Global Courant 2023-05-03 21:50:07
Just weeks ago, US diplomats thought Sudan was on the verge of a breakthrough in an agreement that would advance the transition from a military dictatorship to full-fledged democracy and deliver on the promising promise of the country’s 2019 revolution.
Sudan had become a key test case in President Biden’s core foreign policy goal of strengthening democracies worldwide, which he says weakens corrupt leaders and empowers nations to better act as bulwarks against the influence of China, Russia and other autocratic powers.
But on April 23, the same US diplomats who had been involved in the negotiations in Sudan suddenly found themselves closing the embassy and fleeing Khartoum on secret nighttime helicopter flights as the country plunged into potential civil war.
Officials from the Biden administration and their partners are now scrambling to get two warring generals to stick to a tenuous ceasefire and end hostilities as foreign governments evacuate civilians amid fighting that has killed at least 528 dead and more than 330,000 displaced. The actual toll is almost certainly much higher than those Sudanese government figures.
A pressing question at the heart of the crisis is whether the United States misjudged how difficult it would be to introduce democracy in a country with a long history of military rule and the risks of negotiating with strongmen who talk but never live up to it.
Critics say that instead of empowering civilian leaders, the Biden administration prioritized cooperation with the two rival generals, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the head of the Sudanese military, and Lieutenant General Mohamed Hamdan, a paramilitary chief, even after they carried out a military coup together in 2021.
Senior US diplomats “made the mistake of coddling the generals, accepting their irrational demands and treating them as natural political actors,” said Amgad Fareid Eltayeb, an adviser to Sudan’s ousted prime minister Abdalla Hamdok. “This fueled their lust for power and their illusion of legitimacy.”
And ask some analysts whether US officials have a clear approach to executing Biden’s global push for democratic resilience.
The violence in Sudan is creating exactly the kind of power vacuum that Mr Biden’s aides had hoped to avoid. Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group are among the players already trying to fill the gap, current and former US officials say.
“If these fights continue, there’s going to be a great temptation among outside actors to say, ‘If these guys are going to fight it out to the death, we’d better get in there because we’d rather have this guy, or this institution, win,” said Jeffrey D. Feltman, a former US envoy to the Horn of Africa who worked on negotiations for civilian government.
“If you don’t get a ceasefire, you don’t just have the misery of these 46 million people,” he added, “you have a greater temptation for outsiders to step up the fighting through direct intervention. “
Mr Hamdok said civil war in Sudan would make the conflicts in Syria, Yemen and Libya look like “a little play”.
The State Department and White House declined to comment.
That of the White House Africa strategy paperreleased in August, claims that “by reaffirming that democracy delivers tangible benefits,” the United States can help limit the influence of “negative” foreign nations and non-state groups, reduce the need for costly interventions, and help Africans determine their own future.
For the United States, the effort to prevent Sudan from returning to despotism is an unlikely role after decades when the country was largely known for mass atrocities and as a haven for terrorists, including Osama bin Laden for nearly five years in the 1990s. . In 1998, President Bill Clinton even ordered a missile strike on a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum where he said Al Qaeda was making chemical weapons, although that information was later questioned.
It wasn’t until October 2020, a year after the revolution, that President Donald J. Trump officially revoked the country’s status as a state sponsor of terrorism after Sudan normalized its relations with Israel.
“Today, a great people of Sudan are in charge,” Trump said. “New democracy takes root.”
Mr Feltman and other former and current US officials say supporting democracy should still be the cornerstone of US policy in Sudan given the aspirations expressed in protests leading to the 2019 impeachment of President Omar Hassan al -Bashir, the dictator of 30 years. Congress leaders are now calling on Mr Biden and the United Nations to do just that appoint special envoys to Sudan.
The setbacks in Sudan follow other democratic disappointments in North Africa, including a military counter-revolution in neighboring Egypt a decade ago; nearly 10 years of political anarchy in Libya, another neighbor of Sudan, after its dictator, Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, was overthrown; and a recent return to authoritarian one-man rule in Tunisia after a decade as the only country to emerge from the 2011 Arab Spring with a democratic government.
The demise of Mr al-Bashir four years ago sparked joyful demonstrations by Sudanese who hoped that democracy would take root in their country, despite failures elsewhere in the region. After several months of junta rule, Sudan’s military and civilian leaders signed a power-sharing agreement that created a transitional government led by Mr Hamdok, an economist. The plan provided for elections after three years.
However, a council created to help manage the transition was “a bit of a fig leaf” as it had more military than civilian members, Susan D. Page, a former US ambassador to South Sudan and a professor at the University of Michigan, said in a post on her school’s website. Major citizens’ voices were excluded, a problem that would persist throughout the negotiations this year.
Following the October 2021 military coup, the United States has frozen $700 million in direct aid to the Sudanese government and suspended debt relief, while the World Bank and International Monetary Fund have frozen $6 billion in immediate aid and plan to release $50 billion in debt forgiveness. Other governments and institutions, including the African Development Bank, have taken similar steps.
Ned Price, then State Department spokesman, said “our whole relationship” with the Sudanese government could be re-evaluated unless the military reinstates the caretaker government.
Even as rumors of a coup circulated in October, US officials had warned General Hamdan that he would face “specific consequences” if he seized power, a former senior US official said. But after the coup, US diplomats led by Molly Phee, the department’s top Africa policy official, decided to try to work with the generals rather than confront them.
The US official declined to specify the proposed sanctions against General Hamdan, but said they broadly targeted his personal wealth, much of it in the United Arab Emirates – a war chest experts say was crucial to building a military base. power unleashed in the current battles.
Pressure to punish the generals came from senior members of Congress. Senator Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat on the Subcommittee on African Affairs of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, co-wrote an article on foreign policy in February 2022 that the Biden administration should impose a “comprehensive set of sanctions on the coup leaders and their networks” to weaken their hold.
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 signaled their willingness to share power with civilians again. The official, who insisted on anonymity to talk about the negotiations, said that withholding aid might not do enough to put pressure on the generals, which is why the government had appealed, among other things, to their sense of an honorable personal heritage.
Cameron Hudson, who served as chief of staff to successive US presidential special envoys to Sudan, called that approach a mistake.
“They have put too much faith in what these generals have told them. These guys have been telling us what we want to hear since they agreed to civilian government” following the impeachment of Mr. al-Bashir, said Mr. Hudson. “The State Department was confident that we were on the verge of a breakthrough.”
Washington’s willingness to negotiate with the generals after the coup had the effect of legitimizing them, Hudson said.
The United States also abandoned Mr Hamdok before the coup, he added, when bureaucratic inertia delayed the disbursement of economic aid, partly intended to show the benefits of civilian rule.
That made Mr. Hamdok all too vulnerable.
The coup left Mr. Feltman feeling betrayed. The generals had personally assured him hours before they arrested Mr Hamdok that they would not seize power, he said.
But even if the United States had imposed sanctions on them, “I’m not sure it would have made much of a difference,” he said. “The two generals see this as an existential struggle. If you’re in an existential struggle, sanctions might annoy you, but that doesn’t stop them from going after each other.”
The first post-coup breakthrough came in December 2022, when the United Nations, the African Union and a regional bloc struck a deal to transition Sudan to civilian rule within months.
But huge issues remained to be resolved, notably how soon General Hamdan’s Rapid Support Forces would be merged with the regular army, and who would report to a civilian head of state. Bridging those differences largely fell to the dominant foreign powers in Sudan: the United States, Great Britain, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Although Saudi Arabia and the Emirates are authoritarian monarchies, they claim they want democracy in Sudan.
But as the negotiations progressed, the rift between the two generals grew. Military reinforcements from both camps began moving into Khartoum.
At the end of March, American and British diplomats presented the generals with proposals to bridge their main differences. Instead, the plan seemed to exacerbate tensions. Weeks later, on April 12, General Hamdan’s forces seized control of an air base 200 miles north of Khartoum, in the first public sign that years of diplomacy were culminating in war.
The fighting started three days later.
