The diplomatic gloves came off in Port Sudan last month as General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan’s regime lashed out at the EU Council, accusing it of promoting a ceasefire as a means of enabling the Rapid Support Forces to regroup, again effectively ruling out any negotiation with the RSF.
It is a standard propaganda device to accuse the other party of being guilty of what you yourself are doing, and the Sudanese Armed Forces’ foreign affairs machine did exactly that, accusing the Council of taking an unfortunate approach…prioritizing their own interests over achieving just peace. A perfect example of the pot calling the kettle black.
The Council has called for constructive engagement in negotiations towards an immediate ceasefire and a credible, inclusive peace mediation process, leading to a sustained cessation of hostilities. But it is hard to see how anything of that nature is possible without involving the other principal combatant. Once again, this demonstrates that Burhan and his Islamist-backed Sudanese Armed Forces simply have no intention of allowing that to happen.
Instead, the SAF fall back constantly to their roadmap, which would require the RSF to be disarmed and neatly confined to camps as a prelude to their inclusion in peace talks. That’s not a ceasefire; it’s simply surrender and internment (if not extermination) and is so improbable a proposition as to make the SAF regime’s plan a non-starter and therefore, as is generally suspected, confirmation that they have no intention of negotiating a peace.
The SAF’s foreign ministry statement raged bitterly against the RSF and against the EU, accusing the latter of double standards and recycling narratives promoted by groups aligned with it.
Quite where this leaves the Quad initiative, which for the past four months has been the only negotiating forum that has appeared to be anything more than moribund, is anyone’s guess. Everyone seems to agree on the need for a ceasefire and a move to negotiations that eventuate in a civilian-led administration. But there is no unanimity, or at least there is hedging, on the conditions under which the RSF would be at the table or whether it should be there at all. And that, in practical terms, is the sine qua non.
The EU seems to concede that the RSF must have a place at the table. The Council says it is down to the SAF and the RSF to end the conflict and calls for constructive engagement, meaning, presumably, that the two parties need to sit down and talk. But the SAF won’t have it, and it continues to have the moral support of, inter alia, an Africa bloc locked into an anti-colonial posture in which sovereignty (a.k.a. ‘don’t interfere in our domestic affairs’) is a sacred geopolitical cow. Meanwhile, it’s the Quad, rather than the EU, that must contend with competing but undeniably legitimate geo-strategic interests and priorities that make it harder to put the squeeze on Burhan and his Islamists.
While the Quad wrestles to find that joint resolve on some means of pushing Burhan and his intransigent, hegemonic Islamists into that corner, this devastating conflict rages, and Sudan remains at perilous risk of being permanently splintered, while its people starve in refugee camps.
But if there is one lesson from the Gaza hostage/pullback deal in October, it is that breaking the deadlock took a serious threat, either of brute force against one combatant or of a denial of weapons and money to the other, to get the warring parties around a table and do a deal.
Does anyone have quite that big a stick to wield? General Burhan, his supporters, and the entire regiment of Bashir-republic revanchists behind him, who remain steadfastly committed to their ambitions for an Islamist-militarist state in which civilians do what they’re told, will be praying fervently the answer to that is no. Because, to coin their own accusations against the EU, they will always prioritize their own interests over achieving a just peace.
