Sudan’s collapse risks spiraling to neighbouring countries: expert

“Sudan is a crisis state in constant flux, and it is currently undergoing a delicate transition, spiraling out of control into Hobbesian anarchy. As a mainland sharing borders with seven other African countries and a long coastline on the Red Sea straddling the Middle East. Its collapse will release seismic pressures and spillovers across the region. Such a bizarre construct demands a rebooting of the state’s core functions. Under such distress, the survival of the Sudanese state hangs in a delicate balance, wrote Majak D’ Agoot”, a visiting senior research fellow at African Leadership Centre, King’s College London.

D’ Agoot, a former deputy chief of Sudan intelligence and defense minister of South Sudan, made the warning in a journal article published in December 2022 by Middle East Policy. 

The journal article entitled: Toward Stable Civil-Military Relations in Sudan: analyzed the strength of relations between the military and the civilian-controlled administration in Sudan before and after gaining the independence from British. He argued that military intervention with the view of arresting political debates between politicians has been advancing democratic values ​​and failed to deliver services.

This, he added, has been generating feelings of marginalization and the creation of armed groups as a way to claim power and participation in the control of national affairs. He cited the emergence of regional forces as an indication of a polarized country that could cause feelings that might undermine control.

His analysis of the political and security situation in Sudan becomes at the time political leaders and military officers in Sudan have been unable to reach a consensus on how they could share powers, initiate reforms, and transition. Many other analysts believe that After decades of conflict in Sudan’s western region, the fall of the NCP regime in 2019 fueled further violence in Darfur.

 Groups who had benefitted under the previous regime feared that the new government would try to redress the balance in the region and sought to strengthen their positions. The Juba Peace Agreement (JPA) attempted to address essential questions about land rights and political representation in Darfur. Some believe It has contributed to an increase in violence in some areas, particularly the north, where predominantly Arab communities have feared losing out in any political reorganization.

Others express fears that the implementation of the agreement has been complicated by the actions of SRF leaders before, during, and after the 25 October coup. Two key Darfuri signatories—the Sudan Liberation Army-Minni Minnawi (SLA-MM) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), are believed to have benefitted from the agreement and supported the coup. Since then, JEM and its leaders have stayed close to the military, while SLA-MM has grown somewhat disenchanted.

Other Darfur-based SRF leaders will have to decide which path to follow. Some feel leaders from Darfur now participating in the government created by the Juba Peace Agreement may not explicitly support the coup but also cannot openly oppose it without losing positions gained through the agreement and the mutually beneficial relationships cultivated through the transitional arrangements with the military, particularly with the powerful RSF paramilitary leader Mohamed Hamdan Daglo ‘Hemedti’, who hails from the region.

Other analysts have argued that further implementation of the agreement in Darfur and elsewhere is unlikely in the current political context. The arrangements needed to keep a post-coup transitional government together run counter to requirements for a genuine comprehensive peace process and are likely to increase instability in Sudan’s peripheries.

D’ Agoot agreed with some of the views of the analysts and argued that the Rapid Support Force (RSF) is largely viewed as a private force that has illegitimately encroached on SAF’s mandate. Recently, he pointed out, calls for the SRF to be merged into the SAF and for the military to distance itself from politics have intensified, more so when General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan on October 25, 2021, staged a coup against the civilians in the interim authority—the Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC).

“The FFC has deprecated the move as disingenuous for its amateurish quality of leadership. Unsurprisingly, the sanctity of the state’s monopoly on violence has hollowed out with the dominance of all variants of the Gun Class”, he explained.

According to the former Defense minister, changing this trajectory, will require redefining the roles of political and security actors by perhaps reengineering the civil-military relationships. Difficult as it may be the framework of civil-military relations signifies one of the important thrusts of the current transition.

More important, he further stressed, a discourse to lay out and pursue some of its core agenda requires greater mental acuity and political will.