Sudan war pushing country towards partition, US envoy says

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Sudan is at risk of breaking apart or becoming a “failed state”, the US special envoy to the country said, as foreign powers stoke a war that could rumble on for decades and deepen an already massive humanitarian catastrophe.

Tom Perriello, who was appointed by President Joe Biden in February, told journalists on Friday that the prospects for peace were “bleak” because too many actors were “profiting from the war, both financially and politically”.

War erupted last April between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group whose leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemeti, controls much of the country’s gold. Since then, at least 11mn people have been displaced, with 3mn of those fleeing to neighbouring countries.

“You don’t have a good side and a bad side. You have a bad side and an even worse side,” said Perriello, who has helped negotiate access for food aid to displaced populations, but who has been criticised for lending credibility to an ineffective peace process. “The losers are the Sudanese people, who continue to starve.”

The RSF, which is backed by the UAE, had been responsible for “ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity”, he said. The Emiratis have denied taking sides, although flight tracking and a UN special report suggests the kingdom supplies arms to the RSF via Chad and receives shipments of gold.

But Perriello said Sudan’s government had also exacerbated the conflict and pushed the country towards partition by denying food aid to RSF-controlled areas, in effect using starvation as a weapon of war.

The government of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the country’s de facto president, this month introduced changes to legal tender that could wipe out the savings of people living in RSF territory, potentially adding to food insecurity.

Perriello said that could nudge the RSF towards declaring partition by pushing it to set up parallel “government structures” to deal with the crisis.

The US envoy said several internal and external actors, including Islamist factions inside Sudan, regarded it as in their interests to keep the fighting going. “The countries that are fuelling this war and arming this war are doing the people of Sudan and the region a great disservice,” he said.

Perriello accused Russia of trying to “squeeze every bit of profit they can out of both sides”, particularly through gold shipments. Various Sudanese warlords, as well as mercenaries from across the Sahel, the semi-arid strip beneath the Sahara, were also being drawn into the conflict in the hope of material or political gain, he said.

Since the war began last year, the front lines have shifted, with the RSF controlling most of Darfur in the west, as well as big areas of Khartoum, forcing the SAF to move the capital to Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast.

Perriello said that neither side could win the war despite fleeting victories and the only hope for lasting peace was to revive the aborted “democratic transition” that began after dictator Omar al-Bashir was ousted in 2019.

While some factions might happily settle for a partitioning of the country, he said, that would be a disaster for Sudan and for regional stability.

“It would probably guarantee 30 or 40 years of war,” he said. “It would essentially create an early Balkans period of fighting over each of the regions.”

Further partition of the country, which already split once in 2011 with the creation of South Sudan, would make it even harder to get aid to people who face what the UN has said could be the worst famine since the 1980s.

Cartography by Paul McCallum