International Socialism presents below an article from Sudanese socialist writer and researcher Muzan Alneel based on her talk at the 2024 Marxism Festival in London in July 2024. To provide additional context on the current war in Sudan, and the revolutionary struggle that preceded it, Alneel’s piece is introduced by Rania Obead, Anne Alexander and Khalid Sidahmed.

Introduction

After 15 months of war in Sudan between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia, reports from the United Nations (UN) show the depth of the humanitarian crisis in the country. Although there are no reliable figures for the toll of dead and injured civilians, more than ten million Sudanese have been displaced and half of the 44 million population is facing real threats of famine.1 According to a recent statement by the spokesperson for the Sudanese Teachers’ Committee, 19 million children are out of education. Although the war in Sudan rarely makes headlines in the same way as the atrocities in Gaza, it has triggered the world’s largest displacement crisis.2 Both sides have systematically targeted civilians. In Darfur, the war has revived terrifying memories of the genocide committed by the predecessors of the RSF, the Janjaweed. In the early 2000s, RSF troops committed massacres and ethnic cleansing targeting people from the Masalit community—on the orders of the SAF and the former Sudanese dictator Omar El Bashir.3

To understand the roots of this violence, we have to go beyond April 2023, when the conflict erupted. This approach is embedded in the perspective presented by Muzan Alneel in the article below, which is based on a meeting she gave at the Marxism Festival in July 2024. It makes a crucial contribution to analyses of the crisis in Sudan: as she emphasises, although the main protagonists in the conflict appear to be targeting each other, they are united in their desire to crush the revolution. The masses challenged the power of the Sudanese ruling class and the authoritarian institutions it created to run the country since the coup of 1989, which brought Omar El Bashir to power. This counter-revolution in turn should be set in the context of the threat posed by the revolution to mechanisms of plunder and repression. These have been embodied by the Sudanese state since the colonial period but updated and intensified as a result of Sudan’s uneven integration into global capitalist markets during the neoliberal period.

A major driver of the current war is competition between different segments of Sudan’s military and paramilitary bourgeoisie over control of the mineral and food resources from the so-called peripheries of the state (such as gold and livestock from Darfur, both of which are destined for lucrative export markets in Egypt and the Gulf).4 The conflict is being intensified by regional powers, such as Egypt and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which are backing opposing sides, with Egypt supporting the SAF and the UAE sponsoring the RSF. Regional geopolitical dynamics also play a crucial role in prolonging and deepening the war: Egypt’s military regime has long cultivated the SAF as a potential ally in disputes with Ethiopia over the waters of the Nile, while the UAE and Saudi coalition, which fought a disastrous war in Yemen against the Houthis, relied on Sudanese ground troops recruited by both the RSF and SAF.5

El Bashir’s regime was the longest-lived of the four military dictatorships that, taken together, controlled Sudan for 54 of the 68 years since its independence from British colonial rule.6 The regime’s attempt to impose political stability rested on an alliance between a segment of army officers clustered around El Bashir and the largest current within the Sudanese Islamist movement, which emerged as an off-shoot from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the 1940s.

As Chris Harman noted in an analysis published only five years after El Bashir’s coup, the officers and Islamists derived mutual benefit from their joint control of the state machinery. The Islamists’ mass appeal rested on their claims to promote a just social order based on Islamic teachings. In reality, they oversaw the enrichment of a tiny minority that plundered the country’s wealth and backed up their rule with repression justified in religious terms.7 In contrast to its parent organisation in Egypt, which has spent the vast majority of its nearly 100-year existence in opposition to the government, the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood has a long track record of forging political alliances with military regimes. They already established collaboration with the regime of Jafaar al-Nimeiry, who was brought down by a popular uprising in 1985. Al-Nimeiry’s turn towards cooperation with the Islamists was partially centred on his desire to attract funding from the Gulf states through the creation of an “Islamic” banking sector. This in turn laid the basis for the enrichment of a segment of the Islamist movement’s leadership.

At first, the rising tide of discontent with Nimeiry’s regime undermined the appeal of the National Islamic Front (NIF), led by veteran Islamist organiser Hassan al-Turabi. Yet, as Harman notes,

The coalition of secular forces that had led the uprising against Nimeiry were paralysed by their opposed class interests, unable either to focus the discontent into a movement for a complete transformation of society, including massive redistribution of wealth and the granting of self determination to the south, or to crush it. This allowed the Brotherhood increasingly to offer itself to the army officers as the only force capable of imposing stability, showing its strength visibly by organising a large demonstration against any concessions to the southern rebels.8

The outcome was the creation of a military-Islamist regime that mobilised racist Arab chauvinist rhetoric against non-Muslims and brutalised women for infringements of a police-monitored “Islamic” dress code. As Khalid Medani notes, this ideological cover justified economic policies that systematically transferred state assets into the hands of an elite composed of Islamist politicians, military and militia leaders, their allies and families.9

The December Revolution, which began in 2018, threatened the operations of the state: firstly, as a machine by which elites in the centre of the country plunder the peripheries; secondly, as a mechanism for Sudan-wide processes of exploitation, looting and repression affecting the vast majority of the entire population. Starting with demonstrations in many cities across Sudan, including Mairno, Atbara and Demazen, the protests grew in scale until millions of Sudanese occupied the streets on 6 April 2019. On 11 April, the military announced the removal of Omar El Bashir and formed a Transitional Military Council (TMC). The TMC’s attempt to reserve all power for the military faced determined opposition and several days of general strikes that brought large parts of the capital and major cities to a halt in May and June.

Negotiations between a coalition of opposition organisations—including the Sudanese Professionals Association and traditional political parties—and the TMC to form a joint transitional government followed.10 Yet, it was not the traditional political parties that had mobilised millions in streets and workplaces to force concessions from the TMC. Since 2013, the main resistance body in Sudan has been the Resistance Committee (RC), grassroots organisations established in almost every single neighbourhood in the country. From December 2018 to April 2019, RCs played a major role in organising demonstrations and announcing the routes on their Facebook pages. Later, the RCs became more organised bodies, creating coordination councils to connect across cities and regions, intervening in local areas with campaigns to protect food supplies from diversion onto the black market. They elaborated comprehensive plans for the democratic reform of the state through the development of revolutionary charters.11

In October 2021, Abdelfattah al-Burhan, the military leader of the SAF and Mohamed Dagalo (known as Hemedti), leader of the RSF, carried out a coup and put the civilian members of the Transitional Government in prison, including the prime minister, Abdalla Hamdok. The resistance to the coup began on the evening of 24 October, when news of the arrests of civilian ministers and politicians circulated. Before leaders officially announced the takeover, people had already started blockading roads and organising demonstrations, with the RCs taking the leading role by continuing to organise for full civilian rule for Sudan despite the huge repression they faced.

The emergence of the RCs is one way that the December Revolution can be said to have created a new narrative in Sudan’s history. Two previous major uprisings in October 1964 and March/April 1985 removed dictatorships and established a democratic process, but the December Revolution is different for many reasons. For many revolutionary activists, the December Revolution remains alive today. Even during the war, discussion about how to continue the revolution are ongoing, and many bodies emerging from the revolution are still working on the ground, helping to provide food and shelter for people. Another major difference lies in the fact that the December Revolution was the only revolution in Sudan that started in the small cities outside the capital and spread to cover the whole country.

The number of people who effectively took part in revolutionary organising is huge. Millions of Sudanese joined RCs, the majority of whom were middle or lower class, young people and women. Many of them had no prior political experience but brought fresh views and perspectives to the revolution. Importantly, the creation of RCs meant that for the first time in Sudan’s history, a grassroots movement started in almost every single neighbourhood in the country. At the height of their influence, RCs were an active part of the community, working in harmony with people to organise demonstrations, provide humanitarian aid and create a political vision. The RC charters are among the most developed statements on how to build a future Sudanese state from the bottom up. The most radical charters expressed a social vision of redistribution of wealth as well as the reorganisation of political power to dismantle the political institutions of the authoritarian regime.

This is ultimately why the December Revolution posed such a threat to the SAF and RSF alike, as well as to the Islamist political leaders associated with the former ruling party and to the regional and major imperialist powers. The RCs showed them the frightening prospect of what unity from below against their schemes for plunder can look like. A factor prolonging the war is the role of members of the dissolved National Congress Party and their influential presence within or alongside the army (such as the Al-Baraa Ibn Malik militia, for example). They have already experienced a major setback. During the December Revolution, when they were forced out of key positions in the state and in some cases relieved of control of economic assets by committees set up by the Transitional Government to dismantle the former regime’s networks. Many former ruling party members were invited back into their old roles by the SAF’s leader Al-Burhan after the coup in October 2021. An end of the war without their victory would represent another defeat for their authoritarian project.

Meanwhile, the SAF and RSF are both criminals and enemies of the people’s revolution, which demands civilian rule for Sudan and the removal of military control from the wealth belonging to the Sudanese people. Yet, it is clear that the traditional opposition parties (The Umma Party and the Democratic Unionist Party) do not represent a genuine alternative to the military and militia generals who are ripping Sudan apart with their war. If Sudan’s December Revolution is to continue, it needs an independent party to fight for it. A party that is revolutionary and rooted in the self-organised movement of workers and the poor across the whole of the country and, in the name of freedom, peace and justice for all the oppressed and exploited, takes on the thieves and torturer.

Sudan: revolution, war and imperialism

The two armed groups currently fighting each other in order to take full power over the people of Sudan, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), gained their positions by violent means. This includes coups, wars of displacement and land grabs.12 Both groups used to work together. However, in recent years, they have increasingly been competing with each other. Local, regional and international elites, who benefit from the overall system—and in some cases maintained direct economic and political relations with both the RSF and the SAF—have legitimised them.

It is very important to categorise the RSF and the SAF as counter-revolutionary forces. Without a clear revolutionary reference point, we can easily fall for the definitions of the political situation promoted by either of the warring parties. The SAF describes the current situation as an insurgency by the RSF against the state, which is supported by external actors, whereas the RSF describes it as a struggle against a coup by the SAF. These accounts ignore that both forces were partners in the October 2021 coup, which overthrew the Transitional Government, before the RSF disowned the coup government and presented itself as a supporter of a “democratic transition”.13 They also ignore the crimes in which both are involved.

These narratives contain half-truths but are fully aligned with the authoritarian and elitist ideologies of the warring parties. Yet, neither corresponds to a revolutionary people-centred ideology that can advance a revolutionary political project, and neither makes sense if we prioritise improving the material conditions of the impoverished majority of people in Sudan. As revolutionaries, we understand the state as a tool of control. The bickering of powers for the control of the state is an attempt to control the people of Sudan and their resources.

The domination of the political scene by the RSF and the SAF due to the armed conflict has led to the sidelining of the Resistance Committees (RCs), which were mainly formed during the early stages of the revolution in 2019. RCs are neighbourhood-level bodies that were initially created to organise simultaneous protests in different areas, minimising the ability of the state to suppress them. Over the following years, the RCs evolved in response to state repression. For example, a full internet shutdown by the Transitional Military Council (which at the time included both the SAF and the RSF) forced the RCs to connect offline, forming networks and coordinating bodies. In later years, in the face of the October 2021 coup and the counter-revolutionary actions of the civilian and military elites, the RCs used these same networks and coordinating bodies to discuss the situation. They produced a political charter and a road map for a bottom-up governance model.14 More than 8,000 RC members from all states of Sudan were involved in the discussions on the charter. This process turned the RCs from a protest tactic into a major political player in the country. The model was not without its flaws, but it provides lessons for the international revolutionary front.

The popular masses and the war

During the first few hours of the current war, which erupted between the SAF and the RSF in April 2023, new grassroots bodies emerged called Emergency Rooms (ERs). They ran health facilities, provided information about safe areas, organised maintenance of utilities, such as electricity and water, organised evacuations and ran community kitchens. Some ERs were founded directly by the RCs, but, in general, all ERs adopted key elements of the RC model, for example the geographical distribution and social media tools. Although the ERs are impressive in many respects, a major internal threat they carry with them is the emergency mindset. They exhaust the limited resources available and make similar tactical mistakes due to incorrectly expecting the war to end in a couple of weeks, months or even years.

When the grassroots movement had no political project or vision other than short-term solutions of service provision and, throughout the first year of the war, made minimal effort to offer sustainable systems of popular management of services and resources, its influence on the masses waned. This is not because the movement is no longer active. For example, news about the situation on the ground in conflict areas mostly relies on ER statements as these are the only functioning institutions in those areas that feed people and document the impact of the war. The influence of the movement is declining because it is losing political weight.

In the absence of a revolutionary long-term vision for ending the war, it makes perfect sense that ordinary people will turn towards one of the reactionary visions provided, hoping that one of the two warring parties will end the war with an absolute victory—and there is a good life waiting on the other side.

A good percentage of the Sudanese population has now taken this approach. The choice of supporting either the SAF or the RSF is mostly affected by the socio-economic position of the individuals or groups who choose between one of the two sets of criminals. This is because the SAF and RSF are violent, elitist and armed counter-revolutionary forces that seek control of the state in order to use it to maintain violent, elitist and unjust structures. However, they differ slightly in the way they take advantage of these structures, and the socio-economic position of individuals or a group determines how receptive they are to each side’s propaganda. We also have to keep in mind that the SAF’s propaganda is as old as the state itself, as it is the army of the country and considers itself to be a symbol of the nation. Therefore, its propaganda has impacted a larger segment of the population, and this has led to the growth of a view that sees the SAF as the lesser evil.

It is crucial to remember that many people believe in the army since they do not see any alternatives. The RSF is portrayed as villain number one, but not because its crimes differ from those of the SAF in terms of the scale of atrocities. For decades, the SAF has displaced people and slaughtered them, whether directly or helped by para-governmental militias. The RSF was one of these militias, but it differs from the SAF in that the army committed many of its worst crimes in the areas outside those of historical privilege: in other words, away from the capital and its neighbouring states.

SAF supporters like to claim that the RSF’s ongoing crimes are a rebellion in defiance of the state, whereas the SAF is representative of the Sudanese state, which we should support if we do not want to be traitors. This is a fallacy: the Sudanese people, who are being slaughtered and impoverished by both sides, are expected to define their attitude towards the perpetrators according to the bureaucratic position of the criminal in relation to the structure of the state!

This justification is based on decades of bourgeois propaganda about immunity for state elites and their tools of violence. Moreoever, it generates racist rhetoric, by accusing the RSF of “occupying” villages and cities. I do not remember this language being used to describe the same crimes of the SAF in the South, now the sovereign country of South Sudan. The same is true for dozens of gold-rich areas, in which the SAF, just as the RSF and the security services, together or separately, has displaced and oppressed people and taken over their land. “Occupy” is a term that suggests that an outsider is the culprit. The members of the RSF are indeed social outsiders in the historical structures of the Sudanese state, being demographically connected to the western (less developed) states of Darfur and Kordofan, while the SAF are representative of the first-class citizens from the areas of historical privilege in the centre of the country.

The language of “occupation” has also become popular in a context where the crimes of the Zionist occupation of Palestine dominate the news in the region. This has encouraged the SAF, including its militias and media organisations, to use similar language to describe the RSF in order to secure popular support against an “occupying invader with foreign support and mercenary soldiers”. The SAF’s propaganda outlets declare this with a straight face, while the SAF lends mercenaries to the Saudi regime and its leaders sell Sudan’s Red Sea bases to Russia. The RSF is a criminal force, but it is not an invader.

Domestic encroachment, international complicity

Both the SAF and the RSF, when they were part of the Transitional Government, signed an agreement to “normalise” the relations between Sudan and Israel. This was a transactional deal to which they agreed so that the United States would remove Sudan from the list of states sponsoring “terrorism”, thereby making new loan agreements with the International Monetary Fund possible. As a consequence, the country is under increased pressure to adopt impoverishing neoliberal economic policies. There is something to be explored here about how these political systems of dominance are connected, and there are similarities between the Palestinian and the Sudanese struggle in terms of the role played by international institutions in legitimising criminals.

The complicity of foreign governments is another important aspect of the war in Sudan, and there has been a lot of focus on the support of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for the RSF recently. Certainly, the UAE is a predator in the region in terms of grabbing resources, cementing political control and fighting popular movements. The UAE has been supporting the RSF materially and politically. However, focusing on the UAE-RSF link without a clear critique of the wider context and especially without a critique of the SAF’s crimes only provides ammunition for the propaganda of the SAF. This would mean to strengthen one criminal side, which would ultimately lead to the stronger criminal gaining more power over the people.

As for a tactic for Sudanese activists in the diaspora, it could be to expose and criticise the unchecked interference of so-called global diplomacy by international organisations that keep criminals in power. It was ambassadors of the European Union and representatives of the United Nations (UN) who cemented the power of the RSF and SAF in Sudan after the popular uprising back in 2019. It was the British ambassador who publicly supported austerity measures in Sudan: as the representative of a country with a history of colonising Sudan and after a popular revolution against the same austerity policies—a disgrace! It was aid organisations of the Global North that used their funding to steer the political opinion in Sudan and provide propaganda in support of the policies that led us to where we are today. It was the UN Secretary General who called on the Sudanese people to be “realistic” and accept the military in power after their coup.

In my opinion, an important tactic to curb these counter-revolutionary diplomatic actions is to promote transparency and provide information. Following this line, the Russian Bolsheviks published the Sykes-Picot Agreement—revealing to the world what is now regarded as an undisputed historical fact about the role of the colonial powers in shaping North Africa and West Asia, including the creation of a Zionist colony on the land of Palestine.

In the case of Sudan today, achieving more transparency about the funding of the armed warring parties and exposing their links to anti-democratic regional and international powers is very useful for resistance movements inside Sudan. It helps these movements to understand the political field, advance their analysis, and define clear actions, steps and demands. It is not just a question of the importance of “international attention” but also a question of who is attracting this attention and what goals are being pursued with it. The main characteristic of good answers to the question “how do we bring more attention to the question of Sudan?” is that these answers advance a revolutionary project and are centred on the interests of the people of Sudan.

What will help in developing and practising these answers and tactics is a political organisation. Not just political actions by like-minded individuals but an organisation in which strategic visions are created, executed and revised. It is important for advancing the revolutionary project in Sudan to have a critical and revolutionary analysis of the country’s injustices, and it is always important to share this analysis in the most accurate and understandable terms to mobilise the masses, who benefit from revolutionary change.

The flaws of the developmental model in Sudan are central to these injustices. Such flaws have been created by design in order to benefit the groups in power: they are manifested in the centralisation of services and the prioritisation of the urban centres. We saw that clearly once the war hit the capital. Sudan has been at war for the past 70 years, but it was only when the war reached the capital that it had disastrous impacts on the entire country. This is because more than 80 percent of all industry is concentrated in the capital; all service networks are centred in the capital. This is a system that works perfectly to ensure the security of a small group in power who wants to extract wealth, while leaving as little as possible for the population. Throughout Sudan’s history, we have seen the same logic of governance at work, whether that group was an external foreign colonial power or a local elite.

The mass killings and displacement in Darfur, which happened in the early 2000s, are a good example. They were directed by the government and executed by its militias, one of which later evolved into the RSF. The government at that time as well as previous ones have had a habit of arming certain demographic groups and setting them against others in order to execute violent land grabs. As most of these militias have been drawn from pastoralist groups, Sudanese governments have repeatedly enflamed existing conflicts over resources between sedentary farmers and nomadic pastoralist groups. I think it is useful to take a step back and ask why these conflicts exist and why the armed groups are mostly nomadic pastoralists. The truth is that pastoralist groups are more susceptible to forming militias because their livelihood and economic activities are restricted and endangered by the system of the modern state far more than those of farmers.

The modern Sudanese state has been involved in a decades-long process of pastoral land theft. This was the case under colonialism, which did not define pastoral land in its laws, and it was the case under the post-independence governments, which issued new decrees legitimising the confiscation of pastoral land by large landowners. These regulations did not acknowledge pastoralism as a legitimate form of land use. People were not granted formal access to their land in order to raise their herds. This problem is not specific to Sudan but is common to pastoralist nomadic populations around the globe. They suffer from the encroachments of the modern state, which is more interested in violently changing their way of life by turning them into sedentary groups subject to bureaucratic control.

Within the Sudanese context, it is also important to keep asking how and why current realities were created, and what were the political and economic structures that created them. Otherwise, we risk missing injustices and therefore alienating groups with an intrinsic interest in revolutionary change. This is very important both for understanding the current war and finding a revolutionary way out of it.

Prospects

The Sudanese Revolution is definitely in crisis. It has failed to dismantle the power of the ruling elite. The narratives of the elites are currently gaining in popular appeal, and members of the resistance front joining the SAF is just one manifestation of this process. Some members of the resistance front are also joining the RSF.

Reality shows that the resistance movement was successful in providing and establishing the tools of grassroot organising as manifested itself in the RCs and ERs as discussed above. These tools are very important for the possibilities of advancing a revolutionary project, but, as we saw, doing the hard work of organising without revolutionary theory can be inefficient and merely exhaust the energy of revolutionaries.

So, what can be done to advance the revolutionary project in Sudan? A solution must include a sustainable and long-term vision towards the activities necessary to improve the living conditions of the people. This includes the urgent tasks of feeding and sheltering people, providing them with health care and alternative education, as schools are closed. It means providing accurate information about the situation on the ground as both warring parties are neglecting any responsibility towards service provision in the areas they control. These activities are already done by the ERs, but carrying them out in a more sustainable way requires more participation from the entire community. This requires switching from the volunteer model to a residents’ council model, in which decisions are made democratically by the entire population of a local area and tasks being divided rationally, so as not to exhaust people.

This is a method of establishing popular control over the delivery of services and the distribution of resources that will provide a better chance of survival for Sudan’s suffering population. It also outlines a vision for the country that counterposes authoritarian rule or absolute control by an armed party. Indeed, it lays the foundation for a country run by the people, which by default requires eliminating the ability of any party to take power by force. It is not difficult to see how this vision will be a serious threat to the control of the warring parties over public opinion and narratives. This could encourage the warring parties and the regional and international allies to seek the stabilisation of the country to control the popular movement. They will come with all their weapons and tools to put an end to such a movement, but we have no other weapon to fight them except by further strengthening the organisational capacities of the masses. This is not something that can be theorised in a vacuum as it requires the practical popular organisation and control over resources and service provision by the organised communities involved. This is what happened with the RCs; the smartest and most knowledgeable leftist organisers could not have sat down in 2018 and theorised the path the RCs would take. Instead, this path was mapped out through the organised collective mental and physical labour of the hundreds of thousands engaged in building the RCs.

Of course, a major player in advancing this exercise of strategic organising against the elites in power is a revolutionary party that is engaged in providing critical analysis and a coherent vision. It must support the discussions of the masses and work democratically towards advancing its vision, while openly criticising it and learning from the actions of the people. The first obvious steps now are to organise the people and to build a revolutionary party. This means creating a sustainable model of service provision combined with a critical vision guided by the aim of communal control of resources, service and decision making.

Muzan Alneel is a Sudanese socialist researcher. She works on industrial policy research, is the co-founder of ISTinaD Center and is a research fellow at the Transnational Institute. Anne Alexander is the author of Revolution is the Choice of the People: Crisis and Revolt in the Middle East (Bookmarks, 2022). Rania Obead is a Sudanese activist. Khalid Sidahmed is on the MENA Solidarity editorial board and is a trade unionist.