It was the breadbasket of the continent and the world’s mining hub. But wars are tearing the territory apart, dividing it into four parts and spreading instability to the Mediterranean.
Until a few years ago, Sudan still held hope for a future of prosperity that a potential peace agreement might eventually bring about. It was despite decades of civil war that pitted the northern part of the country and the capital, where Arabic and Sunni Muslims are predominant, against the three southern provinces, which had mainly Catholic, mighty, and populous black ethnic populations.
The largest country in Africa was recognized as a potential “breadbasket” for the continent. Its role would likely be strengthened by the many planned projects to manage the flow of the White and Blue Niles in their central regions.
The prospects from a mining perspective were equally promising. It had large hydrocarbon deposits already identified in the eastern and southern provinces, gold mines actively exploited throughout the territory (especially in Darfur), and other favorable opportunities. Only the wars had prevented proper assessment and exploitation until that point.
Unfortunately, over the past 15 to 20 years, fate seems to have abandoned the large country. It was first severely devastated by a ruthless conflict in Darfur, its westernmost region, and afterward, once drained, forced to accept a division into two states, which took away the three major southern provinces.
South Sudan emerged through a very tough and painful process, also marked by uprisings against the arrogance of the dominant ethnic group, the Dinka. These uprisings have yet to find a satisfactory resolution and still threaten to divide the new country further. Instead of one Sudan, as we once had, we now have two, and there is a risk of ending up with three if South Sudan splits into two separate parts in the near future.
This risk of southern fragmentation also impacts North Sudan. This territory, after battling to free itself from the dictator in power for about 30 years, General Bashir, is now plagued by a civil war that the United Nations considers one of the worst ongoing tragedies on the African continent in terms of deaths and refugees.
The two sides in the conflict are, on one hand, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), and on the other, the militias of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). They are fiercely fighting, with unpredictable shifts in power, over what remains of the original Sudanese state.
Each of them is then supported and supplied, especially with weapons and equipment, by other middle powers in North Africa or the Arabian Peninsula – from Chad to Libya, from Egypt to Saudi Arabia, from Qatar to the United Arab Emirates. Some supporters have also recently started recruiting local mercenaries for the more violent clashes they expect.
Riyadh acted when it was necessary to confront the Houthis in northern Yemen on the ground for a period.
Here, a border province, Darfur, and the militias it mobilizes have managed, in a relatively short period, to become a persistent problem for the same central government that initially supported their emergence and development. For many years, the government tied them to the regular army during crackdown operations.
This also concerns the history shared across Africa, where colonial powers drew borders on maps without considering the ethnic divisions within those territories. Darfur is, or at least was, an area that, from a tribal perspective, was much more closely connected to the Toubou of Chad and northern Libya than to Sudanese ethnic groups.
Furthermore, the dominant tribes, among which the Rizeigat are the most prominent, are people who breed horses and dromedaries. They have therefore never accepted herders, or worse, farmers, settling on their territory. Those herders and farmers would quickly monopolize the available water resources and establish a dense network of property boundaries, thereby ending their seasonal nomadism.
This is why, during the demographic explosion in the black countries to the south that led to a flood of immigrants seeking food and land to move to Darfur, they remembered that they had once been formidable warriors.
Thus, they launched a campaign of repression carried out by a militia that initially called itself Janjawid (the devils on horseback), which grew stronger and more organized over time, eventually evolving into the current Rapid Support Forces. They collaborated with the governments in power in Khartoum for years. Finally—appetite comes with eating—they initiated an open rebellion aimed at seizing control of the entire country.
It was, at least in its early stages and as long as it was limited to Darfur, a clash (herders versus farmers) of a biblical scale and cruelty in its ancestral form. As is often the case, Western governments and public opinion understood almost nothing about it, remaining completely inactive or limiting themselves to some limited humanitarian support.
Besides, what else could they have done? If they had demanded that the rules of their democracy be applied locally, the majority of immigrants (herders and farmers) would undoubtedly have overwhelmed the long-standing herders and landowners of the territory, though fewer in number at the polls. In that case, armed confrontation would also have become unavoidable.
To make things even worse, the original tribes of Darfur consisted of fanatical Muslims – their ethnic groups formed the best mounted force of the 19th-century Mahdi of Khartoum’s revolt – while most of the black farmers were Christians.
There is a chasm of hatred, therefore, which allowed the province to find some stability only after the devils on horseback achieved the final victory.
By that point, however, the warrior ethnic groups of Darfur had once again experienced the rush of war. They recognized that, in situations like Sudan’s and sometimes even today, might makes right. They found in Chad’s ruling Toubou a strong ally very similar to themselves and, most importantly, increased their wealth by controlling all the gold from the province’s goldfields and nearby regions.
Why stop at that point, then, when all the favorable conditions were in place for the RSF to take control of the entire national complex?
Thus, the war expanded, with changing fortunes, to all that remains of the original Sudan. The capital, Khartoum, was first captured by the rebels and then lost again, while the national government, as a precaution, moved to Port Sudan, much farther east.
Recently, however, the last major city in Darfur also fell into the hands of those who were once the Janjawid. This indicates that, in the short term, the province’s independence and the creation of a new state will be officially declared and immediately recognized by all international actors supporting the winning side.
At that moment, on our map, we will need to record the existence of up to four separate Sudans that will have replaced the original Sudan. Moreover, unless quick and drastic changes occur, the relationships among the four will likely remain strained.
What can we do about it? Acting alone, like Italy, probably won’t help much. Things might change if the European Union took action by committing to a plan that could support Africa in stabilizing and preventing future crises like those in Sudan over the past 20 years.
A European intervention could simultaneously deter the Chinese ambitions, the Russian mercenaries, Turkey’s neo-Ottoman imperial goals, and the proselytizing of the most fanatical Sunni fundamentalism funded by the Arabian Peninsula countries… and the list, which is definitely not complete, could be much longer.
