{"id":53597,"date":"2025-08-31T02:03:22","date_gmt":"2025-08-30T23:03:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/?p=53597"},"modified":"2025-08-31T02:03:22","modified_gmt":"2025-08-30T23:03:22","slug":"hamdoks-alliances-and-the-craft-of-neutrality-in-beautifying-funerals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/2025\/08\/31\/hamdoks-alliances-and-the-craft-of-neutrality-in-beautifying-funerals\/","title":{"rendered":"Hamdok\u2019s Alliances and the Craft of Neutrality in Beautifying Funerals"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Dr. Amjad Farid Al-Tayeb<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cKnowledge is never innocent. It is saturated with power, always used either to reinforce or to resist domination.\u201d
\n\u2013 Edward Said, Orientalism<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In today\u2019s collapsing Sudan, Said\u2019s insight feels more urgent than ever. Words are no longer mere vessels of meaning, but weapons in a struggle for existence itself: mobilized to justify sieges, normalize massacres, or construct false sanctity around alliances stained with blood. Here, duplicitous discourse becomes more dangerous than bullets, for it lays the ethical and symbolic groundwork for crimes committed in the name of \u201cneutrality\u201d or \u201cpolitical realism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since war erupted in April 2023 between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), civilian political forces have descended into confusion\u2014fighting bitterly over representation and legitimacy. Out of this confusion emerged the Taqaddum\/\u1e62umud<\/em> alliance, fronted by former Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, who has lived in the UAE since resigning in January 2022. The coalition presents itself as the conscience of the revolution, cloaked in rhetoric of neutrality. Yet a closer look reveals a glaring bias toward the RSF, objectively helping to reproduce the very conditions of war it claims to transcend.<\/p>\n

Hegemony Through Political Discourse<\/strong><\/p>\n

As Gramsci taught, hegemony is not imposed by force alone\u2014it also redefines meaning, offering alternative interpretations that make bias appear like neutrality. From this perspective, the Addis Ababa Declaration (January 2024), signed by Hamdok and RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo \u201cHemedti,\u201d was less about \u201cending the war and protecting civilians\u201d than about granting political legitimacy to RSF-controlled civilian administrations. It paved the way for the Ta\u2019sis<\/em> coalition, an offshoot of Hamdok\u2019s alliance, which openly supported forming an RSF-backed government\u2014elevating the militia from \u201carmed group\u201d to \u201cpolitical leadership.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Addis Memorandum was no passing event; it was a founding moment of a new hegemonic order. Through it, the RSF\u2014long accused of war crimes\u2014was recast as a legitimate political actor. The press conference following the Hamdok\u2013Hemedti signing was a living metaphor: Hamdok seated beside a warlord delivering incitement, even as RSF fighters looted, raped, and killed civilians in Gezira State.<\/p>\n

By rearticulating political discourse, the \u1e62umud<\/em> alliance assumed the role of what Gramsci called the \u201cnon-organic intellectual\u201d\u2014serving external capital (notably Emirati petrodollars) and militia violence rather than the interests of society. This opportunism transformed perpetrators into \u201cpartners,\u201d while attacking and stigmatizing dissenting voices through smear campaigns, hate speech, and disinformation.<\/p>\n

Manufactured Consensus<\/strong><\/p>\n

Chomsky has long argued that propaganda works by \u201cmanufacturing consent.\u201d Taqaddum\/\u1e62umud<\/em>\u2019s calls to \u201cprotect civilians\u201d through a no-fly zone exemplify this: demonizing government airstrikes while deliberately downplaying the RSF\u2019s ground massacres, looting, mass rapes, and ethnic cleansing. In some cases, coalition figures went further\u2014justifying RSF occupations of homes and hospitals in Khartoum, or whitewashing the UAE\u2019s direct role in fueling the conflict.<\/p>\n

In May 2023, the Civil Front to Stop the War (then part of Taqaddum<\/em>) even issued a statement falsely attributing RSF rapes to the army\u2014later retracting under public pressure. This was no accident but part of a systematic pattern: exaggerate army abuses, obscure RSF atrocities, and thereby recast the militia as a legitimate actor.<\/p>\n

Independent data exposes this distortion. ACLED reported in November 2024 that 77% of civilian abuses were committed by the RSF. The INSIGHTS Center in July 2025 found the figure even higher\u201488% of civilian killings attributable to the RSF. Such overwhelming evidence can only be denied through a deliberate false consciousness\u2014what \u1e62umud<\/em> markets as \u201cneutrality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Internal Orientalism and the Islamist Scarecrow<\/strong><\/p>\n

Edward Said showed how dominant discourses invent a negative \u201cOther\u201d to justify violence. In Sudan, \u1e62umud<\/em> deploys Islamists in this role. Instead of confronting RSF-led massacres in Darfur, Khartoum, and Gezira, the alliance distracts by casting Islamists as the ultimate evil. This exploits public resentment against Omar al-Bashir\u2019s regime but ignores that RSF atrocities today mirror those very crimes. Indeed, the RSF itself is a legacy of Islamist rule.<\/p>\n

In this \u201cinternal Orientalism,\u201d anyone not aligned with \u1e62umud<\/em> is branded \u201cIslamist\u201d or \u201cwarmonger.\u201d Thus, independent dissent is excluded, and the political struggle shifts from issues of justice and accountability to semantic wars over identity\u2014policed by a coalition claiming sole ownership of \u201crevolution\u201d and \u201cpeace.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Banality of Political Evil<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hannah Arendt\u2019s concept of the \u201cbanality of evil\u201d resonates here. \u1e62umud<\/em>\u2019s calls for a no-fly zone\u2014fully aware it would hand military advantage to a genocidal militia\u2014illustrate a bureaucratic pursuit of political survival devoid of ethical judgment. When the same Western or Emirati funds both RSF warfare and the alliance\u2019s \u201cpeace workshops,\u201d the contradiction becomes grotesque. What for displaced Sudanese is existential suffering, for Hamdok\u2019s allies becomes a bullet point in a donor report.<\/p>\n

Organized Stupidity of Political Decay<\/strong><\/p>\n

The result is what might be called an organized stupidity of political decline. Neutrality becomes a mask for complicity, enabling efforts to partition Sudan by legitimizing an RSF \u201cgovernment.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u1e62umud<\/em> does not offer a pathway to end the war. It reproduces it\u2014under different words. Its \u201cneutrality\u201d is not ethical principle but a strategic bias dressed in false objectivity, serving foreign patrons who seek to reshape Sudan\u2019s balance of power.<\/p>\n

What Sudan needs is not counterfeit neutrality, but moral courage: a politics centered on victims rather than elites, accountability rather than impunity, civilian agency rather than militia coercion. Following Gramsci, this requires organic intellectuals tied to real social struggles; with Said, a critique of discourse itself; with Chomsky, resistance to propaganda; with Arendt, a recovery of ethical judgment amid the banality of evil.<\/p>\n

\u1e62umud<\/em> markets itself as the \u201credeemed faction,\u201d but in practice it repackages catastrophe with a civilian face and biased discourse. Unless Sudanese politics break from this path, the country will remain hostage between the army\u2019s hammer and the anvil of \u201cfalse neutrality\u201d that legitimizes armed blackmail. Only a politics centered on victims\u2014not their killers\u2014can chart a different future. Otherwise, \u1e62umud<\/em> will be remembered as yet another name for the banality of evil drowning Sudan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Dr. Amjad Farid Al-Tayeb \u201cKnowledge is never innocent. It is saturated with power, always used either to reinforce or to resist domination.\u201d \u2013 Edward Said, Orientalism In today\u2019s collapsing Sudan, Said\u2019s insight feels more urgent than ever. Words are no longer mere vessels of meaning, but weapons in a struggle for existence itself: mobilized …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1621,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53597"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53597\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53598,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53597\/revisions\/53598"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}