Sudan is burning; it's time to listen to its people

Khartoum has been wracked with violence for nearly a week. At least 413 people have been killed and millions trapped without food, water or electricity, while a former Janjaweed militia — the Rapid Support Forces led by Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, known as Hemeti — battles the army for control of Sudan’s capital.

After violence erupted last Saturday, many pointed to the fact that Sudan is still merely four fitful years into building a civilian-led government after decades of military rule. General Hamdan and Gen. Abdel Fattah Al Burhan, who heads the Sudanese Army, had joined forces to remove President Omar Hassan Al Bashir from office in 2019 following a pro-democracy popular uprising, and continued their alliance as they jointly led a military coup in late 2021, removing the (at least nominally) civilian-led transitional government.

Tensions that had been on the rise for months between the two military leaders finally exploded against the pressure of a looming deadline to hand power back to a civilian government. Analysts have noted that the movements that helped overthrow Al Bashir’s dictatorial regime in 2019 were too weak and too disorganized to compete with the armed militias. Others have pointed to a broader “global power struggle” that has reportedly led foreign actors such as Russia, the Gulf States, Egypt and even the Wagner Group to support or build ties with either Hamdan or al-Burhan, who are currently fighting for control of Sudan.

These are indeed likely factors in the violence. But the problems stretch back much further. When conflict did not end in Sudan after the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which marked the end of two decades of civil conflict, the international community fell into a familiar pattern of never-ending peace negotiations, rotating through different facilitators, in which the armed belligerents were brought to various international locations to negotiate for concessions that might lead to an end to the violence.

Yet the problem is that conflict resolution focused on signing peace agreements that split power between armed groups — no matter how many provisions on political reforms are added — rarely leads to sustainable peace. And it often doesn’t even lead to short-term peace. The effects of such misbegotten efforts, in the wreckage in Khartoum, are plain to see.

Armed groups and dictatorial regimes know that as long as they are participating in a peace process, international pressures will eventually — often quickly — ebb. If they are pressed into signing an agreement, there are typically very few effective mechanisms to hold them to implementation. What’s more, the time put into these peace processes — which in Sudan’s case amounted to decades — is spent by the armed groups amassing political and military power.

I saw this happen time and again in both Sudan and South Sudan, where certain leaders of armed groups with whom I dealt were more interested in watching televised soccer matches by the hotel pool and scheduling meetings for their own gain rather than discussing the violence affecting their people. All the while, international interveners — in this case the African Union and United Nations with the support of the United States, European Union and others — legitimize these armed groups as the only valid power brokers or voices that need to be heard, while asking Sudanese citizens to quietly wait their turn. A turn that often never comes.

In 2011, I started working for the U.S. special envoy for Sudan and South Sudan, which had just emerged from a brutal series of civil wars. Despite the peace agreement that allowed South Sudan to secede, violence continued in Darfur and had been rekindled in the “Two Areas,” along Sudan’s southern border with South Sudan. I was young and optimistic, and believed it possible for Sudan to find acceptable, if not ideal, compromises in the name of saving lives.