Chaos as a Strategy: The Sudan Civil War

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov meeting Sudanese warlord Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti), February 2023

Civil wars, especially in Africa, are typically depicted in the media as the product of ancient ethnic rivalries or competing religious views. But it is usually more instructive to follow the money. The American Civil War was launched by Southern slave-owners who wanted to protect their “property”, and abetted by the British, who wanted to protect the supply of Southern cotton to the mills of Manchester and ensure repayment of loans from British banks to Southern plantation owners. Long-simmering civil wars in Myanmar and Colombia are fueled by proceeds from the heroin and cocaine trade while the Afghan Taliban has financed itself largely from taxes on opium production. There may be an ethnic component to the armed conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, but it is mainly about who gets to control the extraction and sale of gold, diamonds, cobalt, coltan, and other essential, high-value minerals.

Sudan is, potentially, a wealthy country. Even after the secession of South Sudan in 2011, which took most of the country’s substantial oil reserves and revenues, Sudan still possesses Africa’s largest expanses of arable land together with abundant water from the White Nile and the Blue Nile, which join together at Khartoum. Over the past 15 years or so, Sudan has leased millions of acres of farmland to foreign companies, mainly to grow alfalfa, which is exported as livestock feed to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other countries in the region. In what is often called a land-grab but is better described as a water-grab, these companies have built pumping stations and pipelines to irrigate vast plantations whose production is almost entirely exported to the Arabian peninsula.

The current civil war between the Sudanese Army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which broke out last April, shows no signs of stopping. Well over three million Sudanese have been displaced by the fighting and nearly a million have fled to neighboring countries. The international charity Save the Children reports that “alarming numbers of women and girls have been sexually assaulted by armed combatants”.

According to an article in Foreign Policy, “this is not just a domestic squabble. Sudan is a bridge that links the Middle East and Africa, and its abundant natural resources mean the battle for Khartoum has taken on a regional dimension. Gulf heavyweights Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates view the war as a chance to cement their hegemonic status in the Middle East.” The Saudis back the Army, while the UAE supports the RSF. One joker in the deck is Russia’s Wagner Group, which began supplying arms to Sudan well before the current hostilities, as part of a deal that granted it large concessions in the country’s gold mines in exchange for weapons and political backing for the then joint Army-RSF coalition. But on the outbreak of civil war, Wagner cast its lot with the RSF. Another wild card is Russia’s plan to build a naval base on Sudan’s Red Sea coast.

This conflict has the potential to engulf the entire region, since Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi—a Saudi ally—has provided aid to the Sudanese military, particularly air support, in its bid to regain full control of the state, and some analysts have suggested that Egypt may be contemplating a full-scale invasion of Sudan. Another big concern for Egypt is its ongoing dispute with Ethiopia over the downstream countries’ share of Nile waters, especially following the construction and filling of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, which Egypt considers an ‘existential threat’ that could push it to attack Ethiopia. But in that case it would almost certainly have to proceed without backing from either side in the Sudanese conflict.

Since it gained independence from joint British-Egyptian rule in 1956, Sudan has known little peace and even less in the way of decent governance. It has known civilian government for just seven out of the past 67 years. Civilian governments have been weak and divided, while military rulers have differed only in the scope of their brutality and venality.

It is hard to imagine a swift or peaceful conclusion to the current chaos. Neither the Army nor the RSF appears likely to prevail militarily, and the proxy battle between Saudi Arabia and the UAE will continue as long as it suits them. Given their record in the Yemeni civil war, now in its ninth year, this could be a long time indeed.