Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Himediti, deputy head of Sudan's ruling Transitional Military Council (TMC) and commander of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitaries.YASUYOSHI CHIBA/Getty Images
Robert Rotberg is the founding director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s program on intrastate conflict, a former senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and president emeritus of the World Peace Foundation. His latest book is Things Come Together: Africans Achieving Greatness in the Twenty-First Century.
Military rule is alive and well across Africa – and it is being strongly supported by Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Nowhere is that more obvious than in the Central African Republic and Mali, where the infamous Wagner Group of Russian mercenaries, overseen by an oligarch close to Mr. Putin, protects presidents and joins local security forces in repressing dissidents. It is happening in Sudan, too, where Wagnerites are reportedly in cahoots with the repressive generals who removed a popular civilian prime minister in October. And now, amidst its invasion of Ukraine, Russia is looking to expand the reach of its warships on Sudan’s shores.
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Three years ago, amid food shortages and rising prices, tens of thousands of protesting professionals and students crowded the governmental quarter of Sudan’s capital Khartoum, and forced Omar al-Bashir, who had been indicted as a war criminal after his ethnic cleansing of Darfur province in western Sudan, to abandon his presidency after 30 years in power. Two of Mr. al-Bashir’s right-hand men, the generals Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, threw him in prison and took his place in a loose alliance of convenience, while installing a civilian economist, Abdalla Hamdok, as prime minister. But last October, just before the generals were supposed to bow out and let civilians rule fully as per their previous agreement, they ousted Mr. Hamdok and took charge.
One of the key reasons for October’s coup was the military leaders’ fear that civilian rulers would deprive them of corrupt proceeds from their many commercial enterprises. Sales of gold – which comprise 50 per cent of Sudan’s export earnings – as well as returns from a trucking business, exports of livestock to Saudi Arabia and Egypt, construction entities, cement factories and a dominant pharmaceutical enterprise in Sudan, all enrich personal and institutional pockets through suspected kickbacks and padded contracts. Sentry, a respected Washington-based NGO, reports that the military’s commercial operations are vastly corrupt, with few leaders paying taxes.
And so, over the last six months, protesters have returned to Khartoum’s streets. They are demanding the return of democracy without soldiers standing over them, but they have also been fuelled by deteriorating living conditions. Annual inflation in Sudan soars above 260 per cent; average yearly per capita GDP is about $660, which is low even in Africa. Now, with the war in Ukraine preventing imports of wheat, the price of staples such as bread has doubled. But protesters have been killed by the repressive regime – 90 of them, since the beginning of 2022 – with thousands more wounded.
Mr. Putin, meanwhile, has stood with Gen. al-Burhan and Gen. Hamdan, better known by the moniker Hemeti. Indeed, Hemeti was in Moscow as Russia began its invasion of Ukraine, and he spoke at length with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov about a new naval facility that Moscow seeks to build at Port Sudan on the Red Sea, one of the globe’s most active shipping corridors. A base there would give Russia agency for the first time below the southern entrance to the Suez Canal and halfway to the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean.
The United States and other powers of the free world hardly want Russia encroaching upon such important shipping lanes, especially in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine. But Hemeti affirmed that he is open to the project, which was initiated under Mr. al-Bashir.
In Moscow, Hemeti also discussed the lucrative terms of the profit-sharing deal under which Russia is reportedly extracting gold from lavish deposits near Port Sudan. It is no surprise that Sudan was one of the 35 countries to abstain from the UN General Assembly’s vote this month to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Hemeti is the leader of the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group, which has been responsible for much of the recent violence against protesters. Between 2003 and 2010, he also led the Janjaweed militia, which perpetrated innumerable documented human-rights violations against civilians in Darfur. If Mr. al-Bashir were to be turned over to the International Criminal Court, he would likely be implicated in his predecessor’s crimes.
UN and U.S. negotiators remain hopeful that they can bring Sudan back into harmony with the West, so as effectively to freeze Russia’s burgeoning interest in the region. The negotiators also hope to return Sudan to democracy. But diplomatic entreaties may well founder on the shoals of the personal ambitions and enrichment plans of the likes of Mr. Putin and Hemeti.
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