The New Sudan and Dinka-ocracy (2-2)

Abdullah Ali Ibrahim

The excitement surrounding the Nairobi meeting on the “New Sudan” resembled, as we have seen, the relationship between Dorian Gray and his portrait in Oscar Wilde’s famous novel. Dorian Gray chose to let his portrait bear the marks of aging, wrinkles, and sins, while he himself remained young and strikingly handsome. Similarly, the marginalized groups and their supporters chose to maintain the fresh and appealing image of the New Sudan, as reflected in the Nairobi conference, while the actual picture of the New Sudan in South Sudan aged and withered.

It is virtually impossible to associate the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) with the idea of the New Sudan, even if others in Nairobi claimed affiliation with it despite their flaws. The RSF and the New Sudan are as incompatible as Adam and Eve. The RSF originally emerged as part of the “Salvation State” plan to crush the New Sudan at the lowest cost possible, targeting the armed struggle movements in Darfur and the Nuba Mountains, as well as popular resistance in cities such as the Khartoum uprising in September 2013. While others may have shed their ugliness onto the image of the New Sudan, the RSF was the very tool engineered by the Salvation regime to spill blood upon that image. The RSF further disfigured the image by embracing the Nairobi vision—despite being the very force that had inflicted so much suffering on those who championed it.

No one understands this newfound ugliness better than Youssef Ezzat, former advisor to Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti). In a mature and insightful statement, Ezzat explained that the RSF’s adoption of the New Sudan vision stemmed from the confusion of being constantly dragged into alliances that were merely tactical tools imposed by the war, without any genuine intellectual or political commitment to the principles behind those alliances. For the RSF’s commitment to the New Sudan to be credible, Ezzat argued, it must resolve the contradiction between such a commitment and the RSF’s current familial and tribal structure, which revolves around clan leadership and tribal loyalties. The key reform, according to Ezzat, is to restructure the RSF as a national democratic institution. Ezzat further noted that the RSF’s tribal and social mobilization has outweighed any commitment to a civilian project, leading to a reduction of its political vision to mere tactical maneuvering.

Ezzat may have been overly generous in his assessment of the RSF. The RSF’s gains in Nairobi were not based on any constitutional framework or foundational document of the anticipated state, nor on the New Sudan itself. Instead, their success stemmed from a private agreement signed with Abdelaziz al-Hilu for joint military action against the “State of 1956.” Al-Hilu, it seems, was not concerned with the marks of misery and ugliness that this pact inflicted on the face of the New Sudan, as long as he remained young and attractive in political terms.

Two Faces of the New Sudan

The Sudanese liberal and leftist elite, who have been aligned with the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) since 1986, ignored the flaws that marred the image of the New Sudan in two key ways.

The first was their rejection of the critiques directed at the SPLM’s struggle for the New Sudan by thoughtful and responsible commentators. As early as the 1990s, several books documented the shortcomings of the SPLM’s struggle—written by individuals who had embraced the idea, fought for it, and later grew disillusioned. These books warned of the SPLM’s fate if it failed to restrain its militarized politics. For example, Lam Akol, an academic and former high-ranking SPLM commander, published “SPLM: Inside an African Revolution” in 2001, detailing his attempts to introduce democratic reforms within the movement before defecting in 1991. Similarly, Mohamed Haroun Kafi, a scholar of Nuba cultural heritage, joined the SPLM in 1986, left in 1996, and wrote “Sudan’s Conflict” about the experience. Peter Adwok Nyaba, who joined the SPLM in 1986 and left by the late 1990s, published “Politics of Liberation in South Sudan: An Insider’s View” in 1997.

The liberal elite not only ignored these critical works but also attacked their authors, as exemplified by Mansour Khalid’s response to Lam Akol in “Call for Democracy,” where Khalid harshly criticized Akol for breaking away from John Garang in 1991, echoing the left’s standard rhetoric of betrayal. The liberal elite stubbornly refused to acknowledge the growing ugliness of the New Sudan’s image, wanting to preserve their own pristine appearance while allowing the New Sudan itself to bear the marks of decay.

Dinka and “Ethnocracy”

The second failure of the liberal elite was their refusal to confront the reality of the New Sudan after South Sudan’s independence. The New Sudan’s actual implementation in its birthplace discouraged them entirely. They found solace in the death of Colonel John Garang in 2005, believing that if he had survived until the 2011 referendum, the South would not have seceded, and the New Sudan vision would have endured. Thus, they shifted the blame for the New Sudan’s flaws onto its actual implementation, preserving their own idealized version of it.

The ugliness of the New Sudan in its birthplace was grotesque, as detailed in Clemency Beniot’s harrowing book “War and Ethnic Cleansing in South Sudan” (2021). Beniot documented the ethnic cleansing of the Nuer and other groups after 2013, tracing it back to the “ethnocracy” of South Sudan, where the ruling Dinka elite monopolized power. This ethnocracy fused South Sudanese nationalism with Dinka identity—a merger that was consolidated during the liberation war. Beniot traced the pivotal moments when the Dinka came to dominate the SPLM and monopolized its leadership and benefits. This elite developed a sense of entitlement as the “liberators” of South Sudan, positioning themselves as the sole architects of independence.

The liberation struggle became a founding myth that justified Dinka dominance within the ethnocracy. The Dinka elite even went so far as to define other South Sudanese people’s homelands outside South Sudan itself. For instance, they designated Ethiopia as the homeland of the Nuer due to their historical roots there, and Sudan as the homeland of the Shilluk because of their archaeological origins in Sudan’s White Nile region. This logic justified the ongoing dispossession and displacement of non-Dinka South Sudanese, reinforcing the notion that they were not true South Sudanese and could be driven from their land without remorse.

Those who championed the New Sudan at Nairobi seemed to be threatening rather than offering hope—maintaining their youthful, radiant image while the face of the New Sudan was marred with wrinkles and scars in its birthplace.