By Joe Gill
There is a longstanding joke about Sudanese politics: that it changes every week but if you come back after ten years it is exactly the same.
Sudan’s civic revolutionaries have a long and proud history of resistance, dating back to uprisings in 1964 and 1985. However when the movement against the dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir that began in late 2018 achieved its immediate goals in April 2019 and Bashir fell after 30 years in power, it was ill prepared for the state power that suddenly fell within its grasp.
Sudan’s Unfinished Democracy is an authoritative, elegantly written and insightful analysis of the recent period of protest and change that, like previous such episodes, has seen a standoff between the military and the grassroots opposition, which has brought together many exiled activists from the diaspora using their networks and skills to aid the civic resistance.
As the authors explain, Sudan’s economic model went from colonial capitalist, to a developmental state run by technocrats in the 60s, to socialist central planning in the 70s, to an Islamist model in the late 80s, then back to unbridled capitalism in the 2000s.
Sudan’s oil boom from 1999 to 2012 enriched a few and fuelled an elite dream of Sudan becoming a petro state, but this model was cut short by the vote of South Sudan for independence in 2011. The western edge of Khartoum, under the Al-Mogran Development Project, transformed into a mini Dubai with glittering skyscrapers for banks and oil companies.
Then Sudan struck gold, drawing hundreds of thousands of artisanal miners from rural areas, young men who abandoned farming for the chance of riches.
The book addresses the complexities of a state which contained within it a metropolitan centre and marginalised and exploited peripheries inherited from the colonial era. Both elite alliances under Bashir, and the revolutionary forces contained this tension and division within them.
Many of the class, race and gender divisions in Sudan were subtly replicated in the opposition camp and the mass sit-ins of 2019.
Women’s major presence in the street during the protests gave prominence to their voices and testimonies, yet this failed to translate into political influence during the negotiations that gave birth to the transitional authority. Despite women making up to 60% of protesters, there were almost none in the leadership of the opposition Sudan Professional Association and Freedom Forces Coalition, the authors point out.
In the recent uprising and counter-revolution, the forces of the periphery, including the armed rebel groups such as the Justice and Equality Movement and Sudan Revolutionary Front, and the pro-government militia RSF, played critical roles in the political drama.
As a former UN economist, Hamdok’s 18 months in office saw him outmanoeuvred by the ruthless transactional actors in the military and old parties, who had the cash and the guns.
Hamdok hoped that the mass civic movement would prevent Sudan reverting to dictatorship, as happened in Egypt after its 2011 uprising: “We have well entrenched resilient political parties that make it different from the other [Arab Spring] nations. And I think more than that we have this public opinion, public movement which are there to guard it. This will help us keep the flame.”
He said this in June 2020 – a year later things looked very different. His removal of subsidies on fuel and food in December 2019 in order to balance the books and satisfy international funders sparked opposition from communists and Baathists.
Hamdok was hoping for quick aid from the US and financial institutions to pay for his plan, but the US wanted to see results before it put its money in.
Sudan had to pay out $335m for victims of terror attacks that Sudan was held responsible for in the Bashir era. Grudgingly Hamdok agreed to pay in order to remove Sudan from the US terror list.
President Trump wanted Sudan to recognise Israel. His Secretary of State Mike Pompeo briefly visited Khartoum in a disastrous visit when his security detail manhandled senior officials in the civilian cabinet which left them fuming. The normalisation deal was agreed with military chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, but the civilian forces voiced opposition.
A key figure in the post-Bashir military leadership was Hemedti, Burhan’s deputy and rival, a former RSF militia leader from Darfur, who had grown rich off the back of the gold boom and the Yemen war.
The militia-based counter insurgency in Darfur under Bashir had created a “monstrous instrument that grew to control its creator. Ultimately Hemedti was Brutus to al-Bashir’s Caesar.”
The RSF played an important role in the Yemen conflict, which was highly lucrative for militia commanders – Hemeti received the fighters’ salaries in hard currency and paid soldiers in Sudanese pounds, providing him and other militia leaders with personal profits.
Saudi and Emirates recruiters cooperated with RSF commanders to hire individual militiamen from Darfur who were the largest force of troops serving in the Saudi-led coalition.
Sudan also kept ties with Turkey and Qatar. Both countries provided direct investment such as Turkish rehabilitation of port Suakin, However Hemeti made the bet that the anti-Islamist powers in the region, led by the UAE and Saudi Arabia, were going to be the winners, and so he broke with Bashir’s balancing act between the two camps.
Army chief Al-Burhan was the face of the deep state in the eyes of the protesters, although it was Hemeti who signed the constitutional declaration with civilian leaders in August 2019, waving it over his head upside down. It was a bad omen of things to come.
Hemeti handed over his gold mines to the government and relinquished influence at the Central bank. But the anti corruption agenda – parallel military and militia budgets were a major target – became a vexed issue that ultimately brought down the civilian government in late 2021.
The Army and RSF were busy taking over the semi secret mechanisms of control inherited from Sudan’s intelligence agency, NISS, including the agency’s shadowy business empire.
After an assassination attempt against him, Hamdok said: ‘This is a revolution, we lost some of the most talented young people during the uprising and I cannot say that I am any more valuable than those people.’
Disputes within Sudan’s left were, say the authors, a throwback to the 60s, with some venerable figures still important within the civilian resistance. Communists and other leftists took over the SPA after the signing of the constitutional declaration, opposing the “opportunist” and “pragmatic” faction that made deals with the military.
Neighbourhood committees – an estimated 700 local committees, and 3,000 across country – were the torch carriers of the revolutionary spirit. This new “anti-structure” was not formalised, a fleeting vision of a new social contract where different classes and national groups were able to unite.
Meanwhile the National Umma Party followed a tradition it had adopted in 1964 and 1985 of seeking to prevent further popular mobilisation by striking a deal with the military. Its venerable leader Sadiq al Mahdi even invited Hemeti to join the party.
After the October 2021 coup led by army chief al-Burhan, is there any hope?
One factor that makes a conservative takeover in Sudan unlikely is that 60 percent of sudanese are below the age of 24 and the median age is just 20. The majority of them are not wedded to the pragmatism of the old political parties and have built their own organisations like Shabab al-Thawra (Revolutionary Youth), formed at the sit in at the military headquarters.
Even the National Ummah party youth wing opposed the party leadership’s conciliation toward the military.
“The dominant factor unifying the civilian leadership of the popular uprisings from 1964 to 2019 has been a shared commitment to a civic ideal and rejection of authoritarianism. Sudan’s revolutionaries were united enough to defeat military but broke up over their different visions of Sudanese society,” say the authors.
For his coup, Burhan needed foreign support and he got backing from Egypt’s Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Israel, but the US Biden administration warned him that he would lose US aid if he did not return to a civilian transition. His position is still tenuous.
For the resistance committees, there is no turning back to 2019; any idea of reaching a deal with the military, following its massacres and betrayals, is a non-starter. The civilians on the streets have made their demand clear: “a fully civilian government to be set up immediately to take the country out of the crisis.”
Time will tell if Sudan can break with the cycles of the past, and forge a new era. “As the Sudanese like to say, when God created their country, he laughed.”
Sudan’s Unfinished Democracy: the Promise and betrayal of a people’s revolution by Willow Berridge, Justin Lynch, Raga Makawi, Alex de Waal. Published by Hurst
