Fighting in Sudan: Deep insights into the background of the conflict
John Donne: "Send not to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee."
Doctor of Juridical Science (SJD) in International Law, Harvard University
For anyone who has not been following events in Sudan for some time, it is difficult to understand the forces at play in the current battle between the government army, and the militia known as the RSF or Rapid Support Forces.
Abdelwahab El-Affendi, Professor of Politics at Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, provides a succinct summary of developments in Sudan in the past 10 years in particular,1 which can serve as a kind of introduction to the complex forces at play in Sudan. There the army and the RSF are engaged in an all-out battle for control of Khartoum, the capital of some six million people, and other towns and cities in the country. 2 The population of Sudan in 2023 is 48 million people.
The situation is out of control, as a huge humanitarian disaster begins to unfold.
In order to understand the ongoing fighting, readers would be well-advised to begin by reading Professor Abdelwahab El-Affendi’s introduction, published in Al Jazeera on April 17.
It is within this historical context that one can begin to understand the forces at play in the current fighting. 3 Libyan militia leader Khalifa Haftar is reportedly supporting the the RSF forces led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo. Haftar is backed by Russia and the United Arab Emirates,
The Wall Street Journal reports:
Both (Burnham and Dagalo) have allied with the U.A.E., which assisted Mr. Haftar militarily to fight political rivals (in Libya) and hired Gen. Dagalo’s men to fight in Yemen. The two have also worked with the Kremlin-backed private military contractor Wagner. Mr. Haftar hosts the paramilitaries at his bases in Libya, and Gen. Dagalo has struck lucrative gold mining partnerships with the group, which is headed by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian businessman and close associate of President Vladimir Putin.
Egypt has supported the army forces led by General Burhan.
The current crisis in Sudan is one the U.N. Security Council might be expected mediate or control. However, with Russia challenging the U.N. Charter and the United Nations itself through its invasion of Ukraine, and with the involvement of Russia’s Wagner group with Haftar and Dagalo’s RSF, the Security Council, which is chaired this month by Russia, may not be able to act to uphold international peace and security.
The situation is extremely dangerous, as it raises the possibility of a civil war in Sudan, which could potentially involve the latent military conflict in Libya, and the support by Egypt, the UAE, and Russia of different parties to the conflict.
But why should we care?
Why should we care about the fighting in Sudan?
There are two different answers, on two different levels, to this question.
The first was stated by John Donne (1572-1631) when he wrote the following:
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1624)
No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.—Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and several steps in my Sickness, written in 1624
The last lines state Donne’s belief in the clearest of terms:
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
Donne wrote this poem in 1624, as The Thirty Years War (1618-1648) had been raging for six years. It is of more than passing coincidence that Hugo Grotius published his seminal treatise on international law, De jure belli ac pacis (On the Law of War and Peace]), in 1625. Grotius is generally considered to be the father of international law.
The modern system of sovereign states and international law was born during what was the great world war of the seventeenth century and at its conclusion with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.
The second reason we should care about the fighting in Sudan is that peace is indivisible.
It was to control its evil effects that Grotius sought to humanize war by subjecting its conduct to the restraints of law.
The moral impulse expressed by Donne, in a larger sense, became entwined with the birth and development of international law. Four centuries of experience including two world wars in the twentieth century brought home the lesson that peace, which has from the beginning been a central goal of international law, cannot be divorced from the legal restraints humanity has erected to constrain its nemesis, war.
This fact elevates Donne’s meditations during the Thirty Year’s War from a personal plane to the level of the fate of nations.
The international law seeking to limit wars, expressed today in the U.N. Charter’s prohibition of the threat or use of force (Article 2 paragraph 4) is in a very real sense the international society or global equivalent of Donne’s “Don’t send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.”
Like the Peace of Westphalia, the United Nations Charter was adopted following a devastating world war, as also had been the Pact of the League of Nations at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919.
The desire for peace is why the nations of the world have continuously striven to avoid wars and to bring them to a halt.
Peace is indivisible.
This is the belief that drove the United Kingdom to defend the Falkland Islands against an invasion by Argentina in 1982. For if peace begins to unravel and the unraveling is ignored or allowed to spread, if aggression in violation of Article 2 (4) is not countered, the whole fabric of peace begins to unravel.
And the more it unravels, the harder it becomes to stop the unraveling.
That is why we should care about the fighting in Sudan and the foreign actors involved, and the ongoing challenge to the U.N. Charter and our civilization represented by Russian aggression and war crimes in Ukraine.
Abdelwahab El-Affendi, “There is much danger in the Sudan crisis but also an opportunity; The proliferation of militias has long undermined the Sudanese state. The ongoing fighting could put an end to it, Al Jazeera, April 17, 2023.
Abdelwahab El-Affendi is Professor of Politics at Doha Institute for Graduate Studies
See, e.g., “Soudan : ce qu’il faut savoir sur la guérilla urbaine qui plonge le pays dans le chaos, Le Figaro, le 18 avril 2023 (@12:30 pm);.
See Benoit Faucon, Summer Said and Jared Malsin, “Libyan Militia and Egypt’s Military Back Opposite Sides in Sudan Conflict; Involvement of regional forces raises risk that fighting between warring Sudanese generals could widen and set back cease-fire efforts,” Wall Street Journal, April 19, 2023 (4:18 pm ET);
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See also “Why I care about the war in Ukraine,” Trenchant Observations, June 26, 2023,