The Failed “Coup-Proofing” Behind the Recent Violence in Sudan

Nearly four years ago, in April, 2019, protesters helped overthrow the Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir, who had become notorious around the world for his role in perpetrating mass slaughter in the country’s Darfur region. Bashir’s downfall did not immediately lead to any democratic transformations—many protesters were later killed by the same military forces that had ousted Bashir—but by October, 2019, a civilian Prime Minister had been appointed to run the government alongside the military. Two years later, the military took full control of Sudan in a coup led by two generals who had long been key players in the nation’s politics: Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who has spent his career with the Army, and Mohamed Hamdan, formerly a commander of the infamous janjaweed militia, which had terrorized Darfur’s civilians, and who’d become close to Bashir.

Over time, conflict developed between these two generals. Last week, that conflict flared, leading to clashes across the country between the Sudanese Armed Forces, led by Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group led by Hamdan. Hundreds of civilians have died, several thousand have been wounded, and many others wonder whether a ceasefire that was announced earlier in the week will hold.

To learn more about the situation in Sudan, I spoke by phone with Mai Hassan, an associate professor of political science at M.I.T. who has written extensively on the region. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how Sudan got to this point, the role of outside countries in the conflict, and how the roots of the current fighting might lie in the genocide in Darfur.

In a broad sense, what do you think the fight between these two generals is about?

I would say that this is the result of so-called coup-proofing. Sudan is caught in what’s known as the coup-civil-war trap. We should go back to Sudan’s prior dictator, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who had been in office from 1989 to 2019. One thing that a lot of autocrats do to prevent armed factions of the state from launching coups is to coup-proof, which means creating rival centers of power by creating an internal security apparatus. Sudan has a conventional army, the Sudanese Armed Forces, or SAF, which is one of the belligerents now. Back in the early two-thousands, around the war in Darfur, Bashir decided to rely on janjaweed or Arab militias to engage in scorched-earth tactics and genocide. Really horrible stuff.

After that, he incorporated some of these janjaweed militias into an official paramilitary and into the Sudanese state, and allowed them to grow. He allowed them to enrich themselves, and engaged in and actually passed through the parliament a decree allowing the Rapid Support Forces, the successors to the janjaweed, to be on an equal institutional footing as the Army. In 2013, the janjaweed were incorporated as the R.S.F., which began to be brought into the Sudanese state. By 2017, through an act of parliament, the leader of the R.S.F. responded directly to the head of state. Bashir did this to coup-proof, to insure that if the SAF ever got too rebellious, or too powerful, he would have a counterweight. And, in fact, for some time, Bashir called Hamdan “my protector.”

Unfortunately for him, the coup happened anyway. In 2019, there were mass protests, which were followed by the military somewhat directly taking power.

The uprising was really propelled by civilians and civilian forces. The economy was just in shambles and honestly still is. There’s so much fighting, so much injustice, and so people mobilized out onto the streets. I was talking earlier about coup-proofing, but the situation on the ground got so bad that the SAF and the R.S.F. ended up joining the opposition, in part because they recognized that Bashir was just untenable, and that he was no longer going to be able to secure their financial or political interests going forward. Even though they were created to be these rivalrous bodies, they ended up joining and responding to, in a sense, the will of the people and couping out Bashir.

Since then, the leaders of the R.S.F. and the SAF, along with other élites in other security organs, negotiated with civilians to figure out the transition to what we were hoping would be democracy. Burhan, who’s in charge of the SAF, was the leader of the transition. He was supposed to be the leader for the first twenty-one months and then hand over leadership to a civilian who would oversee the rest of the transition. As you can imagine, he didn’t do so willingly. In 2021, he said that he was going to take over the rest of the transition.

In that brief period between 2019 and 2021, when there was a civilian Prime Minister and there was at least a façade of democratic movement, was anything accomplished?

That’s a really complicated question. I think there was a lot of hope at the beginning for Abdalla Hamdok, the civilian Prime Minister. His government tried to tackle the largest issues from Bashir’s dictatorship and tried to dismantle lots of the elements of the state. It engaged in civil-service reform. It had this asset-recovery program to try to reclaim assets that the Islamists had taken from the state. But it wasn’t strong enough to really see those through.

What has changed since the military took full control almost two years ago? How does Sudan function differently, either from the transitional time or from Bashir’s time?

Both of my parents came back from Khartoum just a month ago. The economic crisis seems to be getting worse and worse and worse. Part of this is because, since the 2021 coup, a lot of Western countries have pulled aid as a way to get the belligerents back to the negotiating table, and to try to force democratization upon these unwilling parties. Another thing that I’m seeing is that there’s a growing disconnect between the “street”—informal resistance committees that are mobilizing their own neighborhoods, that are really agitating against the regime—and the more coördinated, or formal, opposition. You’re seeing a growing divide there. It’s really unfortunate.

Can you talk more about this divide?

If the West is calling on or forcing people to the bargaining table with a military regime, the people that it’s going to ask first are the civilian opposition: formal political parties, formal women’s groups, formal civil-society groups. But those groups seem to be getting more and more disconnected from the opinions on the ground. During the uprising, in particular, a lot of informal resistance committees, what are called neighborhood resistance committees, had formed and emerged organically to lead mobilization, in part because formal civil-society groups were so repressed, because it was so easy to find them, because it was so easy to infiltrate them.

But a lot of these groups that emerged organically eschewed verticality—having a leader and then a vice-leader and all that. Instead, it’s much more agile, much more horizontal, which was really, really great for mobilization, as you can imagine. But then how do you negotiate with something like that? Who’s the leader who can represent the interests of all of these local resistance committees?

How would you define the relationship between Burhan and Hamdan? How has it changed during the past two years?

The coup happened in October, 2021. In August, 2022, Hamdan, who is known as Hemedti, went on television. He went on some kind of big public platform and said that the coup was a mistake. Reading between the lines, a lot of people were saying that Hemedti realized that Burhan is being run by the Islamists, and the Islamists don’t want Hemedti in power. They really want to kick him out. You could see this growing tension between them. And, in October, 2021, when Burhan and Hemedti no longer had shared interests—the civilian forces were out, Bashir was out—the split between them started to emerge.