If Sudan fails, the impact will reach across the globe
Jul 25th, 2023
The UK’s Africa minister, Andrew Mitchell, recently warned that the conflict in Sudan will have repercussions from Cairo to Cape Town and beyond. Sudan specialists believe he may have been downplaying the potential impact, warning that Khartoum could resume its role as an academy for global Islamist terrorism.
After 100 days of conflict in Sudan, there are no signs that either battling leader – General Burhan of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) or General Hemedti of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), is ready to negotiate a genuine ceasefire. However, they are united in their willingness to allow intolerant, fundamentalist jihadists back into the driving seat of their nation’s politics once the fighting stops.
The Islamists are back
For thirty years, Sudan’s ruler, Field Marshall Omar Bashir, oversaw hardline Islamists infiltrating key Sudanese institutions and businesses. They created a deep state of Muslim fundamentalists who disparaged democracy, pluralism and religious tolerance. Sudan specialist Gill Lusk describes it as “a twisted version of Islam that involved death and torture at home, and a leadership role in jihadist terrorism abroad, from the bombing of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania [in 1998] to the attempt to assassinate the late Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Ethiopia. This regime was one of the world’s most organised, determined and best funded Islamist apparatuses and not for nothing did it host Usama bin Laden for five years.”
A popular uprising in 2019 expelled Bashir, and a transitional administration consisting of secular technocrats tried to loosen the Islamists’ grip on power. Corrupt officials were purged and Bashir was jailed. However, the transitional government encroached on the political and economic interests of the SAF and the RSF. Together, they staged a coup in October 2021. Committees investigating kleptocracy were arrested; women were once more physically and verbally abused on the streets; Christians were again harassed; and the non-Arab populations faced violence from Islamists seeking an ethnically and religiously pure theocracy.
Weeks before the current violence between the SAF and the RSF erupted in April, thousands of Islamists swelled the army’s ranks. The RSF is also riddled with Islamists, although they deny it. Judging by their previous track record under Bashir, they would put jihadism back in the driving seat of Sudanese politics. They would incubate and protect fellow jihadists from across the region, posing a potential threat to the United States and Europe. The authorities in Egypt, Kenya, Uganda, CAR, Chad, Libya, Uganda, and Somalia would also be alarmed by the prospect of their own evangelising fundamentalists receiving training and funding from Sudan.
Lusk says: “There is no doubt that the Islamist strategy is not only to kill their own people but to rebuild a major hub of international terrorism. To name only two, the Foreign Minister, Ali el Sadig, was recently in Iran, and several leading figures have long been in exile in Turkey.”
More Failed States
Sudan’s disintegration will have serious repercussions in South Sudan, which has been midwifed and bankrolled by the UK and USA since independence in 2011. Oil makes up 95% of South Sudan’s revenues, exported through pipelines across Sudan to Port Sudan. If a deepening conflict stops transshipment, the international community will have two failed states to handle.
A senior diplomat working in the region (who requested anonymity) warns that Egypt is worried it too will be destabilized by the massive influx of refugees, including Muslim Brotherhood alumni from Khartoum. “They must be regretting their support for the 2021 coup and what they thought would be a short war,” quips the diplomat.
A Bitter Harvest
While bombs are dropping, farmers head for refugee camps. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has already pushed up grain prices. If more harvests are lost, and the military regains control of Sudan, hundreds of thousands of migrants will leave the region for good. Their arrival in Europe will add further poison to the toxic debate on migration.
Dr Ahmed Abbas of the Sudan Doctor’s Union warns that whichever way the fighting ends, the international community must learn from past mistakes. It must exclude Sudan’s military entities from all aspects of civil life and activities. A future constitutional settlement must put moderate civic society at the centre, with women, young people representing neighbourhood resistance committees, representatives from elected trade unions, and those from the marginalized peripheries given a voice. Allowing a fudge which keeps the men with guns in power condemns the region to an endless cycle of violence, he says. Moreover, the rest of the world will suffer the knock-on effects of an emboldened Islamist movement.
Rebecca Tinsley is the founder and president of the human rights group Waging Peace: www.WagingPeace.info
