A Year after “Futile” War: Woe to Nation that Anger is the only Energy Generator (1-2)

By: Abdullah Ali Ibrahim

This 15th April will mark one year since the outbreak of war in Sudan between the armed forces and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). It is not only a long year, nor like years similar to it, but it is also bloody and exhausting. It took us to pause and take this war to know its motives and consequences for building the state in Sudan.
It is difficult to be optimistic; however, if our political thought has the courage to take such a worthy stand. Alex de Waal, a British academic and keen researcher of Sudan, mourned it in a speech in 2009, describing it as exhausting. Politics was devoid of a big idea other than tactics that served their owners simply to remain in the political field.
According to Alex, Sudan tried governments of centralized tyranny, parliamentary democracy, a one-party state, the socialist revolution, the Islamic revolution, regional and autonomous rule, and federalism, but they failed one after the other and their ruins spread, blocking the vision of every other political path.
This bankruptcy of thought is what another researcher cited verse of God Almighty’s saying, “A broken well and a built palace,” about the dryness of thought in our partisan bowls. All the structures of the parties, which are the production of the decades of the forties to the sixties, were derived from the thought current in the world at one time, then the circumstance faded, and its flow diminished, and the structures of beliefs remained unchanged. What most disrupted the well of thought of the Sudanese elite was the fading of Egypt’s cultural fire. Historically, this elite has not paved an independent path for Arab Islamic or Western thought that does not pass through Egypt. In its first generation, it was divided into “Doctrinists” and “Levers” by name. Subsequent generations breastfed Marxism, Islamism, and Arab nationalism directly from the breast of Egypt.
When Egypt no longer pumped into Sudan the culture of the East and the West, the thought receded in the veins of our parties. The migration of significant numbers of this elite to the West and others did not compensate for. The migration approached them its sources, but it prevented them from being taken away by the predominance of purely political opposition to the dictatorial regimes because of which they had left the country in greivance. A grievance that disconnect them from those that had connected them to their western sources.
The mud of the broken wells made matters worse, as disgust towards the war prevailed among the modernists, who meet in the Coordination of Democratic and Civil Forces (Taqaddum), over the quest for knowledge about it. Not one of them mentioned it except that he was satisfied with describing it as “cursed” or “evil” and called for its urgent halt. This is spiritual generosity is appreciated. But they extinguished their search for the light of knowledge of the jurisprudence of war that destroys crops and offspring. Among the reprehensible sins of war, in their view, is sacrificing all Sudanese for the “ambition of two generals,” as the phrase was used, to rule. They are dragging the country to ruin in a war in which the citizens, who have no purpose in it, are harmed by the terror of occupying and looting homes, forced displacement that borders on ethnic cleansing, and artillery and air bombardment.
Here, it seemed that the modernists were confusing “citizens” with “civilians” in their denunciation of the scourges of war that people suffer. It is unrealistic to say that citizens have no business in the war. They, on both sides of the war, are partners in it if they analyze it well in the context of a long Sudanese struggle to build a modern civil national state. Many of them, for example, do not want to live under the supervision of a state, or without a state, due to what they see today as “RSF” in the villages of Gezira, for example.
When we talk about citizens as civilians, their right to life and property is protected by international humanitarian law. Accordingly, the harm inflicted on citizens from war is not an argument for the absurdity of war, but rather for the management of a war that targeted the citizen’s property and honor perhaps more than it intended against the military. As a result, it is correct to discuss what the citizen suffers from the war as a civilian for whom the warring parties provide protection against harm, not as a citizen for whom war is politics in another way.
However, the description of war as absurd by the modernist elite is invalidated when they come to designate those who initiated the war as reprehensible. They all agree that the remnants – Kizan – were the ones who started the war, and in fact they were the ones who burdened the armed forces to fight it, dragging its feet. The plan behind the remnants provoking war, they say, is to return to power by eliminating the December 2018 revolution that overthrew their state and initiated the democratic transformation.
Perhaps the modernists considered the efforts of the remnants to return as futile, or even as a joke due to the excessiveness of their demand, but they are efforts to seek rule, or restore it, which make the war very much not futile. What negates the absurdity of this war, on the other hand, is the determination of the modernists, as previously mentioned, not to allow the remnants to return to power. Where does the absurdity come from for a war that the reprehensible instigator wanted to seize power in the country, and whose opponents in “Taqaddum” and “RSF” agreed that it would not return to them except for their dead bodies?
On the other hand, when you designate the aggressor party in the war, namely the remnants, you delve into the jurisprudence of war. The first of this jurisprudence is to determine who is the aggressor in war. The principle of just war allows the aggressed the right to respond and to seek the help of whomever he wishes to repel the aggression.