Those Who Started the War Can Stop it — But Not on Their Terms

Al-Obeid A. Murawih
The war that broke out in Sudan on 15 April 2023 was not born on that day — nor even in the days and weeks immediately beforehand. It was the product of planning and arrangements by well-known international forces, predating even the Security Committee’s coup in April 2019. The purpose of that design, as we have repeatedly written, was to topple the al-Inqaz (the “Salvation”) regime and to re-engineer Sudan’s political, social and economic order so as to block Russian and Chinese expansion in the region via this vast country. It was also meant to prevent Islamists who once dominated power from returning to it within a generation or two — perhaps never — as part of a broader drive to eliminate what they call “political Islam”, which they view as a major obstacle to normalisation and subordination to the West.
Those forces succeeded in removing the regime and installed figures under the label “civil forces” or “revolutionary forces”, elevating them above the political actors in order to complete the plan. Thus came the Committee for the Removal of Empowerment, the laws of Nasr al-Din Abdul Bari, the Qaray curricula, and orchestrated campaigns against the army, the police and the security apparatus — all intended to neutralise the state’s levers of control and to turn those institutions from guardians of the state into guardians of the new project, under the pretext of combating the former regime.
Not two years had passed since implementation began under the banner of democratic transition when the sponsors discovered the plan had failed and was producing the opposite results. They decided to change method and instruments, replacing inducement with intimidation. Thus came the “framework agreement” after the plotters had succeeded in splitting what was known as the military component and persuading the commander of the Rapid Support Forces that he would become the country’s number one man, and that his forces should protect the emerging order — as stated at the time by leaders of the Freedom and Change Coalition (for example Ja‘far Hassan, Yasser Arman and Mariam al-Sadiq).
When intimidation failed to impose the framework, the project’s backers resorted to imposing it by force. There was the attempted seizure of power by military coup on the morning of 15 April 2023. Despite the careful planning and choreography of that attempt — which was to be carried out in the name of the Armed Forces and under the slogan “civilian rule” — it too failed. When the failure became apparent, the sponsors and planners began evacuating their nationals and foreign dependants from Khartoum: Marines planes touched down in the foyer of the US embassy in the Soba district; convoys of diplomats and international staff drove to Port Sudan; and military transport aircraft were allowed to land at Wadi Seidna airbase to evacuate nationals of several Western countries and Sudanese passport-holders, including some Freedom and Change leaders.
On the third day of the conflict, the then US Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared that there could be no victors in this war and that it must stop. He instructed his Sudan desk officials, led by Molly Phee, to rush to Riyadh and arrange Saudi-US mediation aimed at a temporary ceasefire and the opening of humanitarian corridors for aid to civilians. Meanwhile, the conflict was characterised — adopted as the official line — as simply a power struggle between two generals, rather than as a coup or a military rebellion against the state.
Thirty-plus months have passed since the war began. During this time Sudan has witnessed some of the most heinous crimes against humanity conceivable in any conflict. Millions of Sudanese civilians became a direct target of the rebel, terrorist Rapid Support Forces militia: they suffered looting, forced displacement, rape, killings, sieges and deliberate starvation. Sudan experienced the largest displacement, refugee and hunger crisis in the world, according to the United Nations: some 13 million Sudanese were displaced or became refugees, including children, women, the elderly and people with chronic illnesses, and UN estimates of people facing hunger in Sudan reached around 25 million, or more.
Throughout these more than thirty months, sophisticated weapons and combat systems — tanks, armoured vehicles, artillery and drones among them — continued to flow into the battlefields, much of it via Sudan’s western neighbours, making its way to the various towns of Darfur and to theatres of combat in Khartoum, Al Jazirah, Sennar, White Nile, and Kordofan. The international media documented and reported much of this and named the party behind it. The international sanctions committee established under UN Security Council Resolution 1591 monitored and recorded such flows, yet it remained “unable” to make these findings public to the Security Council — one of the great scandals of collusion that history will record, a matter we shall address in due course.
The permanent Western members of the Security Council — Britain, the United States and France — know perfectly well who ignited this war. They also know that if they wanted it to stop tomorrow, they could make it happen. A single word from the United Arab Emirates to the rebel Rapid Support Forces telling them to stand down would stop the war. Yet all these “great” powers keep silent — as the proverb puts it, “they have water in their mouths” — unwilling to trade their economic interests, represented by Emirati investments worth hundreds of billions of dollars, for vindication of rights and the defence of moral principles enshrined in international law and custom that criminalise attacks on peoples and violations of their sanctities. The proper course would have been simply to tell the sponsors of the murderous militia to stop — or at least to allow Sudan’s complaint to be heard in the Security Council, to lift the unofficial gag on the sanctions committee’s reports, and to allow the panel of experts to submit their findings without compromising their impartiality. Had the experts reported honestly, the Security Council would have had no option but to name the party violating the arms embargo to Darfur, to expose who was igniting and insisting on the war’s continuation, and to move to designate the Rapid Support Forces militia as a terrorist group responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity. But “this is forbidden” because it would jeopardise material interests with an ally.
Now, after all the crimes and violations committed by the Rapid Support Forces against Sudanese — killings, looting, theft, rape, sexual slavery — and after the massive destruction of infrastructure and essential services (power stations and transmission and distribution systems, hospitals, schools, markets, banks and private savings), and after hundreds of thousands of civilian and military martyrs, those who lit and sustained the war and sought to hide as many of its facts as they could now say they want to stop it.
Very well. You can indeed stop it — for you are the ones who stood with the aggressor and aided him — and because the Sudanese army, allied forces and the people who rallied around it were the victims: they defended their military bases, their captured cities and the honour of their people. They have no interest in prolonging the war. But stopping a war is not the same as starting one. The reality today is not what it was on 15 April 2023, and things cannot simply revert to that earlier state. Therefore the price that the aggressors must pay ought to be the basic precondition for ending the war — and that price is not merely financial; it must also be political.

Shortlink: https://sudanhorizon.com/?p=8185