John Perriello: Before Calling for a Peacekeeping Mission to Sudan

Abdullah Ali Ibrahim

In his final speech, the US Special Envoy to Sudan, Tom Perriello, seemed to express his despair of ending the war in Sudan by having its parties sit down for negotiations. He said that there was little left to reach a peace deal through negotiations. Without them, it would be very difficult. The armed forces continued to block the road to it, and the Rapid Support Forces RSF would come to it, if they came, with an unsound heart. He called for the world to have a Plan B when negotiations were impossible, which is to prepare a peacekeeping force under the African Union AU or the United Nations UN .
What is most hopeless in Perriello’s statement is not his summoning of peacekeeping forces to stop the war in Sudan instead of negotiations, but also his own despair of the world’s readiness to launch this force to preserve peace in Sudan.
He said, “And I will be the first to say that the political will for such a mission does not appear.”
I do not know if Perriello had exhausted all his tricks before “the pot is a squeak and the drum is a stick” in our metaphor for general mobilization in times of panic.
The world and America Us were mobilizing to pressure the Rapid Support Forces RSF not to attack the city of El Fasher and lift the siege it had imposed around it. It is the capital of North Darfur and the rest of the state’s cities are not in the hands of the Rapid Support Forces RSF and the last refuge for its fleeing population of one and a quarter million people. On April 24, US said that it was disturbed by the news of the imminent attack on El Fasher by the Rapid Support Forces RSF and that it was distressed by the reports documenting the rapid forces’ elimination of a number of villages west of the city.
Washington gave the Rapid Support Forces RSF two choices: to continue what it was doing and cause people distress at the risk of their state disintegrating, or to stop the attack. On June 11, it called for a ceasefire in El Fasher, which the Rapid Support Forces RSF had been attacking since last April, out of mercy for millions of innocent people.
The US Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, described El Fasher as being on the brink of a massacre. It asked the Rapid Support Forces RSF to lift the siege, or the consequences would be dire for those responsible for the attack on El Fasher.
The Treasury Department even imposed sanctions on two leaders of the Rapid Support Forces RSF that are attacking the city by blacklisting them.
On the other hand, the Security Council voted for Resolution (2736) of 2024, calling on the Rapid Support Forces RSF to stop the siege of El Fasher and immediately refrain from fighting and escalation inside the city and its environs.
The British delegate to the Council said that “the attack on El Fasher would be disastrous for the one and a half million people who fled there.” The Swiss delegate said that the resolution sends an unambiguous message to the Rapid Support Forces RSF to end their siege of El Fasher. The Rapid Support Forces RSF did not hear America’s and the world’s calls for it to stop the escalation, and it continues its attack until our hour to occupy the last Darfur fortress without punishment.
As we have seen, Periello was content to call for the Rapid Support Forces RSF again to sit down to negotiate to end the fighting across Sudan, silent about his violation of the calls for it to stop the escalation. It is known that whoever calls for a permanent cessation of war is keen first and foremost to stop the escalation.
The first step to ending the war is to stop its escalation. By escalating, a party in the war gains territory that may make it difficult for the loser to sit at the negotiating table, knowing that its text was decided in advance in the military field.
Accordingly, escalation defeats the negotiations that Periello is calling for, which he said there is only a very short time left for them to be held, or we move to Plan B, which is to entrust the matter of Sudan to a continental or global peacekeeping mission that he himself has little confidence in the possibility of its occurrence.
It is strange that America has turned its face the other way from the arrogance of the “Rapid Support” and its government, warning members of Congress since the beginning of April to implement the “Magnitsky Act of 2016” on the “Rapid Support” within 120 days, which is the law that authorizes the US government to boycott employees of any foreign governments who violate human rights by freezing their assets and banning them from entering the United States US .These sheikhs want to punish Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Daglo for terrorizing the residents of nine villages around Mellit in North Darfur at the end of last March. Perhaps punishing Hemeti with the “Magnitsky Act” is just a pat on the back when we consider his attack on a city from which a million and more Sudanese will be displaced for the second or third time.
They are on their way to becoming another heavy burden on the humanitarian effort to address the effects of the Sudanese war. America and the world’s disregard for the Rapid Support’s refusal to comply with their calls does not fit with their insistence that the goal of their policy is to protect people like the people of El Fasher from harm above all else.
On the other hand, the Sudanese war situation in its political, social and historical specificity may have been obscured by Perriello’s comparisons with the situations in other countries. Looking at the situation in Libya, he said that perhaps the “Rapid Support Forces RSF had arranged to establish an independent or breakaway state for them in Darfur if they occupied El Fasher. He dismissed this idea as a mere illusion that they should quickly get rid of, adding that the United States would not recognize this state under any circumstances.
It is no secret that Perriello considered in his assessment what the “Rapid Support Forces” aspired to from a state in Darfur that broke away from the Khartoum government to the phenomenon of the two governments, Tripoli and Benghazi, which resulted in the Libyan civil war. However, the phenomenon is one of the facts of Libyan history. Tripoli and Benghazi remained two independent states in the history of Libya until they were united by Italian colonialism in 1934.
The establishment of the governments of the two Libyan capitals is now a memory in history that is unparalleled in Sudan. It is known that Darfur actually came late to Sudan during the Turkish-Egyptian era (1821-1885) and during the British colonial era (1898-1956), but it was better late than never. It came, for example, to Sudan after 16 years of British rule over the rest of Sudan, but its sultan paid tribute to the British in recognition of their sovereignty in the region. Not to mention that the “Rapid Support” in reality was devoid of the illusion of establishing a state in Darfur with which to control Khartoum. Its forces are now in the country’s capital, claiming to control 90 percent of it, including the Republican Palace.
The purpose of the “Rapid Support” is to rule Sudan.
Periello made another comparison between Sudan and Somalia. He said that the most terrifying situation on earth in Sudan is about to become more terrifying. The result will be another version of Somalia “on steroids” (in the sense of its horror brought by this organic compound to build the body) for 20 or 25 years. But there is a world of difference between the two situations. When the state of Siad Barre, President of the Republic of Somalia, fell in 1991, the Somali National Army dissolved.
The last thing it provided to Siad was an armored vehicle that carried him to Kenya. After the dissolution of the army, four military movements and two parties clashed to inherit the state. The Somali Congress movement came divided into the furnace of that conflict, and its two sides, led by Mohamed Farah Adeed and Ali Mahdi Mohamed, clashed in fierce battles to control the capital, Mogadishu. It was a civil war without an army.
Sudan, by contrast, did not collapse its army, which bowed its back with the “Rapid Support” forces to the storm of the civil revolution in 2019, until they ended it together in the coup of October 25, 2022. With the presence of the Sudanese army SAF in this war, whatever one may think of it, it is impossible to compare it to the situation in Somalia.
Even some of our writers are unaware that we still have a regular army in our great turmoil, unlike Somalia and others, or that it is an undesirable fact for them despite its danger.
Finally, journalist Rasha Awad came to evaluate the Sudanese military institutions by the standard of protecting the citizen and preserving his human rights. She began to measure the citizen’s gain from both the armed forces and the “Rapid Support” by this standard, which means that she considered the “Rapid Support” RSF a military institution on an equal footing with the army SAF.
Neither the SAF nor the “Rapid Support” passed her test of protecting the citizen, but the army was the loser. The SAF according to Rasha, has been in crisis and historically condemned since its founding, including its creation of the “Rapid Support RSF or its emergence from its womb, as the phrase goes.
Accordingly, according to Rasha, the army is the “mother disaster” since its establishment about 70 years ago, while the “Rapid Support” is the “branch disaster” that has only been with us for 10 years. If someone protests against the violations of the “Rapid Support”, which have not been with us for more than a decade, according to Rasha, then the army is the first to be protested against because of its addiction to these violations for seven decades.
Although the army SAF and the “Rapid Support” are equal in rudeness and harming citizens, the SAF is at the bottom of what she called “seniority” in the craft. If the army, according to her, protests against its equality with the “Rapid Support” in the evils of violating citizens’ rights, then the first to protest in reality with equality is the “Rapid Support”, which is still a virgin in the field of these evils. Whatever the case, the comparison between a regular SAF
and militias is, at best, a comparison between oranges and apples, as the Franks say.
Perriello’s despair at ending the war through negotiation between the parties echoed a statement by a previous US special envoy to Sudan, John Danforth, President George W. Bush’s envoy to Sudan in 2001. He said, exhausted by his mission to bring peace to Sudan between the Islamist Salvation Government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, “I think sooner or later the United States US or other countries involved in the Sudan peace process will ask themselves if there is a better way to use their time.”