Sudan is tearing itself apart and Washington lost its capacity to help

Sudan is tearing itself apart, and Washington is watching, seemingly unable to do anything to stop the carnage. America’s diplomats lament that the U.S. has lost leverage. The truth is that no one is doing the basics of multilateral diplomacy — coordinating disparate actors.

Two Sudanese warlords are intent on destroying one another, and in the process are destroying the nation’s capital Khartoum. A city of more than seven million people is wracked by street fighting. Two rival armed forces — the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF), a passable imitation of a professional army, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary of comparable size and combat capacity — are battling for control.

It's a simple power struggle between two generals. Abdel Fattah al Burhan is the chairman of the Sovereignty Council and de facto president. He commands the SAF and has the support of most of what Sudanese call the “deep state” — the network of crony capitalist companies entangled with the army, intelligence, and Islamist networks. Mohamed ‘Hemedti’ Hamdan Dagolo is the leader of the RSF and sits atop a transnational conglomerate that includes gold mining and export, supply of mercenaries to neighboring countries, and other business interests, including a partnership with Russia’s Wagner Group.

The two men collaborated in the 2019 overthrow of long-standing military kleptocrat President Omar al-Bashir when a non-violent popular uprising led by an alliance called the Forces for Freedom and Change (FFC) made his rule untenable. The soldiers cooperated to thwart the democratic movement. But each wanted to rule Sudan. 

The fighting in Khartoum came as no surprise to close observers. 

A complicated international mediation process had adopted a “Framework Agreement” and was winding its way towards finalizing a document that would bring a civilian prime minister and resolving the question of security sector reform. The crux of this was whether Hemedti would agree for the RSF to be integrated under SAF command in two years, or whether he could retain them as a separate force for ten years—long enough for him to make a bid for power at some future date.

Any mediator knows that the most dangerous moment in a peace process is the last moment, and the most explosive issues are the security issues.

The Sudanese mediation involved no fewer than seven diplomatic actors. The “tripartite” of the United Nations, the African Union and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), an eight-country regional grouping, convened the talks involving the FFC and the military. The “tripartite” was supported by the “quad”, consisting of the United States, Britain, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. 

With all those diplomatic eyes on the ball, why wasn’t the conflict stopped before it erupted to such devastating effect?

The answer is, it was a low-level diplomatic traffic jam. All the actors were going in different directions. No one wanted what has now transpired — but no one was coordinating the signaling to prevent it from happening. 

Sudan is no stranger to wars, and diplomats have experience in preventing them. It’s salutary to compare other instances when diplomats averted all-out war.

In April 2011, just two months before South Sudan’s scheduled independence day, fighting erupted in Abyei, a disputed region between Sudan and South Sudan. Each side blamed the other for firing the first shots, and the Sudan Armed Forces launched a military operation that drove out the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (the army of the south) and burned and looted Abyei town. The South’s independence was in peril.

Aware of the perils of the separation process, the African Union had set up a High Level Panel of three former presidents — Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Abdulsalami Abubaker of Nigeria, and Pierre Buyoya of Burundi. In turn, the United Nations and western governments deployed experienced diplomats with a sharp political sense.

When Abyei exploded, a joint delegation of AU Panel, UN representative (Haile Menkerios) and the U.S. Special Envoy (Princeton Lyman) intervened with both sides, insisting on de-escalation. Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi called an emergency summit and, when the negotiations stalled on the question of security, he offered to dispatch a brigade of peacekeepers, provided it was mandated by the UN Security Council. 

The Sudanese Government had confidence in Ethiopia’s neutrality and in the effectiveness of its peacekeepers but distrusted the western countries. The U.S. secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, personally assured the Sudanese assistant president, Nafie Ali Nafie, that — contrary to normal procedure for UN peacekeepers — the mandate and specifics of the UN Interim Security Force for Abyei would be exactly as agreed in the agreement in Addis Ababa. The peacekeepers were dispatched. War was avoided.

A year later, fighting erupted on the border between the Sudan and newly independent South Sudan at a nearby place called Heglig. Again, all-out war threatened. Guided by the AU Panel under its Chairperson Thabo Mbeki, the African Union immediately convened its Peace and Security Council and issued a communiqué, setting out a roadmap for a peaceful resolution of the conflicts — and all the underlying disputes that had led to the crisis. 

While the PSC’s communiqués don’t have the same legal standing as UN Security Council resolutions, a united African position, coordinated with the UN and the U.S., and outreach to Russia, China and the Arab League, created the formula for the UN to act. At a time when the Security Council was paralyzed by U.S.-Russian sparring over Syria, it unanimously adopted resolution 2046, copied almost word-for-word from the PSC’s communiqué. 

Mbeki’s panel, working with the UN and the U.S., then facilitated the negotiations that led to the two countries signing a raft of cooperation agreements.

It wasn’t a question of trust or leverage. Al-Bashir was paranoid, and no U.S. official could even speak with him after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against him. The key was diplomatic tradecraft.

As well as frequent meetings and phone calls, Mbeki wrote often to the Sudanese leaders, precisely framing the issues, principles and proposed steps. Formal correspondence is often underrated. But it can challenge often-impulsive military men to respond with equal thoughtfulness—helping to restrain their worst impulses.

That kind of coordination now seems like a dream. The current AU Chairperson, Moussa Faki, has undermined his own institutions. On the Ethiopia war, for example, he and his High Representative, General Olusegun Obasanjo, kept the mediation as their own personal initiative, cutting out the PSC and thwarting any discussion at the UN Security Council. 

The UN’s representative in Khartoum, Volker Perthes, is a technocrat without the political savvy of his predecessor. A decade ago, U.S. Special Envoy Lyman was in regular — sometimes daily — contact with Secretary Clinton and then-Senator John Kerry (at the time, Chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, who visited Sudan at key moments) and could get them to intervene at crucial moments. The Biden Administration has deployed no one of remotely comparable stature to the region for more than a year.

The Trump Administration delegated its policy to the Horn of Africa to its main Middle Eastern allies — Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. After the peaceful uprising in Sudan in April 2019, it worked with the Saudis and Emiratis to help secure the deal between the FFC and the generals that led to a civilian-led government. 

But the idea that the Saudis and Emiratis wanted democracy in Sudan was wishful thinking. Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi wanted a junior version of himself in power in Khartoum, and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu got what he wanted from General al-Burhan — recognition of Israel, in return for which the U.S. finally lifted Sudan’s designation as a state sponsor of terror.

For the Biden Administration, Sudan was never such a sufficient priority that it would push its Middle Eastern allies to support democracy in that country. Eighteen months ago, al-Burhan and Hemedti launched a joint coup, sweeping the civilian leaders into prison. The two generals were confident that their backers in the region would overrule any strong U.S. reaction. They were right. After a brief period of diplomatic activism, U.S. policy reverted to a low-wattage policy of “stability,” and that meant dealing with the de facto strongmen. Washington supported the “tripartite” mediation to restore the democratic transition, but it was little more than a box-ticking exercise.

Each of the outside power brokers has its own preferences. Egypt backs al-Burhan. The UAE leans towards Hemedti. But none of them want a war that will cause millions of refugees, destroy their investments and cause mayhem in their backyard. Russia has ties to the RSF but it has a bigger stake in keeping Egypt onside. Ten years ago, China and the U.S. agreed that they had complementary interests in Sudan, and that reality should not have changed.

There’s no doubt that the U.S. has lost a lot of leverage over the last decade. What’s tragic is that it seems to have rationed its diplomacy as well, and left Africa adrift.

Alex de Waal served as an advisor to the AU High-Level Implementation Panel for Sudan and South Sudan, 2009-2013.