Peace on sale: Sudan’s mediation crisis

By Adila Gaafar

On Saturday, July 6th, 2024, Egypt hosted an ‘end to the war’ meeting of the Sudanese Political and Civic Forces, which came to be dubbed the Cairo Conference. The event featured notable civil society and political figures at the center of the Sudanese political scene since Al Bashir’s removal in 2019. At the crowd’s helm is technocrat and international civil servant turned Prime Minister Abdullah Hamdok. The event is one of many attempts to bring together Sudanese stakeholders to end the ongoing war in Sudan. Egypt sponsored humanitarian access talks with donors, civil society, and local actors in November 2023. Despite Egypt’s mediation, political breakthroughs and humanitarian access remain untenable.

In April 2023, a disagreement between Sudan’s two top generals, Abdel Fatah Burhan, Commander General of the Sudanese Armed Forces, and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo – Nicknamed Hemedti – leader of the Rapid Defence Force (RSF) militia, quickly escalated into an all-out war. The army and the militia troops exchanged deadly fire on the streets of Khartoum before turning almost all of Sudan’s capital cities into war zones. Both belligerents used advanced armament in their urban warfare. The RSF deployed surfaces to air missiles and RBG-6CALs while driving – through the city – their machine gun-fitted pickup trucks supplied by the UAE and Russia’s Wagner group. The army responded with indiscriminate air bombardments. Both violated international law by turning residential areas into war zones and using the unarmed public as human shields. The hostilities induced waves of displacement as terrorized populations fled to safety. According to humanitarian figures, Sudan is now the world’s worst and largest displacement crisis; almost 8 million people out of a population of 40 million are displaced, and half a million of them escaped to Egypt.

In the 16 months since the war broke out, multiple mediation fronts sought to sponsor peace negotiations between the army and the RSF. The leading platform, Jeddah, established in May 2023, is one of many but remains the officially endorsed mechanism by the US. Despite international backing, Jeddah failed to facilitate a breakthrough in peace talks. The Jeddah agenda is inconsistent with the preconditions it produced. Mediation and peace talks tend to focus on the symptoms of the conflict, in the case of the Sudan 2023 war; a cease-fire, humanitarian access and improving communication measures to help build towards the next steps. The narrow set of objectives is designed to preclude venturing into political issues out of fear of complicating the crisis further. The army’s preconditions for implementing the ceasefire arrangement are conditioned upon the unconditional withdrawal of the militia from the capital and exiting people’s homes. The latter is not just a successful war strategy by the militia but a contentious spillover from the pre-war security sector reform agenda, essentially one of many political disputes between the army and the militia that led to the war. It’s a typical Catch-22 situation.

As Jeddah declined, stakeholders and policymakers sought to test alternative mediation mechanisms in hopes one would serve as the basis for a new peace project. Between April 2023 and July 2024, several multilateral and bilateral initiatives were set up to intervene to stop the war in Sudan, to no avail. One was through IGAD, the dominant sub-regional organization, prompted by Kenya’s Ruto’s newfound role as a regional mediator. Having intervened to mediate a peaceful end to the South Sudanese war, the forum retained enough experience to institute a political dialogue between the two belligerents. However, Ruto’s rapprochement with General Daglo at the behest of the Emirates caused the army to withdraw from talks as it did in Jeddah, citing bias on the part of the mediating partner. In both cases, meddling accusations towards the Gulf and claims it is trying to influence the process through political pay-outs to mediation parties struggling to foot their food bill are not unfounded. The exclusive nature of the sub-regional forum prompted countries like Egypt and Chad, both not members of the body but at higher risk of cross-border rising insecurity, to propose a parallel ‘Neighbouring Countries Initiative’. The July 2024 Cairo summit aimed to develop ‘effective mechanisms’ with neighboring countries and support other international and regional efforts to resolve the escalating conflict. The use of effective in their published communique alludes to the failure of previous processes without delving into the political crisis behind it. In the meantime, the African Union in Addis Ababa hosted multiple side meetings with various civil actors to facilitate exploratory talks on the most appropriate type of mechanism, agenda, and participants. The multiplicity of mechanisms and the politics underpinning their creation, most of the time a reactionary response to exclusion by member states and influential groups, raises concerns about the consequences of forum shopping on the viability of peace talks.

The history of peace mediation in Sudan is one of divisive politics and fracturing of alliances. Multiple war fronts in Sudan between the state and groups with unresolved grievances propelled wealth and power sharing as a governance alternative to addressing underdevelopment and equitable resource distribution. Under the tenure of Al Bashir in the early 2000s, the Islamists sought to buy the loyalties of opposition and warning groups by offering them a piece of the pie. The process by which these agreements were reached was highly clandestine and militarised. Conducted behind closed doors in the absence of any parliamentary oversight or civic representation, peace dividends rewarded the most violent. The larger the armed group, the bigger its seat at the table. The 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) instituted a legacy of bargaining as a base for peace-making. Peace wasn’t necessarily the end of violence, but the best deal negotiators strike to reshuffle the balance of power for the state’s benefit or at least to buy it more time. In the case of South Sudan, the political machinations came to an end with the 2011 secession.

20 years after the CPA, the ‘peace for a price’ handbook has returned to haunt the 2023 war mediation process. The multiplicity of actors, meeting capitals, international and regional backers, and overlapping agendas reinforces the time-old practice of transactional politics dictating whose peace is to be. Forum shopping is linked to donor funding. You pick your backer and negotiate a deal that best alleviates your standing in the post-war political project. Financiers of political processes, also known more agreeably as donors, sponsor the process to influence the outcome. The UAE has learned, much to the Sudanese’s dismay, that war patrons can invest as lucratively in peace, influencing the political process at both ends: diplomatically and on the battlefield. The political marketplace of the post-Bashir era has expanded beyond armed actors and state politicians to include technocrats, civilians, civic actors, and independents, as is the case with Taqadum.

When I was asked to write this piece, the task was to present the July 2024 Cairo conference to the lay Egyptian reader. Who the participants are, who was absent and why, and what that means for agenda formulation. While all these are crucial questions, presenting the Cairo conference in separation from the larger context of failed mediations and forum shopping precludes the politics behind deal brokerage and the advantage it gives to those with power, whether they are on a quest to achieve peace or not.

The Cairo conference was called in a highly contentious setup of regional competition over access to resources and the rise of militia violence aiding the forceful opening of economic frontiers. The Egyptian government plays host while contending with numerous internal economic and security concerns, which it needs to balance visa-vi neutralizing a growing security at its borders. For one, Egypt is a net importer of Sudanese raw materials, while the Sudanese market is a primary receiver of Egyptian manufactured goods. The Sudanese war has a negative effect on the Egyptian balance of trade especially the agriculture and livestock sectors. Geopolitically, the long-term tug of war between Egypt and Addis over Nile water shares and the dispute over the filling of the Renaissance Dam was mediated through Khartoum. Egypt’s hydropower agenda is at the risk of being caught between the triangulated war and peace mediation relation that has the UAE subduing both Egypt’s and Ethiopia’s foreign policy to its own economic domination agenda in the Red Sea. At home, the Gulf’s financial payouts keep the Egyptian economy at bay. When it comes to the Sudanese peace agenda, Egypt must tow a fine line between keeping its largest investor happy while firmly wrangling its interests abroad. Sudan is caught between the geopolitics of competition masquerading as peace facilitation.

The congratulatory statements following the proceedings of the Cairo conference suggest that some big breakthrough was achieved. But the war in Sudan rages on, famine is declared, and the conflict is rapidly developing an ethnic outlook. Overall, things today are much worse than before the successive mediation attempts kicked off more than a year ago. The Cairo conference presents itself as a revolution in inclusive mediation, promoting the participation of civic actors in a space usually reserved for armed belligerents. But the value of civic-ness in itself is not a marker for progressive or radical antiwar politics. In Sudan’s near and far history, civilian politicians emboldened by electoral representation pitfalls have contributed to the formation of the political marketplace and were instrumental in the weaponization of violence in the service of their agendas. Taqadum, the political alliance leading civic peace talks, is accused by the public of being bankrolled by the Gulf to serve as the political arm of the militia. Their history as revolution representatives during the 2019-2021 transition is also questionable. For many Sudanese, the civilians’ contribution to the peace processes in Cairo last month and Addis before that suffers from the same governance transgressions noted during their transitional tenure: lack of transparency, absent accountability, and disregard for the popular voice. Between Cairo, Addis, Jeddah, and Geneva, the retreat of the real politics behind the violence makes peace a distant possibility.