Just a few weeks ago, US diplomats suggested that Sudan was on the verge of reaching a breakthrough agreement to accelerate the transition from military dictatorship to full-fledged democracy, delivering the promise of a huge increase in income. country revolution in 2019.
Sudan has become a key test case in President Biden’s strategy core foreign policy goals of strengthening democracies around the world, in his view weakening corrupt leaders and allowing countries to stand stronger as bulwarks against Chinese, Russian influence and other autocratic powers.
But on April 23, the same American diplomats who had been involved in the negotiations in Sudan suddenly closed the embassy and flee from Khartoum on secret helicopter flights at night as the country descended into a spiral of civil war.
Biden administration officials and their partners are now fighting to get the two warring generals to comply with prolonged ceasefires and end hostilities, as foreign governments evacuate civilians in the context of fighting that left at least 528 people dead and more than 330,000 people displaced. The actual number is almost certainly much higher than the Sudanese government figure.
A pressing question at the heart of the crisis is whether the United States has miscalculated how difficult it is to introduce democracy in a country with a long history of military rule and the risks of negotiating. talk to the strong talk about democracy but never do it.
Critics say the Biden administration, rather than empowering civilian leaders, has prioritized working with the government. two enemy generalsGeneral Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, Sudan’s military chief and Lieutenant General Mohamed Hamdan, a paramilitary commander, even after they jointly staged a military coup in 2021.
Amgad Fareid Eltayeb, an adviser to Sudan’s ousted prime minister, Abdalla Hamdok, said senior US diplomats “made the mistake of pampering the generals, accepting their unreasonable demands and see them as born political actors.” “This feeds their lust for power and illusions about legitimacy.”
And some analysts asked whether US officials have a clear approach to carrying out Mr. Biden’s global push for democratic resiliency.
Violence in Sudan is creating exactly the kind of power vacuum that Biden’s aides had hoped to avoid. Wagner Corporation’s Russian mercenaries were among the players tried to fill the voidcurrent and former US officials say.
“If this war continues, there will be a great temptation for outside actors to say, ‘If these guys are going to fight to the death, we’d better go in there, because we’d rather go in there. let this guy, or this organization, win’,” said Jeffrey D. Feltman, a former US special envoy to the Horn of Africa who worked on negotiations on civil rules.
He added: “If you fail to achieve a ceasefire, you are not only causing misery for these 46 million people, but you are also at greater risk for outsiders starting to intensify the fighting by direct intervention.”
Mr. Hamdok said The civil war in Sudan will make the conflicts in Syria, Yemen and Libya like “a little play”.
The State Department and the White House declined to comment.
of the White House Africa strategy documentreleased in August, asserting that “by reaffirming that democracy offers clear benefits,” the United States can help limit the influence of “negative” outside states and groups. non-state, reducing the need for costly interventions and helping Africans define their own future.
For the United States, the effort to prevent a possible return of Sudan to autocracy is an unlikely role after decades in which the country has been largely known for its mass atrocities and was a hideout for terrorists, including Osama bin Laden, for almost 5 years in the 1990s. . In 1998, President Bill Clinton even ordered a missile attack on a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum that he said Al Qaeda had used to make chemical weapons. though that intelligence was later questioned.
It was not until October 2020, a year after the revolution, that President Donald J. Trump officially abolished the status of state sponsor of terrorism after Sudan normalized relations with Israel.
“Today, a great Sudanese is in power,” Trump said. “The new democracy is taking root.”
Feltman and current and former U.S. officials say pro-democracy must remain a cornerstone of U.S. policy in Sudan, given the aspirations expressed in the protests that led to the overthrow of the United States. dumped President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, a 30-year dictator in 2019. Congressional leaders are now calling on Mr. Biden and the United Nations appoint special envoy to Sudan.
The failures in Sudan led to other democratic frustrations in North Africa, including a military counter-revolution in neighboring Egypt a decade ago; nearly 10 years of political turmoil in Libya, another neighbor of Sudan, after the country’s dictator, Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, was ousted; and the recent return of a one-man dictatorship in Tunisia after a decade is the only country to emerge from the 2011 Arab Spring with a democratic government.
Al-Bashir’s downfall four years ago led to displays of joy from Sudanese, who hoped that democracy could take root in their country despite its failures in other parts of the world. elsewhere in the area. After several months of junta rule, Sudan’s military and civilian leaders signed a power-sharing agreement to form a transitional government led by Mr. top. The plan envisions elections after three years.
However, a council set up to help manage the transition is “a bit of a fig tree,” as it has more military members than civilian members, said Susan D. Page, former US ambassador to South Sudan and a professor at the University of Michigan, said. said in a post on her school’s website. Important civilian voices have been excluded, an issue that will linger in this year’s negotiations.
After the military coup in October 2021, the United States freeze $700 million in direct support to the Sudanese government and suspend debt forgiveness, while the World Bank and International Monetary Fund freeze $6 billion in immediate assistance and plan to write off $50 billion in debt. Other governments and organizations, including the African Development Bank, have taken similar steps.
Ned Price, a State Department spokesman at the time, said that “our entire relationship” with the Sudanese government could be reassessed unless the military restores the transitional government.
Even as rumors of a coup spread in October of that year, American officials warned General Hamdan that he would face “concrete consequences” if he took power, a former senior official said. American high said. But after the coup, Molly Phee, the department’s top Africa policy official, led American diplomats to try to work with the generals rather than confront them.
The US official declined to detail the proposed sanctions against General Hamdan but said they broadly target his personal assets, much of which is kept in the United Arab Emirates – a war chest that experts consider very important for building a military force has been liberated in the current war.
Pressure to punish the generals came from senior members of Congress. Senator Chris Coons, Delaware Democrat on the Subcommittee on African Affairs of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, co-wrote in an article Foreign Policy in February 2022 that the Biden administration should impose “a comprehensive set of sanctions against the coup leaders and their networks” to weaken their grip.
Speaking to reporters during a trip to East Africa with Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken in November 2021, a senior State Department official said the generals had indicated they were willing to re-share power force against civilians. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said of the negotiations, saying that withholding aid may not be enough to pressure the generals, and so the administration has appealed to their sense of a personal legacy. respectable, among other things.
Cameron Hudson, who served as chief of staff to successive US presidential envoys to Sudan, called that approach a mistake.
“They put too much faith in what these champions told them. “These people told us what we wanted to hear since they agreed to the civilian regime,” Hudson said, after al-Bashir was ousted. “The State Department has absolute confidence that we are on the cusp of a breakthrough deal.”
Mr. Hudson said Washington’s willingness to bargain with generals after the coup had the effect of legitimizing them.
He added that the US had also let Mr Hamdok down with the coup as bureaucratic inertia slowed the disbursement of economic aid, partly to show the interests of the civilian regime.
That makes Mr. Hamdok too vulnerable.
The coup left Mr. Feltman, the former envoy, feeling betrayed. The generals themselves assured him hours before they arrested Hamdok, he said, that they would not take power.
But even if the US did impose sanctions on them, “I’m not sure that would make much of a difference,” he said. “The two generals see this as a battle of survival. If you’re in a battle for survival, you may be annoyed by the sanctions, but that won’t stop them from chasing each other.”
The first foray after the coup came in December 2022, when the United Nations, the African Union and a regional bloc brokered an agreement to convert Sudan to civilian rule for several months.
But huge issues remain to be worked out, notably how quickly General Hamdan’s Rapid Support Force will be merged with the regular army and who will report to the civilian head of state. The job of bridging those differences lies largely with the dominant foreign powers in Sudan: the United States, Great Britain, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
Although Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are absolute monarchies, they claim to want democracy in Sudan.
But as the negotiations progressed, the gap between the two generals widened. Reinforcements from both camps began to advance into Khartoum.
In late March, American and British diplomats presented the generals with proposals to narrow their biggest differences. Instead, the plan seems to exacerbate tensions. Weeks later, on April 12, General Hamdan’s forces took control of an airbase 200 miles north of Khartoum, the first public sign that the years of diplomacy were culminating in war.
Three days later, the war began.
