Dilemma of Khartoum and the predicament of youth
by Gaffar Mohammud Saeneen
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What a dilemma: the war in Khartoum and the predicament of many youths whose families might have once upon a time suffered excesses from the Sudanese military!
The Sudanese armed forces face an existential threat as they fight off one of their unsavoury creations in the form of a tribal militia which started as a counterinsurgency tool and ended up as a competitor; the so-called Rapid Support Forces(RSF)! This situation creates a very difficult dilemma for a category of Sudanese citizens who have sincere loyalty to the country but have once suffered extreme injustices and excessive brutality at the hands of the army of the nation when it violated the right to life for some members of their families, including their fathers when the same military extrajudicially liquidated them.
Now that the army is facing the militia it used as a tool for violations of human rights, and as that tribal militia is an existential threat to the country, the dilemma for the sons of the victims of the army excesses is whether to support that same army to ward off these machinations by the tribal militia to save the country from disintegration or just watch over its demise?
A personal opinion article from the perspective of the victim of the Sudanese army
Before I answer the question posed in the title of my article, I want to bring forward some missing facts to non-Sudanese readers and observers interested in Sudanese political affairs. I do this to shed some light on the reality of the political division in light of the current war. Some called this a war of two greedy generals vying for power.
The first fact is that the Sudanese people, like any other people, are highly politicised and have become very much interested in politics with a great degree of interest on a daily basis. During the past thirty years of the rule of the ousted regime of Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese people have been turned into fuel that the political elite often uses to achieve their goals, agendas and strategic ends. Thus, the Sudanese people, like its bitterly divided elite, have become politically divided, and their political mood is often driven by public opinion, which is propagated and promoted by the activists through social media outlets according to events and aspirations.
Pulling off the carpet from under the feet of the Sudanese elite
The protests of September 2013, which were brutally suppressed by the security apparatus of the former regime of al-Bashir, were a turning point and clear cut-off between the old and the new political elite who continued to dominate the national political arena on their own and the emergence of a new, and young energetic generation who were fed up by the inaction, complicity and duplicity of Sudanese elite. This new vibrant youth generation, who emerged with heavy weight in the Sudanese political arena after the September 2013 revolution, had a completely different opinion and a contradictory perception to that of the older elite, which strives for make-up and restoration instead of radical change that aspires by the new. These discrepancies, the differences in political opinions and sharp disagreements of future perceptions between the old political club, which is represented by the traditional political parties, with their allies of a new club, which are represented by the armed movements on one side, and the newly emerged generation that stems from the platform of independence is the beginning of the inevitable and deferred conflict, whose features appears five years later in the epic of December 2018’s revolution.
The missing fact
The missing fact is that the December 2018’s revolution was initially sparked from the beginning, passing through the sit-in at the general military headquarter which had shaken the throne of Omar alBashir’s regime was led by the newly emerged youth groups who were either independent or fallen out of the traditional political parties /armed movements but the fruits of the hard-fought battle was eventually hijacked in broad daylight by the elite of political parties and the armed movements to cut off the road of revolution. The beginning of the problems. The first constitutional document of 2019, which was signed with the pressure and blessing of regional and international powers between the Forces for Freedom and Change on the one hand and the Sudanese Transitional Military Council led by the two generals who are now fighting each other, is the straw that broke the camel’s back between the real stakeholders, which is represented by the youth of revolution and their future aspirations and the political entities who are desperately seeking and searching for the benefits from the revolution itself to strengthen their shrinking positions.
The fundamental disagreement
The fundamental disagreement at the time was not in the defective constitutional document itself, as much as the debate was in the principle of sitting with the two generals of the Military Council who betrayed the revolution by dismantling the sit-in and barbarically killing hundreds of peaceful protesters in front of the Sudanese army’s headquarter on the morning of June 3, 2019. But, unfortunately, the regional and international community did not only pay much attention to the seriousness of the matter at the time but instead ignored the frustration of the real stakeholders, the grief of youth who lost their comrades in the massacre of the sit-in, and the roaring of the majority of Sudanese who have lounged for freedom, justice and peace for so long, but rather they shamelessly sought to exert pressure on the Sudanese political parties to sit with down the military council to reach compromise solutions that didn’t live up its expectations of mere two years of the transitional period.
Where is the dispute now over the ongoing war, and where does the silent majority of Sudanese stand in this war?
In this war, although we, the Sudanese, are mere pawns moved by a regional and international force according to their best interests, the truth is that we are still bitterly divided into two discordant camps, each of which sees the other on the wrong side of the argument.
Pro Military camp:
Supporters of the army camp are a segment in which you find the vast majority of the Sudanese people from various parts of Sudan. Despite their different reasons, the common denominator that binds them lies in the long-standing grievance that would almost have been addressed had it not been for the complexity of the scene that resulted from the entry of the Rapid Support Forces into the political arena from the beginning. Within this most significant segment of supporters of the army in its war against the RSF, one can see many victims of all kinds of prolonged injustices from the horror of torture in ghost houses, burning villages in peripheries such as Darfur, the Nuba Mountains and the Blue Nile and victims of long lists of other unforgivable crimes that the leaders of the Sudanese army committed in the past thirty-two years. This larger segment which constitutes the vast majority that supports the army today in their war against the Rapid Support Forces, are not only fully aware of the shameful history of the Sudanese army, which was ruined and distortions by the Islamist during the past 32 years but also firmly believe that Sudan’s army institution cannot be reformed without a radical change that takes off from the ground of zero impunity which will hold everyone accountable for their crimes. The general conviction of this segment is that this distorted institution (the Sudanese army) cannot be reformed to reflect its true identity nor be désinfected by the elements of Islamist and politicization in the light of the presence of other paramilitary groups such as the Rapid Support Forces in the arena. This large segment of the Sudanese people, led by independent youth, social activists and political cadres detached from traditional political parties and other entities, are also deeply suspicious of the credibility of the Rapid Support Forces and their leader towards a meaningful democratic transition in Sudan.
Pro RSF camp :
Supporters of the Rapid Support Forces and its leader, Hemetti, constitute a segment of the people that does not exceed 2%. All those who support him, the RSF, either stem from the ethnic background that the RSF leader belongs to or selfish material interests link them.
Pro No to War:
These are just supporters affiliated with political parties allied in the Freedom and Change-Central, entities from the armed movements that signed the Juba Peace Agreement and allied parties in the so-called Democratic Bloc. All of these do not represent the aspirations of the Sudanese people embodied in the slogans of the glorious December 2018’s Revolution. On the contrary, this segment most of them represents the people centre and the Khartoumians, who have never tasted the bitterness of war and imagined the brutality of the Janjaweed whom they have contributed to creating are calling the calls of ( No to War) but very little is being heard by a wider population.
In conclusion, where do I stand in this absurd war that taking place between the Sudanese army, whose hands are stained with the blood of its people and the blood of my father, and the Janjaweed militias who crossed many borders to come and kill tens of people from my and hundreds of other of my relatives? I do not see a place for neutrality in this damned war that is taking place in Sudan. Either it will be with the Sudanese army whose hands are stained with the blood of my people and whose will of its peak has been hijacked by a handful of cells of the National Islamic Front, or it will be with militias of cross-border led by members of one family who have no affiliation to the land of Sudan nor loyalty to its generous people who one day honoured them with hospitality. No matter how much we disagree with the Islamists’ failure, corruption, brutality, injustice, tyranny and hatred of democracy, we cannot strip them of their Sudanese identity. Still, the RSF will remain the Janjaweed brought hordes of mercenaries from across borders to insult the dignity of my people.