Are There Hopes For Enlightened Action?
15 April 2024 marked the one-year anniversary of the armed conflict in Sudan between the forces of the regular army led by General Abdel Fattah Abdelrahman Al-Bourhana and the Rapid Reaction Force led by General Mohammed Hamdan Daglo better known by his war name of "Hemetti". On 15 April 2023 fighting broke out between the two generals in the capital Khartoum and has spread to the whole country. An estimated 8 million persons have been displaced; the agriculture is disorganizd, and many face famine and acute hunger.
Each of the two generals has created local militias which rob, torture, rape, and create conditions of disorder. Each has opened the door to foreign fighters. There are Russian mercenaries and Ukrainian mercenaries come to fight the Russians. There are mercenaries from the fighting in the Sahel States such as Mali, Chad, Niger and even South Sudan. There are mercenaries and munitions coming from the Central African Republic that has been largely under the control of the Russian Wagner Group. There are more or less hidden influences of Iran, Turkey, Egypt and Qatar.
Although there have been offers of mediation by African and Arab countries, none has led to negotiations. There have been calls for a ceasefire, but these calls have fallen on deaf ears.
It is difficult to understand the intensity of the current divisions represented by the two generals. On behalf of the Association of World Citizens, I had been the first to raise in the Commission on Human Rights the violent conditions in Darfur, Sudan, in 2004 having been informed by a member of the U.N. Secretariat who was leaving the country and who could not speak out himself. The violent conditions in Darfur were largely based on ethnic divisions linked to life style differences between settled agriculture and cattle herders. We kept in close contact with the Sudanese Mission to the U.N. The Association of World Citizens was invited to be observers of the voting that led to the creation of the State of South Sudan, and we had sent a team of observers. Thus, we had a fairly good grasp of the social, political, and religious forces that were the lines of division in Sudan. However, the current fighting is less understandable as the divisions do not follow earlier fault lines.
The armed conflict in Sudan has drawn little attention from non-governmental organizations concerned with conflict resolution efforts since much attention has been focused on Russia-Ukraine and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts.
For outside NGOs concerned with conflict resolution, it is difficult to know where to start to create avenues for negotiation. The suffering is real. Enlightened action is necessary. There are currently governmental discussions in Paris on food aid, but progress seems difficult as convoys of food are blocked and often plundered. Sudan requires close NGO cooperation to see what is possible.
René Wadlow, Association of World Citizens
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