No end in sight for war in Sudan despite relative lull in fighting
More than 10 months after it began, the war in Sudan has turned into a low-intensity conflict, with both warring sides seemingly adamant to fight on and shunning all efforts at mediation.
Meanwhile, analysts say the relative lull in fighting has not stopped the conflict between the army and the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary from deepening ethnic divisions in the vast Afro-Arab nation.
“The RSF employs narratives about marginalisation and the grip on power by Arabised northern Sudanese, omitting the fact that its own nucleus is Arab Sudanese,” analyst Osman Al Mirghani told The National.
Post-colonial Sudan has been torn apart by decades of religious, ethnic and tribal division.
The latest bout of civil strife began in April last year, when simmering tension between the army and the RSF over the details of the nation’s democratic transition boiled over into violence.
The fighting, mostly taking place in the capital Khartoum, has displaced about eight million people so far and given rise to a major humanitarian crisis.
There are no precise numbers for the dead or injured. One estimate often cited for the death toll is 10,000, but the actual number is believed to be considerably higher.
A series of ceasefires mediated by the US and Saudi Arabia in the early days of the war did not endure.
Similarly, attempts to end the war by regional groupings and Sudan’s neighbours have come to nothing.
Significantly, both the army and the RSF have so far failed to gain a definite edge on the battlefield, although the paramilitary has been in near total control of Khartoum and made major inroads south and west of the capital.
In recent days, the army has regained control of areas in Khartoum’s twin cities of Omdurman and Bahri.
“There will be no peace until the mutiny is defeated,” army chief Gen Abdel Fattah Al Burhan said last week.
“The war must end before there can be a political process,” he added, alluding to a recent bid by politicians to arrange a meeting between him and his one-time ally, RSF commander Gen Mohamed Dagalo, to resolve their differences.
Gen Al Burhan and Gen Dagalo staged a joint military takeover in October 2021 that is widely viewed to have caused the war to break out 18 months later.
The takeover, which drew punitive measures from the West, created a security vacuum in Sudan’s outlying regions and reopened latent ethnic and tribal fissures.
Facing a shortage of manpower, the army is suspected to have recruited thousands of fighters from militias linked to the toppled regime of Omar Al Bashir.
Their alleged enlistment gave the RSF a narrative rooted in the notion that it is fighting remnants of the hated Al Bashir regime in a bid to restore the nation’s democratic transition.
The RSF also claims it is fighting to break the monopoly on political power of the Arabised north of Sudan and empower the country’s marginalised regions, such as Darfur and Kordofan.
But since the conflict began the paramilitary and allied groups have faced allegations of killing hundreds of unarmed civilians in Darfur who belong to an ethnic African community, the Masalit.
The army is using Sudan’s ethnic mosaic to its own advantage.
Its drive to recruit able-bodied men to fight the RSF is restricted to areas where Arabised Sudanese are the dominant demographic, such as the country’s north and areas to the south of the capital, while avoiding outlying regions where non-Arab communities form a large segment of the population.
“The army plays the same cards as those of the RSF,” said Mr Al Mirghani.
“The conflict is essentially political and not societal, but the warring parties use ethnic faultlines to the detriment of the people.”
The army’s drive to recruit civilians significantly accelerated after the RSF captured Wad Medani, a city south of Khartoum that sits in Al Gezira region, the breadbasket of the stricken country, whose produce is vital to feeding the country and maintaining its exports.
The fall of the city led to the mass displacement of its residents, who either fled the country or sought refuge elsewhere in Sudan.
It also sent shock waves across regions north and south of the capital, as well as eastern regions, with many taking up arms in anticipation of an RSF attack.
“For nearly a year now, accounts coming out of Sudan have been of death, suffering and despair,” UN human rights chief Volker Turk said.