Two roosters cannot serve in one yard. In Sudan, armed conflict is looming within the national armed forces between Abdel Fattah Burhan, the army chief and president of Sudan, and his second-in-command General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, alias Hemedti, head of a former militia group.
The Sudanese woke up on Thursday morning to the alarming report from the Sudanese army that the Hemedti paramilitary force is mobilizing troops in the capital Khartoum and other cities. His forces would now number 100,000 men. In the north near the city of Merowe, they would like to occupy the airport at an army base where Egyptian soldiers are also stationed. “A clash between the soldiers of formally the same army will be terrible for Sudan,” said a Sudanese journalist.
Reports are coming from all parts of the country about the soldiers in sand colored uniforms of Hemedti taking up strategic positions. In western Darfur, they would gather near the regional capital of Al Fashar.
Military movements near Merowe in the north could become a flashpoint due to the presence of hundreds of Egyptian soldiers stationed there two years ago over a dispute between Egypt and Ethiopia over a controversial dam in the Blue Nile. In the power struggle in Sudan, Egypt supports Burhan, Hemedti is allied with several Gulf states.
Coup
The long-simmering tensions between Burhan and Hemedti have reached a crescendo in recent weeks during talks between civilian groups and army leaders about a handover to civilian rule. Part of these discussions is the integration of the militia into the regular army. Burhan wants that merger to take place in two years, Hemedti in ten years. It was once intended that Burhan and Hemedti would oversee the democratic transition following the fall of President Omar al-Bashir, who was in power for 30 years and was ousted in a popular uprising in 2019. But in October 2021, just weeks before Burhan was due to step down as head of the transitional regime, he led a coup that removed all civilian politicians from office. Hemedti supported the coup, but when it only worsened the situation in Sudan, he called the coup a mistake. Since then, their struggle for individual gain has threatened to further destabilize the country.
Senior leaders of both the old regular army and the militia are in business. Already under Bashir, generals were allowed to set up companies and so they controlled a large part of the economy. Hemedti has a gold mine in Darfur and is received at the highest level in the Gulf countries and also in Moscow, where he walked the red carpet just before the invasion of Ukraine.
Pro-democracy demonstrations
Hemedti belongs to Bashir’s toxic legacy. The story of how an uneducated tall man with the sarcastic smile managed to work his way up from a mischievous child to the almost most powerful man in Sudan remains a mystery. A camel trader from neighboring Chad, he became the leader of the Janjaweed, a militia deployed by Bashir that took on murderous Darfuri of African descent in the early 2000s. When the battle in Darfur was over, Bashir incorporated the Janjaweed, now known as the Rapid Support Forces, into the national army. They are courageous desert fighters and Hemedti bought them modern weapons. But they are not well trained and many generals of the old regular army loathe his illiterate bush warriors. They are feared among the population because of their crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators, which still take place almost every week in several cities.
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The civilian activists who were about to strike a deal with the military on a new civilian regime have little to gain from a battle within the military. In the background is a struggle for influence with the Muslim fundamentalists who held sway under Bashir. They have recently gained influence again and bet on Burhan to represent their interests.