The original founders of the Sudanese tragedy

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If we review the basic stations in modern Sudanese history, we come across a rich background for understanding the current tragedy. There is a combination of exceptional, multi-level fragmentation, and an exceptional inability to narrow that fragmentation through a state that transforms society, even gradually, into a national political community.

In terms of time, the British rule played a founding role in two aspects: In September 1898, it unified administratively that huge geographical area after defeating the Mahdis, so it exaggerated the unification in opposition to the reputation of colonialism as being absolutely fragmentary. On the other hand, the unification of Sudan was tinged with disintegration, which fueled an already huge disparity. Britain followed a “southern policy” that limits the influence of the Arab and Muslim north on the south, and encourages Christian evangelization there. But after World War II, and with British preparations to withdraw from the colonies, any “southern policy” was no longer implemented, and the principle of simple integration with the North was adopted. This is what the southerners responded to, in 1955, with their first armed rebellion that opened the first civil war.

However, the largest roles in the tragedy were played by Sudanese leaders who, over decades of independence, were able to narrow the disparity, whether in its original form or with a British addition. But what happened was exactly the opposite, while the most prominent crimes were committed by the army generals through their rapid impatience with the faltering political processes, and their equation between an attainable salvation and an increasingly inflated subjective “ego.”

The first of these was Ibrahim Abboud. In 1956, the country gained independence with its Muslim north, which was advanced in education and connections to administrative work, and its traditionally backward south, which embraced Christianity and a few local religions. But independence implicitly expressed a compromise between two northern movements that distributed independence activity: Al-Mahdi, who represented local patriotism and was expressed as the “Umma Party,” and Al-Khatami, who called for union with Egypt and was represented by the “National Union Party.”

Between North-South and Mahdia-Khatmiyya, politics seemed a difficult task in Sudan. Thus, two years after independence, Abboud proposed the imagined solution with a military coup that kept him in power until 1964.

The second was Jaafar Numeiri, who carried out his coup in 1969, taking advantage of the confusion and confusion of political life. This is because the “October Revolution,” which overthrew Abboud, established a civil rule with a succession of unstable coalition governments, due to the weakness of consensus on the south, the constitution, and the relationship of religion to the state. But in 1972, Numeiri reached the Addis Ababa Agreement with the southerners, which the hasty people thought would end the civil war. In 1977, the “national reconciliation” with the unified opposition, which Numeiri wanted, was the complete and absolute integration of the opposition into his regime.

The latter's authoritarian tendencies began to accelerate: in 1983, he canceled the Addis Ababa Agreement and imposed Islamic Sharia laws, and the second civil war broke out in the south. He had paved the way for Sharia by taking measures, the most important of which was naming the Islamic leader Hassan al-Turabi, since 1979, as Public Prosecutor, which demonstrated leniency towards Islamists infiltrating the state apparatus and its bureaucracy.

As for those who thought that there were solid intellectual and political loyalties in the matter, they were alarmed that the officer, who began his career as a Nasserist and an ally of the communists, turned away from Nasserism after Abdel Nasser’s death, and eliminated the largest Arab communist parties in the wake of Hashim al-Atta’s coup in 1971.

As for the third, the longest-reigning and most lethal in the country, was Omar al-Bashir, supported by the “Islamic Front” and its Turabi leader. He also benefited from the missteps of a civilian rule that only lasted three years, and it was the last parliamentary experience in the country. In 1989, Al-Bashir turned and remained in power for thirty years, during which he established Osama bin Laden in Sudan. Instead of solving the problem of the South, the problem of the West worsened and, in 2003, the Darfur War broke out. When Al-Bashir recognized the South’s right to self-determination, which led to its independence in 2011, he devoted himself to the West’s war and expanded its scope and violations to the point that, in 2009, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against him.

Like Nimeiry before him, in the late nineties, Al-Bashir rebelled against his teacher Al-Turabi, dismissed him from his position and then arrested him, declaring that the Islamist sky could not accommodate two stars.

In 2019, the “military council” overthrew Al-Bashir after popular protests sparked by an economic collapse. Since then, there have been several attempts for a “democratic transition” that did not happen. What happened was the outbreak of bloody conflict, in 2023. Just as the war against the South was tinged with racist tendencies, the same was repeated in the war against the West, led by the “Rapid Support Forces,” an offshoot of the notorious “Janjaweed,” which, ironically, was created by the Bashir regime in 2013.

As for the great war, which broke out in 2023 and is still ongoing, it resulted in the displacement of about 9 million Sudanese within their country, and the asylum of about 4 million outside it. The number of those killed in that war and the resulting deaths ranges between 60 and 150 thousand, noting that many deaths were not recorded due to the inability to reach their remote areas.

Quoted from "Asharq Al-Awsat"