“O Gatekeeper of the West’s Gate, Conquered Yet Claiming Conquest!”

As I See

Adil El-Baz

1

The Nairobi gathering has dispersed, and as usual, nothing new has emerged. The same statements, the same recommendations, the same people, and the same sponsors. Do these people never tire of these festivals of empty noise? Do the performers never grow weary of participating in these absurd and futile spectacles?

How many conferences have they held before and after the war? How many workshops have they organized? How many meetings have they attended across various forums and Western parliaments? What have they harvested besides ashes? Has the war stopped? Has peace been achieved?

Every time they attend a conference, they return empty-handed. These gatherings produce nothing but tons of meaningless rhetoric and hollow declarations. At times, I almost feel sorry for them and try to excuse them. They have no occupation other than circulating endlessly through conferences and conspiracies; it is their only means of livelihood. Were this empty cycle to stop, they would be forced to confront the reality of the people they claim to represent: hunger, displacement, and destruction.

Yet they prefer moving between luxury hotels and air-conditioned conference halls to visiting refugee and displacement camps. If they did not do so, how else would they make a living? That is why they guard the gates of the West more diligently than they guard the gates of their own homeland.

2

What strikes me about these gatherings is that their stages and performances are all located abroad. Ultimately, they are dependent on external actors in most of their affairs. It is the outside world that provides them with funding, opens the doors of institutions and parliaments to them, drafts recommendations and political positions for them, draws their roadmaps, and even determines the direction and political course they follow.

In the final communiqué issued by the participants in Nairobi—what they called the “Sudanese Declaration of Principles”—there is nothing new beyond what the Quartet had already decided. I do not know how they neglected to mention the outcomes of the “Berlin Call.”

In that declaration, issued on May 30, 2026, the groups gathered in Nairobi called for “structured consultation with international and regional mediation mechanisms at all stages of designing the political process, and the unification of external platforms into a single forum based on the Quartet’s roadmap.”

It is as though the Quartet has become their political compass from which they cannot deviate, while the Sudanese people themselves were never consulted in the drawing of that roadmap.

3

These gatekeepers believe that their true victory and the justice of their causes derive their strength and legitimacy from Western support and endorsement—not from their own people, from whom they have become increasingly distant as they have sunk deeper into dependency. The more they incite the West against their homeland, the greater their isolation becomes.

What these gatekeepers fail to understand is that when you betray your country, call for its isolation, seek to dismantle its army, and open the door to its invasion, you are in fact invading yourself before invading your homeland.

This is how a traitor shapes his own destiny: he begins by betraying his people and eventually ends by betraying himself, becoming merely a tool in the hands of those who use him and then discard him.

Western support for the Nairobi group is not an act of charity. Rather, it is an investment in local proxies who can manage the political landscape at minimal cost. States do not operate on emotions but on interests, and these groups present themselves as ready-made instruments for restructuring power in ways that serve those interests.

4

One cannot help but marvel at this constant appeal to the West, which these gatekeepers have become addicted to, expecting it to do everything for them. They ask it to pressure the Sudanese government to respond to their calls for ending the war. They ask it to open humanitarian corridors that would allow supplies to reach the militia so that it may continue its crimes. They urge the consolidation of mediation tracks to prevent exploitation of multiple negotiating channels. They ask it to impose a ceasefire on the Sudanese government. They demand that the Islamic Movement be designated a terrorist organization and excluded from political life. They insist that the Sudanese government not be treated as legitimate. They ask for a single negotiating platform to represent them.

They call for accountability for violations—while completely ignoring the militia’s crimes and atrocities. Finally, they ask, or rather plead, for international recognition of their legitimacy and for assistance in carrying them into power on the backs of Janjaweed pickup trucks.

I am particularly astonished by the conduct of the “young gatekeeper.” He toured European capitals, urging the West to act against his own country and scattering accusations indiscriminately.

He accused the Sudanese Armed Forces of using chemical weapons without evidence. He claimed that the Sudanese state posed a threat to regional and international security without offering proof or argument. He blamed Islamists for the outbreak of the war and demanded their exclusion from political life, as though accusation alone were sufficient evidence.

In short, he attached every conceivable accusation to his country and exploited every platform available to denounce it before foreigners. One almost imagines that he has exhausted every possible allegation and has nothing left except to complain to them about his own people—and perhaps even his Creator.

What a pitiful gatekeeper. He imagines that standing before his masters is an act of heroism, and that inviting outsiders against one’s homeland is a form of conquest. He struts about as though returning victorious from battle, when in reality he has never left his old position: repeating what is dictated to him and surviving on the approval of others.

It is as though the great poet Abdul-Qadir Al-Katiabi had him in mind when he wrote in his celebrated poem Dhat Al-Hawdaj:

«“O gatekeeper of the West’s gate…
Conquered, yet claiming conquest!”»

5

The central question remains: Why does the West provide them with so much support?

The answer is simple: because they serve in its court and safeguard its interests.

There is nothing in their discourse that reflects the people they falsely claim to represent. They are scarecrows without a people. They have not visited the people in their places of exile, nor have they assisted them in camps for the displaced and refugees.

They possess neither an economic plan nor an inclusive political vision. Yet they presume to decide who may participate and who may not. They classify opponents according to their own preferences and exclude those they dislike.

On what basis? Under what legitimacy? No one knows.

The gatekeepers of the West seek borrowed legitimacy from Western parliaments and foreign patrons, failing to realize that true legitimacy is earned from the people and from no one else.

They will continue knocking on the doors of the West until they eventually realize—perhaps too late—that those doors do not lead to nations. They seek legitimacy from those who do not possess the authority to grant it.

When the sponsors’ tables are cleared away, when the files of proxies are closed, and when the masters shut their doors, nothing will remain for them except what they left behind: a people who never chose them and a homeland that never forgave them.

All those who have wagered on foreign powers against their own countries have ultimately lost their bet. They may gain a platform here, a statement there, or a commemorative photograph in the corridors of foreign parliaments, but each time they lose something far greater: the trust of their own people.

6

O gatekeepers of the West’s gate, a little modesty would do no harm.

The legitimacy whose mirage you pursue cannot be imported in travelers’ suitcases, nor can it be bestowed by foreign capitals.

As for the doors you guard with such devotion, they will not lead you to the seats of power. Rather, they will lead you to the place where all those who wagered against their own people eventually ended up:

The dustbin of history.