On the Stage of the Political-Diplomatic War (2-2)

Ambassador Dr. Ibrahim Al-Kabbashi

Bloc One is the locomotive pulling the other three. It triggers alternative pathways of struggle according to the circumstances produced by the war’s daily dynamics. If signs point to battlefield setbacks, it opens different political and diplomatic channels from its reserves. As it mobilized supporters across Africa for war (states and organizations), it now mobilizes contingency backers from the same sources. Using coercive diplomacy — a set of tactics steadily employed since the end of the bipolar era — it keeps its objectives fixed while waiting for opportune moments to resume its strategic advance: dismantling, reconstitution, extermination, replacement, and the re-production of old settler colonialism in new guise.

From the repertoire of Bloc One over the past forty years, the United States — in close, public coordination with its partners in the Quadruple Alliance — adapted the idea of holding talks in Geneva.

Since the early 1990s, after the Soviet Union’s collapse and the expansion of U.S. global influence, the approach to Sudan has not substantially changed. The hallmark of U.S. policy toward Sudan has been coercive diplomacy founded on four pillars: 1) iterative demands or, more precisely, issuing orders; 2) the requirement to comply; 3) threats of sanctions; and 4) promised rewards that never materialized if compliance occurred. Those are the tools of American coercive diplomacy toward Sudan over four decades.

When Sudan historically avoided asymmetric confrontation with the U.S., it tried to establish relations without sacrificing its sovereignty and independence; cooperation in common humanitarian causes was possible while respecting cultural and societal specificities. But tendencies toward domination — under a sense of superiority — overshadowed the prerequisites for peaceful coexistence and healthy interstate relations. The aphorism “what is good for the West should be good for the rest” became a widespread refrain: what the West deems beneficial should be accepted by others.

The lessons of our relationship with the U.S. remain fresh in Sudanese diplomats’ memory.

After John Garang returned from his doctoral studies in Iowa, he led a 1983 rebellion — supported by multiple dimensions of U.S. backing. President Nimeiri’s complete alignment with U.S. policy then did not suffice to stop Garang’s revolt. The objectives of the SPLA at that time aligned with U.S. strategic aims; the U.S. saw no reason to give up a reliable strategic partner for a transient tactical friend. Nimeiri fell, and the cycle of U.S. support for the SPLA escalated.

Then came the National Salvation (Al-Inqadh) government — which, ironically, was presented as rescuing Sudan from a genocidal project resembling the current one (read the SPLA manifesto of 1983) — while the SPLA was openly aware of U.S. political and logistical support.

By 1996 the SPLA no longer held many of its former positions. Thereupon U.S. coercive diplomacy intensified to “save Garang’s army,” designing what was called a “lifeline” — supply routes for provisions and military material that sustained the SPLA for another decade. This is standard practice in coercive diplomacy, a method the U.S. seeks to reproduce in Geneva today.

For over twenty years the U.S. and the Troika provided ample support to the SPLA’s military campaign against Sudan. Dozens of Sudanese government appeals to ceasefire and seek fair settlement were thwarted by U.S. pressure on the SPLA to refuse peace. Then in August 1999 Sudan’s oil began to flow. Its positive effects on the economy also enhanced military modernization — alarming those who had long incited the SPLA to avoid peace. Consequently, the U.S. shifted tactics: President George W. Bush telephoned Omar al-Bashir; Secretary of State Colin Powell visited Khartoum; the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and numerous U.S. and European diplomats, politicians and parliamentarians sought a rapid settlement with the South. The dominant instrument remained coercive diplomacy.

In this context, Norway’s Minister of International Development, Hilda Heintz (Johnson), recounted how two U.S. congressmen, Donald Payne and Thomas Tancredo, sent a letter to President Bush naming twelve Sudanese figures — many of whom were in the government negotiating team at Naivasha — accusing them of fabricated terrorist activities from their pasts and urging sanctions against them. That scenario culminated in what they called the Sudan Peace Act. All this frantic activity sought to extract a settlement under threat that would enshrine America’s long-term political investments in the South. (The perceptive reader will see the parallel with today’s events.)

Minister Heintz, who was ever present at Naivasha, said she coordinated with her American allies to transmit pressure and threats to the government negotiating team, hoping to create fissures that would yield American desired outcomes. The negotiating team reportedly replied that such pressures would not yield the fruits desired by their senders.

Thus the methods of American coercive diplomacy continued — and now, in the final days of the Biden administration, its calls for the army commander to go to Geneva are driven by shifts in global power centers that run counter to U.S. interests, notably the emergence of an active rival global pole that lacks the coercive instruments that have long colored U.S. relations with Sudan and its Bloc One allies in the war against the Sudanese people and army.

But suppose President Burhan decides to attend that meeting — the scenario most favorable to the U.S. and the UAE, and also to the RSF and its political base.

It would be the worst scenario for the Sudanese military institution in all its factions and for the overwhelming majority of the Sudanese people.

Under this hypothetical scenario several questions arise:

Will Burhan attend as chairman of the Sovereignty Council (thus head of state, responsible for both civil and military institutions)?

Or will he attend solely as commander of the Sudanese Armed Forces, facing the commander of the RSF?

If Burhan responds to the invitation as the RSF-sought representative of the army only:

– He would, by his own consent, forfeit his constitutional status as head of state.

– He would thereby relinquish his decision to dissolve the RSF.

– He would nullify his determination to treat the RSF as a rebellious terrorist entity whose apparatus must be dismantled.

– He would thereby recast the political and legal characterization of the RSF to mirror that of Garang’s movement in 2005, or of Jibril and Minawi today. Thus the Sudanese army would have been reduced to just one faction among several.

Hemedti and his brother would be restored to their previous positions as vice-presidents of the Sovereignty Council, frozen RSF bank accounts would be unfrozen, compensation — perhaps for roughly 150,000 dead among their ranks — would be paid, similar numbers of wounded would be treated, and camps seized from the armed forces would be returned to them.

A ceasefire would be declared under which RSF forces would remain in the positions they occupied, and the Sudanese army would be obliged to stop attacking them. All of this would be enshrined in a document adopted by the United Nations, the African Union and IGAD. International forces would then be deployed to separate “the two factions,” and the situation could remain frozen for years — thereby securing the malign alliance’s objectives to seize Sudan by tearing it apart into cantons.

The public framing of the dispute would be reduced to a personal quarrel between two officers: General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo.

The settlement scheme with such contours — though perhaps not perfectly identical to the pre-April 2023 landscape — would represent a serious political maneuver to leap directly toward the war’s strategic objectives: settler-colonial occupation, extermination, replacement. The Geneva invitation would then be merely a formal pretext for what Bloc One had already designed in its capitals.

Under this logic, there would be no room to account for mass killings, looting, rapes, the plundering of property, the destruction of institutions, and the occupation of homes. These are precisely the issues enshrined in the famous Jeddah Agreement, and their mere mention enrages all four blocs of the alliance. The Geneva platform, logically speaking, was designed to get them off the hook from commitments they made in Jeddah.

Thus the appropriate handling for them is to preserve the negotiation as a man-to-man matter, outside the remit of constitutional institutions governed by formal rules of institutional governance. For that reason the invitation to Geneva cunningly avoided recognizing Burhan in his constitutional capacity as head of the Sovereignty Council and the executive government apparatus.

All this would be achieved through the four pillars of coercive diplomacy mentioned earlier. Burhan — if in Geneva — would be surrounded by so-called mediators who are in fact the leaders of the Quadruple Alliance as delineated at the head of this article.

Everything outlined above is hypothetical — yet it is extracted from a fundamental truth that makes the likelihood of its full or partial realization plausible: the Quadruple Alliance that engineered the crisis since late 2018, charted its course at every stage, and instigated the present war, has shown no fundamental change — neither in its coordinated composition nor in its strategic objectives.

The Geneva invitation is part of the tactical repertoire shaped by stage assessments: whether to respond to significant RSF battlefield losses that cannot be compensated, or to hemorrhaging finances, or to the mounting political and criminal liabilities of alliance members, or to score votes among war victims in U.S. elections.

Accordingly, the Sudanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded to the U.S. invitation to Geneva. The alliance blocs likely interpret that response as a refusal. Meanwhile it is still too early to interpret the assassination attempt on President Burhan today — which claimed the lives of some attendees — as a reaction to his stance on the U.S. demand that he submit to Geneva.