There are wars in the world worse than those in Ukraine and Gaza. The war in Sudan is insanely cruel and stupid, but you hardly hear anything about it. Why not? Because, like me, other journalists hate writing about it and avoid doing so if they can.
There is nothing good to be said about either side, the ‘official’ Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) or the rival Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Even the ordinary soldiers are wicked, regularly subjecting the civilian population to gang rape and murder.
And the war is about nothing, absolutely nothing, except the struggle for power between two professional killers. One is General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, commander of the SAF, and the other is General Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo, universally known as Hemedti, founder of the genocidal Janjaweed paramilitary forces and now commander of the RSF.
Both men worked for a long time for the brutal 30-year dictatorship of General
Omar al-Bashir, but then took part in the coup that overthrew him in 2019. Together they refused to hand Bashir over the International Criminal Court for trial on war crimes charges, and together they seized power back from the interim civilian government in 2021.
But they couldn’t agree on sharing power after that second coup. The only significant difference between them was that Burhan belongs to the elite ‘Arab’ establishment of Khartoum, the capital, while Hemedti is a tribal ‘Arab’ from the western region of Darfur, but they would not share either the government in Khartoum or the gold in Darfur.
The shooting started in April of last year and quickly spread across the country. Since then both sides have been frantically recruiting more soldiers, poorly trained and disciplined, who are much better at killing random civilians than each other. The RSF controls the west of the country and much of the capital, Khartoum, while the SAF dominates the rest.
What makes the situation weirder and even more hateful is that this is also a race war in a country where everybody is black, but a majority think they are ‘Arab’ and therefore not really black Africans despite their appearance.
There was an influx of real Arabs into the region from across the Red Sea in Arabia about 900 years ago. They conquered the place, Islamised a lot of the population, and became the culturally dominant group in the northern part, but there were never a lot of them.
Within a few centuries they were physically indistinguishable from the rest of the population, but those who were Muslim still thought of themselves as ‘Arabs’, spoke a local version of Arabic – and saw the rest of the population as pagans and therefore eligible to be slaves.
That made a weird kind of sense at the time. The white Muslim empires around the southern and eastern Mediterranean, mostly Arabic or Turkish-speaking, were the main market for African slaves until the arrival of European customers diverted some of the trade westwards five centuries later.
In Sudan, both of those identities were internalised by people who looked exactly the same: Muslim ‘Arabs’ who owned and traded in slaves and non-Muslim ‘Africans’ who were slaves or at least were treated as inferior beings. Fast forward to the 21st century, and those attitudes and divisions are still alive and kicking.
Every government of post-colonial Sudan has been completely dominated by ‘Arabs’. The far south of the country, where almost everybody was ‘African’ and most were Christian, rebelled in 1955 and waged a fifty-year struggle for independence that killed about three million people. It got independence in 2005 as South Sudan, but that didn’t solve anything.
The rest, calling itself just ‘Sudan’, still had a 30% minority of ‘Africans’ who were seen as disloyal to the Muslim-majority state. Some rebelled and some did not, but all were brutally treated by Omar al-Bashir’s regime, which used Hemedti’s Janjaweed paramilitary to attempt a genocide of the most troublesome groups in Darfur region.
That brings us up to today, where the current war in Sudan, only 18 months old, has probably racked up 100,000 deaths already. Only the Ukraine war is killing more. 12 million people, more than a quarter of Sudan’s population, have fled or been driven from their homes. Hemedti is doing another genocide in Darfur.
The rival claimants for power are both getting financial support and lots of advanced weaponry from abroad: Hemedti from the United Arab Emirates, the Wagner Group (Russia) and Libya; Burhan from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Ukraine and Iran. So you can see why I hate writing about Sudan. It’s a shame they can’t all lose.
