An airstrike on a Sudanese city on July 8 killed at least 22 people in one of the deadliest air attacks yet in the three months of fighting between the country’s rival generals. The assault took place in the Dar es Salaam neighborhood in Omdurman, the neighboring city of the capital, Khartoum.
Zobinou Komlan Hubert, S.D.B., a parish priest in the Archdiocese of Khartoum, told a reporter from ACI Africa News in May that despite talk of ceasefires, the fighting in Sudan shows no sign of abating. “The shooting and bombing can be heard at any time, whether from the center of Khartoum or from [nearby cities of] Omdurman and Jebel Aulia.
“So, ‘ceasefire’ seems to be just an announcement. The reality on the ground is that the confrontation is still going on.” His words resonate in the hearts and minds of over one million Sudanese Catholics.
The basic question centers on whether the conflict in Sudan will metastasize into an all-out civil war as both generals repeat in their own ways the atrocities begun by Mr. al-Bashir years ago in Darfur.
The current conflict in Sudan focuses on two Sudanese enemies who emerged from the same toxic experience: Lt. General Mohamed Hamdan, the leader of the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group that has become the main combatant in the renewed conflict in Sudan, and Sudanese Army General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who leads the regular army. These two men both have strong historical links to Sudan’s former president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, under whose reign 350,000 Sudanese were killed and 2.5 million people displaced. The suffering was especially intense from 2003 to 2008.
General Hamdan’s military prowess caught the attention of Mr. al-Bashir, who in 2003 was recruiting members of the Janjaweed (“spirits on horses”), a violent militia, to fight non-Arabic rebels rising against his regime in Darfur, a seemingly inconsequential desert region on Sudan’s western frontier. Eventually, General Hamdan rose to the rank of commander. More recently, he has become a very wealthy man by investing in Sudanese gold mines and by allying himself with the Wagner Group, a Russian paramilitary organization whose recent mutinous activities in Ukraine marked the most significant challenge to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s authority in his more than 20 years of rule.
Last year, General Hamdan’s forces received military assistance from the United Arab Emirates, which, along with Saudi Arabia, has invested billions of dollars to secure future food supplies by buying tracts of fertile land along the Nile in Sudan. Even as its arable lands come under control by outside interests, international humanitarian organizations in Sudan report that Sudanese hunger persists and that their warehouses and offices have been looted, leaving countless thousands without food or clean water. The World Food Program, an international organization within the United Nations, has activated its highest level of emergency response to help the people of Sudan, where it anticipates 2.5 million people will go hungry.
General al-Burham had served as a regional army commander in Darfur, eventually rising through the ranks to become one of the most powerful leaders of Sudan. After he assisted in deposing Mr. al-Bashir in 2019, General al-Burham became involved in a number of internecine intrigues in a determined effort to assume supreme power in Khartoum.
A power-sharing agreement signed by civilian leaders and the military in 2019 allowed General al-Burhan to become chairman of the Sovereignty Council, charged with administering the Sudanese government. As 2021 approached, however, he had great reservations about transferring power to civilian authorities and chose to derail the nation’s fragile democracy. Members of the international community subsequently brokered a deal between General al-Burhan and a coalition of pro-democracy groups. Unfortunately, this deal failed to satisfy General Hamdan.
The World Food Program anticipates 2.5 million people will go hungry in Sudan.
The basic question centers on whether the present military conflict in Sudan, in spite of a futile ceasefire signed in late May 2023 that had been supported by U.S. Secretary of State Anthony J. Blinken, will metastasize into a protracted, all-out civil war as both generals repeat in their own ways the atrocities begun by Mr. al-Bashir years ago in Darfur.
The efforts of the United States to achieve peace in this region have been known for years. As far back as 2001, five days before the terror attacks of Sept. 11, President George W. Bush appointed Senator John C. Danforth as special envoy to Sudan. In accepting this assignment, Senator Danforth said, “The civil war in Sudan has lasted at least 18 years, and it has caused immense human misery—the death of two million people, bombing and displacement of civilians, trading in human beings as slaves.”
At that time, Mr. al-Bashir broke ties with Osama bin Laden and told the Americans he would cooperate in rooting out local and international terrorists in Sudan. Washington then began collaborating closely with Khartoum on the issue of terrorism. Mr. Bush, however, was not fooled by Mr. al-Bashir, especially as the conflict in Sudan intensified.
Breakthroughs for peace between Khartoum and the Sudan’s People Liberation Army were short-lived, and fighting soon reignited. The Janjaweed, with Mr. al-Bashir’s support, launched a major offensive against members of the Fur tribe in Darfur. Since troops of the Fur and other tribes wanted to share in the wealth and power they saw in the central and southern parts of the country, they attacked an airbase at al-Fasher, Sudan. This was a pivotal moment of the war as the rebels outmaneuvered the Sudanese army.
In response, Mr. al-Bashir upgraded the Janjaweed to a full paramilitary fighting force and deployed regular troops from Khartoum to Darfur, in addition to sending Russian Antonov airplanes and combat helicopters with orders to kill civilians, poison wells, burn fields and huts, plunder villages and rape women.
The International Criminal Court in The Hague has charged Mr. al-Bashir with war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The first Sudanese refugee camp at Farchana in Chad, a landlocked country that shares 870 miles of border with Sudan, opened in January 2004; it soon grew to a population of 19,000 by the end of that year. Further talks that year between the opposing parties agreed both on a ceasefire and disarmament of the Janjaweed, but neither was achieved, and by August, the Janjaweed were operating 16 camps in just one of Darfur’s three states, recklessly pursuing a campaign of slaughter and destruction.
When I arrived in late 2004 to work in the Farchana, Touloum and Kounoungou camps, the Darfurian refugees I encountered told me their lives had changed in ways they could never have imagined because of the violence. I have no hesitation in saying that what was happening in Sudan at the moment of the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement on Jan. 9, 2005, was genocide—and a genocide that continues to this day. I took some photos of spontaneous drawings done by Sudanese refugee children on tent flaps that represented horrible memories suffered at the hands of the Janjaweed. The eyes and imaginations of traumatized 6-year-olds simply do not lie.
On July 22, 2004, Congress unanimously condemned the Sudanese government’s attempt to eradicate Darfurians as “genocide,” and former Secretary of State Colin Powell used the term before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But Mr. Bush and the United Nations did not act on these declarations of genocide.
I remember clearly the elation I felt in learning about the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement between the government of Sudan and the S.P.L.A. to bring the 21-year-long civil war to an end and return refugees to their homes. Under this plan, John Garang, an impressive member of the Dinka tribe from South Sudan, would become Sudan’s first vice president, joining Ali Osman Taha, a former leader in the National Islamic Front, in running the government, under Garang’s nemesis, Mr. al-Bashir.
Unfortunately, Garang was killed that July in a helicopter crash near Uganda’s border with Sudan. A rebel leader for the past 21 years, he had nevertheless put into place a hierarchy to continue functioning in case of his death. It was led by Salva Kiir, who would become president of an independent South Sudan.
If the violence orchestrated by Gen. Hamden and Gen. al-Burhan does not cease soon, then there is a distinct possibility that Khartoum risks uncontrollable destruction.
This peace agreement was a historic event that established power-sharing between the two factions for a period of six years, followed by a referendum on self-determination for the South. Revenues from the oil fields in the South were to be divided on a 50-50 basis between Khartoum and the government of South Sudan. The national army would withdraw from the South and integrated Sudanese armed forces would be formed in Khartoum.
When I left Chad at the end of a second nine-month stay in 2011, Mr. al-Bashir had by then retired from his post as commander of the armed forces, though he was re-elected president of the country. On July 9, 2011, the new country of South Sudan was formally created, which marked the beginning of untold skirmishes, especially over rights to the southern oil fields.
Salva Kiir became president of South Sudan, but he was unable to completely resolve South Sudan’s claims to the southern oil fields. Before long, he dismissed his entire cabinet and accused his vice president, Riek Machar, of fomenting a coup, which led to another conflict in South Sudan that displaced some four million people. By August 2018, Salva Kiir and Riek Machar signed a power-sharing agreement in an effort to end the fighting.
Eight months later, 82-year-old Pope Francis invited these two previously warring leaders to the Vatican where he prayed with them and unexpectedly got down on his knees and kissed their feet. “I am asking you as a brother to stay in peace. I am asking you with my heart, let us go forward,” he counseled them with great compassion.
In the north, as expected, Mr. al-Bashir dealt harshly with dissenters who opposed his policies. In 2015, he defeated more than a dozen candidates to retain his post with over 90 percent of the votes in his favor, in spite of a low voter turnout.
Facing large-scale demonstrations after that apparently fraudulent outcome, Mr. al-Bashir refused to step down from his presidential office. Protests continued for four years, and Mr. al-Bashir declared a state of emergency and dissolved the central and state governments. Moreover, he grew increasingly more hostile and belligerent, even as he lost control of Sudan’s security and military forces.
On April 11, 2019, he was overthrown and placed under arrest. The International Criminal Court in The Hague has charged him with war crimes and crimes against humanity, which means, if convicted, he would face a death sentence or life in prison. According to some recent reports, he was held in Kober maximum security prison in Khartoum before being transferred to a military hospital for medical treatment.
In early February 2023, Pope Francis presided over a Mass attended by 100,000 people in Juba, South Sudan. He prayed that peaceful human relationships might curb “the corruption of evil, the disease of division, the filth of fraudulent business dealings and the plague of injustice.” His words, however, fell on the deaf ears of Sudan’s military leaders. If the violence orchestrated by Gen. Hamden and Gen. al-Burhan does not cease soon, then there is a distinct possibility that Khartoum risks uncontrollable destruction.
According to the medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders, 6,000 people recently crossed into Chad, joining the 100,000 others who had fled there since mid-April. Sadly, the catastrophic legacy of the elusive Mr. al-Bashir, wherever he is, continues unabated.
