From Garang to Hemetti: The repeating tragedy of a ‘New Sudan’

By Professor Medani El Shibly
Executive Director, Cognizance Centre for Strategic Studies

Was the choice of the name Tasis, meaning “Establishment”, as a civilian front for the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) merely a rhetorical gesture signalling a desire to shape a new reality? Or was it, in fact, a linguistic cover for an organised campaign of violence aimed at reconstructing society and power through displacement and extermination?

This is not a semantic game, but the key to understanding how violence is now deployed in Sudan, not as a defensive reaction or a chaotic breakdown, but as a deliberate foundational act. Violence today is being instrumentalised as a tool of “establishment,” not to build a pluralistic civic state, but to impose a new social and political order upon the ruins of the national state and civil society.

I. The logic of foundational violence

In its moral and civic sense, establishment implies dialogue, consensus, and institution-building, not guns and grenades. When “establishment” becomes militarised, violence ceases to be an instrument of war and becomes instead a method of social engineering. The objective is not simply to defeat an armed opponent, but to dismantle the social fabric itself: the forced displacement of populations, looting of resources, and the destruction of community-based networks of protection, all to replace them with new loyalties and demographic realities.

In this way, “Tasis” turns into a project of coercive reconfiguration, not reconstruction, a violent rewriting of who belongs, who rules, and who survives.

II. Are the atrocities in El Fasher an act of “establishing” the New Sudan?

Cities that fall to armed groups and subsequently witness systematic terror against civilians are not simply battlefields; they become laboratories of political experimentation. What is happening in El Fasher, as documented through numerous reports of killings, arrests, looting, and mass displacement, is not a field excess. It is part of a deliberate strategy to empty the city of its indigenous social forces and redistribute control along lines of military or ethnic allegiance.

Here, violence is not a consequence of war; it is the very logic of the war itself, a campaign not against an enemy army, but against the very idea of civil society, and against the possibility of a national centre that unites Sudanese citizens under a shared identity.

III. Why violent “Establishment” always fails

While violence may yield short-term tactical gains, it breeds chronic fragility: unending resistance, a war economy based on looting, and a legitimacy deficit both at home and abroad. The Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) under John Garang stands as the clearest evidence of this structural failure.

Armed struggle was once justified as a means to establish the “New Sudan.” Yet its ultimate outcome was the secession of the South, not the unification of Sudan on the principles of equality and citizenship. Worse still, the very weapon that was raised to establish a “New Sudan” continues to be wielded today by rival SPLM factions in South Sudan, each claiming to build its own “New South Sudan”. The result has been endless cycles of violence that have claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, without realising the original promise of justice or unity.

It is the same tragic paradox: when the gun becomes the philosophy of foundation, the ethical and political meaning of “establishment” is obliterated.

History now repeats itself in Darfur, where the same logic re-emerges under new banners. UN and humanitarian reports from El Fasher, Darfur, and Kordofan lay bare the gulf between the rhetoric of “establishment” and the reality of atrocity, between the slogan of protecting civilians and the practice of annihilating them.

IV. The illusion of “founding of the New Sudan” — from Garang to Hemetti

Beyond the moral and humanitarian catastrophe lies a deeper dilemma: what guarantees exist that Tasis Forces themselves will remain a unified bloc after the devastating war?

Experience in both Sudan and South Sudan suggests that every armed “foundational” project begins unified and ends fragmented. The SPLA, once united under Garang’s vision of the “New Sudan,” eventually splintered into dozens of factions and militias scattered across two countries.

There is nothing in the composition of Tasis Forces that would prevent a similar fate. It is a coalition bound by temporary expediency, not shared nationhood, an amalgam of disparate identities, ideologies, and ambitions.

What, for example, guarantees that Abdel Aziz al-Hilu’s movement, with its distinct ideological, social, and ethnic orientation, will not break away from Ta’sees in the future, given the profound structural differences between his forces and the RSF?

If the “New Sudan” is to emerge from the womb of such an alliance, history warns that this womb gives birth not to nations but to more armed factions, each seeking its own “New Sudan.”

V. The deep structure of violence

Foundational violence is not random chaos; it rests on a coherent architecture of coercion. Its instruments include:

• Semi-official armed networks linked to economic and political interests;
• A parallel war economy based on looting and illicit trade;
• Tactical alliances with regional and local actors; and
• Discriminatory policies in land and resource distribution.

The outcome is an internal occupation that redefines who owns the land and who has the right to exist upon it. Schools are destroyed, hospitals closed, local leaders targeted, and civic life systematically uprooted. Society itself is hollowed out, emptied to make space for Tasis and its affiliates.

In this new order, the “New Sudan” promised by Tasis becomes not a homeland of citizenship but a geography of fear, where ministries are replaced by war offices, and belonging is reduced to a network of survival centred on the gun.

VI. Accountability as the foundation of true establishment

No nation can be built atop the ruins of impunity. The absence of justice entrenches the logic of violence and converts brute force into a permanent source of legitimacy. Yet Ta’sees faces a moral and strategic impasse.