Dave Stockton
Across Sudan, a devastating war has now been raging for one year. It has been largely ignored by the Western media and driven from the headlines since October 7 by Israel’s genocide in Gaza. But the suffering of the Sudanese people bears comparison with that conflict in terms of numbers displaced from their homes, civilian atrocities, and the imminent threat of famine. Many buildings in the capital Khartoum have been destroyed and, in El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, 40,000 people had to flee their homes as the Rapid Support Forces, RSF, attempted to seize the city.
United Nations sources talk of “mass graves, gang rapes, indiscriminate attacks in densely populated areas” and the displacement of 8.1 million of Sudan’s 45 million population, including at least 1.76 million who have fled to poor neighbouring countries like Chad. At least 292 people have died of cholera with over 10,700 suspected cases as of 17 February 2024.
According to a report quoted in The Middle East Eye, since the fighting erupted, 37 per cent Sudan’s farmland has not been cultivated and the country’s wheat production has fallen by 70 percent. Hunger and famine stalk the land and, although on April 15 a donors’ conference in Paris promised £1.7bn in aid, delivery will be difficult because warring commanders seize supplies for their own troops.
How the war started
Fighting broke out in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces, SAF, headed by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his deputy, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, who heads the paramilitary RSF. They had headed a military regime since the coup they carried out against the civilian government of Abdalla Hamduk in October, 2021.
The war erupted within the huge capital city of Khartoum, but it quickly spread to other parts of Sudan, including Darfur, Port Sudan and, by December 2023, to the previously peaceful Gezira state, the country’s agricultural heartland situated at the meeting point of the Blue and White Nile rivers.
Both al-Burhan and Dagalo first emerged as military leaders during the bloody war in Darfur between 2003 and 2008, in which 300,000 people were killed and 2.5 million were made refugees. Dagalo led the infamous Janjaweed militias who committed some of the worst atrocities while becoming enormously rich from Darfur’s gold mines.
But the two thieves fell out, ostensibly over al-Burhan’s attempt to put the RSF in Darfur and Khartoum under his own command. Dagao realised this meant handing over access to the riches of Darfur, including its gold, minerals, oil and agricultural products.
Outside Forces
The clash between these corrupt leaders was, in part, due to their touting for the support of the rival imperialist groups also seeking access to Sudan’s wealth and strategic location; US imperialism, and its European allies, facing off against China and Russia, plus the involvement of regional powers like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, UAE, Egypt and Iran. They have all meddled in Sudan. According to the New York Times, the UAE is covertly shipping weapons to the RSF.
In fact, Sudan is itself only part of an arc of crisis extending westwards across the Sahel region, including Chad, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. These states have seen military coups, resulting in the ousting of French semi-colonial domination, often with the involvement of Russia, militarily, and China with finance and trade. Eastward it stretches to the states of the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa.
There, too, states are wracked with conflict and rivalry. Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somaliland and Somalia have all attracted, or sought, the aid of the super-rich rentier states of the Arabian peninsula. In addition, of course, the Houthis in Yemen are intervening in the Gaza war. These states are strategically located near or on the Bab el-Mandab Strait, which links the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea, and thence to the Suez Canal. Some 20 percent of the world’s container shipping passes through this choke point.
Crucial Lessons
To varying degrees, all these developments are the result of the defeat of the Sudanese democratic revolution or, rather, its failure to break the power of the rival Sudanese warlords and advance towards working class power.
In late 2018 and into 2019, the world watched in admiration as a mass uprising, involving students, workers and women, challenged the military-Islamist party regime of President Omar al-Bashir who had been in power for thirty years. The protests were organised at the level of the street by youth-led neighbourhood resistance committees. In April, al-Bashir was ousted by the military. On 21 April 2019, it was Abdel Fattah al-Burhan who announced a Transitional Military Council “complementary to the uprising and the revolution” and promised that it was “committed to handing over power to the people”. This of course was a brazen lie.
The rest of the year was marked by mass demonstrations alternating with negotiations with the political parties. In October 2019, a civilian government headed by Abdalla Hamduk was established. It was clear, however, that this was still under the tutelage of al- Burhan. An uneasy dual power dragged on for two years, during which Hamduk wore out his popular support by imposing economic reforms dictated by Sudan’s foreign creditors. He eventually resigned in January 2022, and this left the military back in power until the split between the RSF and the SAF.
In an article written four years ago, we drew the lesson of the Arab Spring revolutions, particularly the biggest of them all, in Egypt. There, because the military high command, under Abdel Fattah El Sisi, retained its power over the rank and file of the army, the coup against the elected Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi, saw the rapid reimposition of a military dictatorship, as bad as, or worse than, that of Hosni Mubarak.
We said: “Sudanese revolutionaries will doubtless be thinking of the fate of the Arab Spring of 2011 in Egypt, Syria, Yemen, and Libya where, despite the courage of the young revolutionaries, their movements were crushed by a brutal return of the old regime. As long as the army high command, the Islamist parties, and the state bureaucracy remain intact, even if their present leaders step down or step aside, the danger of counterrevolution will remain. The only answer is a revolution that goes all the way, breaks up the repressive power of the state, takes control of the economy from the corrupt capitalist class and puts power in the hands of working people.”
In Sudan, the brutal civil war is the result of an incomplete revolution, confirming once again the word of the French Jacobin Louis Saint-Just, “those who make revolution halfway only dig their own graves”. In the hard conditions of civil war and whatever reactionary deal the foreign powers impose on the warring parties, Sudanese revolutionaries need to learn the lessons of the past years and embody them in a programme and a party.
These lessons include the enormous danger of leaving the military intact, that is, in Leninist terms, of not “smashing the bureaucratic military state machine” but also of the fatal Stalinist Popular Front strategy of alliance with, and subordination to, bourgeois and petty bourgeois forces. Working class leadership, even during what starts as a ‘democratic’ revolution, is the only way to achieve even its democratic goals and to do this the revolution must become permanent, that is, move on to establishing working class power and socialist tasks.