the banks of the Nile Valley, coming down from Egypt until you get to Khartoum where you have the confluence of the Blue Nile and the White Nile. This route was mainly influenced by the advance of the British army in the campaign of the reconquest of Sudan in 1897-99[ii] by Lord Kitchener after the death of Gordon Pasha in Khartoum.
This colonial legacy – borders, institutions and a sense of ‘nation’ as approximating to one ethnos, language and culture – carried on into the independence period[iii]. As with many post-colonial states, after independence, there was an educated Sudanese elite who were educated so as to inherit and run the civil service put in place by the British, ensuring that economic, political and governance ties continued into the post-independence period, often if not always favouring the former coloniser. If we want to be kind to this new civil service, we can say that their vision was very centralized and did not take on board the hinterlands and peripheries of Sudan. It was a very Khartoum-centric government and it left much parts of the countryside and the other areas very underdeveloped.
The sheer mass of Sudan itself – which could have been of immense benefit to a nascent state – was instead part of its downfall. Before the breakup of the Soviet Union, Sudan was the eighth largest country in the world area-wise. It is equal to the area of the US, east of the Mississippi River. Instead the old colonial architecture of institutions and infrastructure continued to inform political and economic organisation contributing to huge underdevelopment in large swathes of the country e.g. Sudan has very poor transport ties and other infrastructure inequalities with Khartoum and its surrounds along the Nile Valley. Therefore, with time these grudges against central authority grew; non-violent initially.
Kinship
Muslims inside and outside Sudan are as confused as others and cannot explain the narratives of what has happened and is happening in Sudan because atrocities are being committed by people dressed in Islamic garb, sometime s literally, always metaphorically.
At the moment we hear a lot about the Rapid Support Forces, but understanding where they came from, the personalities involved and the machinations that led to their incorporation into the Sudanese Army is important if we are going to develop a framework of analysis and conflict resolution that will break the cycle that has developed in intra-Sudanese relations.
The usage of terms relating to ‘tribe’ abound in discussions around Sudan and feed into simplistic narratives of racism that ignore the foregoing. Their focus instead tends to be on tribe or ‘race’ exclusively as a cause of conflict, and in the narratives around the Darfur war the focus is on Arab v African tribes. These narratives tend to take on the Islamophobic hue of Arabness as intrinsically violent and ‘Islamist’, and ‘African’ as victim or victimised. Sudan’s geography and its interconnectedness to its own and the region’s history needs to be understood outside of Westphalian nation state narratives. However the question of how the country was drawn up we do not ask who drew the map of modern-day Sudan, who drew the borders. In other words, we do not look at the impact of the colonial portioning of different parts of Sudan. Thus, every issue under discussion – economic, political, civil, neglects the tensions, impact and future potentials and problems caused by the colonial instrumentalization of borders, which are under 200 years old in the context of civilisations sometimes thousands of years old. Modern-day Sudan is a young state, and its colonial borders, are as much a creation of Muhammad Ali Pasha[iv] around 1820-1824, as the British colonial powers.
Understanding those described as Arab and African as tribes in the Darfur conflict beyond this flattening narrative is crucial if Sudan is to create a sense of nation and citizenry that bucks Europeanised notions of nation. Before the breakup of Sudan in 2011, it had somewhere in the region of about 560 tribes and ethnic groups with about nearly 114 indigenous languages and more than 500 dialects, many of them unwritten, although Arabic is the lingua franca of the country. Embracing that diversity has always been a challenge for whichever part of the political spectrum has held power, whether the leftists or the centralists or the Islam oriented group.
What are the Arab tribes? In the context of Sudan, Arab is really a term (although it comes across as ethnically Arab) that is quite loosely used to describe Bedouin tribes because of the Bedouin nature (desert dwellers with pastoral lifestyle) of their living or anybody who lives out in the countryside and has a ‘Bedouin’ lifestyle. This is where these groups hail from and they have these relationships extending from Western Sudan all the way to Mali, Niger, Central Africa, Chad, Southern Libya, and some of them hail afield as Algeria and beyond. So these are ties of kinship which were disrupted by modern day borders: and they don’t necessarily conform with the borders and workings of the modern nation state.
The other component that we have is the settled communities in Darfur, many of whom are farming communities which are largely described as African tribes.
These are settled. They have their centuries old kingdoms and sultanates. And one of the important conditions for having recognized sultanates in Darfur was that these tribes or groups had rights to land. So they owned the land and they were largely subsisting on farming. For decades, if not centuries, there would be regular clashes, seasonal clashes between the ‘Bedouin’ or ‘Arab’ nomadic tribes migrating on a seasonal basis from north to south during Summer and the rainy season or in Autumn. They would take their cattle and their animals and head south towards the more fertile areas of modern-day South Sudan. So clashes would happen over crop disruption by Bedouin groups. There existed traditional mechanisms and means of sorting out these issues, even paying compensation or blood money if there were any deaths from these seasonal clashes.
Inter-marriage and a lot of inter-tribal relationships existed over the years and Darfur had its own Sultanates: one of the largest was the Fur Sultanate or the Darfur was named after: Dar meaning the abode of the Fur; and there was also Dar Masalit in Western Darfur which was part of the ancient Wadai Islamic Sultanate, which was broken up by the French with part of it ending up in Sudan, part in Chad. So there is a kind of crucible here in which all this current conflict begins: the wholesale disruption of these movements, cultures, ethnicities and traditions with the advent of the modern day state and borders imposed or drawn up by the different French and British colonial powers. The idea of the nation state is imposed on peoples who have ways of living together and apart, as coexisting but also conflicting, in ways that do not conform to nation state criteria. Thus existing problems between groups are exacerbated, while traditional mechanisms for resolution and or management of conflict disrupted and even eviscerated by the advent of new borders and also new forms of governance that destroyed existing political structures.
Those new political structures, raised by colonial powers, did not have as a raison d’etre, concern for social and political issues pertaining to the societies contained or disrupted by these borders. The main strategic concerns for Britain were access to the Nile and preventing French expansion, the use of land for cotton plantation as another powerhouse for British industry, and of course as and when resources were discovered their extraction, a matter that has outlasted the British colonial administration and which continues to be a major factor today.
Regional conflicts and instability plagued the region, particularly in Libya and Chad with Muammar al-Qaddafi. He created what was known as the Islamic Legion in 1972. This contributed to a proliferation of weapons in the region. When war broke out between Libya and Chad (1978-1987) over the Aozou strip, this led to a displacement of many tribal groups, but also his arming of a broad range of groups. This instability was another factor which led to the displacement of different Arab Bedouin tribes.
Displacement was also exacerbated by desertification, famine and drought, particularly the drought of the 1970s and the 1980s, which pushed many of these tribes towards the more fertile areas of either the Nile Valley or South Sudan, which also meant that they went over the lands, the farming areas, which belonged to the settled groups in Darfur. The instability caused by the proliferation of weaponry and environmental factors were instrumentalised by a number of local and regional political figures who had their own aspirations and agendas. These ingredients created the perfect recipe for the war that we saw at the turn of the century in Darfur. Those players included Libya and Chad but as the years passed, and particularly in this iteration of the war, we witnessed the deep involvement of the UAE. But there are other actors depending on which side of the equation or what side of the conflict people stand including Libya, particularly General Haftar; Egypt with its ties with the Sudanese army; Saudi Arabia and as discussed the UAE. The mix will include Iran, Qatar, Turkey and Ethiopia. It is now a huge mixing bowl for nearly everybody. Even arguably Ukraine and Russia are involved to varying degrees because of the stakes. And of course we have the issue of the US and Israel involved separately and in confluence with some of these actors (a matter we will develop later).
Who are the Islamists?
In the early 2000s the Western world was in outrage over the genocide being perpetrated in Darfur. This is not to dispute the genocide, but to explore the narratives in the West, which focused on the idea of this being driven by Arabs against Africans on the basis of ethnicity, how this was a narrative that played into pre-existing stereotypes against Islam and Muslims and their association with Arabness. The violence became another ‘example’ of Muslim barbarity. The initial facts are more complicated, and often belie the narrative. However, the prevalence of these narratives has also become self-fulfilling in their internalisation by the Sudanese state and the various actors within it[v].
Before the genocide in Darfur came to be a cause taken up in the west, key parties of the rebellions in the restive region were often portrayed by the Khartoum government and in western political and civil society arenas as Islamist in nature. Darfur is unique, even within Sudan. Darfur is 100 % Muslim, despite the ethnic differences. I remember speaking to many people from Darfur, and they would always say, we never saw a non-Muslim place of worship, a church, until we went to Khartoum. This is because of the diversity in the more central part of the country. So the first tragedy here is that this was a war between and a genocide committed by Muslims against each other, all from the same Sunni Maliki madhhab. Secondly this instrumentalization of ‘ethnicity’ while at play in the war and instrumentalised further in the West, decimated the centuries of coexistence and intermarriage that make such boundaries of ethnicity nonsensical. This latter point, the idea of ethnos in the Sudanese nation state, can be blamed in part on a failure of the Sudanese elite since, before and after independence to even want to comprehend the diversity of Sudan and use it as a source of strength rather than the spiral into disaster we see at the moment.
The Islamic movement split in 1999-2000 between the President General al-Bashir and between Dr Hassan al-Turabi. The National Congress Party stayed with al-Bashir, and Turabi formed the Popular Congress Party. The Popular Congress Party was accused of instigating or encouraging some of the armed revolts in Darfur and certainly one of the two major Darfuri movements, e.g. the Justice and Equality Movement was seen as the military wing of Turabi, a matter which was often entirely ignored or simply not understood in westernised narratives of events.
In Darfur, the embeddedness of Islam, and long history of ‘political’ Islam / centuries of Islamic governance, is perhaps more profound and indigenous than anything associated with the ‘Arab’ tribes.
If we are to break the cycle of violence in Sudan, as outside observers we need to have an honest understanding of who the people in the country are, their histories and cultures. As those involved within Sudanese politics, we need to stop pandering to external narratives however much external assistance may depend upon them, as they carry with them at best meaningless and harmful colonial cultures, and at worst are cynically designed to skew the development of the country and manipulate its political and civil spaces.
When armies are welcome to rule
At this point it is worth noting some significant points about the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), particularly its role as a political player in Sudan, and again the need to resist the urge to make comparisons with other militaries in the region, especially Egypt. Arguably each area where there has been military interference in civil government has its own trajectories, and again Westernised narratives regarding African strongmen and militaries flattens the specificities of these experiences.
In Sudan it is worth noting that despite (and analogous to intent but not reach) the SAF having huge reach within the economy of the country, it is not the sole such player. The embeddedness of the RSF in the economy and the speed with which it was able to get there belie the idea of Sudan and the SAF being Egypt lite regarding the economy. More distinct in the Sudanese experience is the embeddedness of the SAF in the everyday life of the country. Unlike in Egypt where the military are a class unto themselves, with their officer class even living in segregation from the rest of society, the Sudanese Armed Forces are dispersed within society. Their makeup in fact reflects some of the diversity which has otherwise eluded successive governments. This diversity has interesting outcomes when looking at military and political developments.
Part of al-Bashir administration’s impetus to use the Janjaweed in Darfur, and later to recognise the RSF as a de facto second army in Sudan, stems from the prevalence of West Sudanese non-commisioned officers and soldiers within SAF. When Darfur erupted into rebellion, not only were there military strategic issues around the slow response of the regular armed forces, but also a suspicion in Khartoum about the loyalty of this group of soldiers.
Secondly and throughout the modern history of Sudan, the armed forces have been very involved in the popular uprisings (three in total) that have toppled both civilian and military (Aboud in 1964, Numeri in 1985 and al-Basir in 2019) regimes.
It is true on face value that the military have ruled more than civilian regimes in Sudan, and it was hoped that this third attempt at civilian rule in 2019 would last. But it is also crucial to note that these “military governments” were not purely made up and drawn from the ranks of the army but also enjoyed considerable support and participation from both partisan and non-partisan civilian figures and technocrats. In the previous two experiments, or the civil revolts, there was a short period of maybe one year’s transition, and then general elections and ‘democratically’ mandated governments came in. But these governments were always marred by extreme and unstable inter-party politics and were very weak. And thus we have a cycle in which the military would take over again. The army in Sudan can be understood to be a political institution. I would argue that the military taking over was more a symptom rather than the illness. It was a symptom of the political incompetence of the civilian parties. But their stepping in is a sign of the symptoms of Sudanese civil political failure e.g.in 1958 when General Ibrahim Aboud came in, he was actually ordered by the prime minister to take power as the country was gripped in a political crisis at the time and economic pressure due to the 1958 cotton crisis. When Numeri took power in 1969, it was a result of the plotting by the communists and the Arab nationalists against the background of the dissolution and banning of the Sudanese Communist party in November 1965. In 1989 Al-Bashir came to power against the background of the incompetence of Sadiq al-Mahdi’s successive coalition governments and threats including a memorandum and ultimatum by the army command which effectively led to the expulsion of the National Islamic Front from government in March 1989.
So we can see in Sudan that it is the civilian component who really push the military to intervene. This does not mean that the military once in power have not benefitted from the dynamics of ruling, gaining the upper hand over civilian political life and subsiding it; but it is also part of the dynamic for change, often demanded. We saw this in the popular revolts in 1964 and 1985 and certainly 2019, there’s a certain pattern here as well where the revolts taking place reached a certain critical mass: at that point, the military intervened, to push whoever is in charge out, either in the name of stability or of preventing bloodshed. In December 2018 the revolts started and become widespread. By April 2019, the demonstrators had a huge sitting in front of the general headquarters of the Sudanese army, specifically on 6th April, which was the anniversary of the April revolt of 1985, which overthrew the Numeri regime. Their message was clear. We want the military to dislodge al-Bashir now.
Next steps
These are some introductory terms and thoughts to reimagine what has happened in Sudan and create a space for an imagined future. In the next piece we will look at inter alia, the failures of civilian administrations (how much of their own making and how much is due to external interference), the rise of the RSF, the role of the US in the political, civilian and economic life of the country, the role of the international community in reproducing dedevlopment policies. Some of the matters are Sudan specific, others will be familiar to readers in the wider politics of the region and modern day neocolonialism more generally. In all events, understanding Sudan or indeed any other county pathologized in western narratives is essential for creating a better future for all concerned.
Muhammad Elamin is an independent commentator on Sudanese affairs. This series of articles is based on interviews with one of The Long View editors.
[i] These essays are based on an interview between the author and one of The Long View editors.
[ii] Both Pashas’ conquest and subsequently the British colonisation broke up these ties of kinship that characterised the Sahel or the Sudan without borders.
[iii] Sudan achieved political independence on 1 January 1956.
[iv] Muhammad Ali Pasha (the governor of Egypt on behalf of the Ottoman Caliphate) pushed into the region in search of slaves to employ in his armed forces, and on industrial and agricultural projects. The borders created by his governate are more or less those that the British concretised as tehor colony and as the post-colonial state of Sudan, granted independence in 1956.
[v] Fast forward towards the end of General al-Bashir’s regime. When we go back to 2003-2004, the genocide or the crimes perpetrated against the African groups, what comes to mind is the infamous Janjaweed groups which were made up from some of the Arab Bedouin tribes and these are essentially the precursor to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The difference was the Janjaweed then is that then they were militias, today the RSF is a formalised military force, at one time before the schism with Burhani, arguably a second (semi)official Sudanese army, which I will discuss elsewhere.