It was instructive watching Kamal Idris, prime minister to the Sudanese Armed Forces’ regime in Khartoum, as he addressed—or should that be hectored?–-those who attended a panel discussion on the civil war in his country, at the Munich Security Conference last week.

The regime’s opposition to any outcome other than one it controls, was on full display. It started with the moderator, Lindsey Hilsum, international editor of Channel 4 News in the United Kingdom, pointing out that the SAF’s own ‘peace initiative’ ‘involved ‘the other side [the Rapid Support Forces] surrendering all the territory they control and going into camps to be vetted’. 

‘This is a global peace initiative, it is a win-win,’ Idris replied. ‘How do they win?’ Ms Hilsum interjected. ‘I will tell you in a minute,’ Idris replied—and of course he never did.

Instead he went on to list a host of international organisations he said had supported the initiative—to which Ms Hilsum replied: ‘What we need to know is, how is this going to bring peace? Because I have read what this proposal is and what I don’t see is compromise… You make peace with your enemy not your friend… Where is the compromise in this proposal?’ Again, Idris didn’t answer that either. 

So, no ceasefire agreed, then?’ Ms Hilsum said. ‘There is no concrete agreement which we have received and agreed upon,’ Idris replied. A plain ‘no’ would have been sufficient. 

The rest was a depressing but unsurprising litany of assertions and spurious claims. The urgency of the humanitarian issue notwithstanding, a ceasefire was not an end in itself; truces had solved nothing in Africa. ‘Most’ of the RSF’s fighters were mercenaries from Colombia and Ukraine. And—in response to a question from the audience—no, they wouldn’t talk to the RSF because under Sudanese law it had been officially dissolved and ‘does not exist anymore’. 

The audience listened with faces set. Idris was implacably intransigent. People in the front row started leaving: perhaps they had another engagement; they would be forgiven for thinking it had been a sad waste of time. After 10 minutes his time was up. As Idris left the stage, his delegation applauded; the rest of the audience sat in stony silence, perhaps imagining themselves at a negotiating table, and despairing at the futility of it all. Assistants came onto the stage to prepare it for the next part of the panel discussion; they might have been rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic.

US envoy Massad Boulos kicked off the second part of the session with an update on the negotiations, which amounted to an admission that the Quad (US, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE) has been largely talking to itself, and with the UN. He did point out that the position of the SAF on not negotiating with the RSF did not correspond with ‘the facts on the ground’. British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper spoke passionately about what she had been told at a refugee camp for 140,000 Sudanese refugees in Chad about sexual violence against women. And she pointed out that as many as a dozen nations are involved in arms flows into Sudan and that this would have to be stopped on all sides if the idea of a military solution was to be finally abandoned. 

In general, the panel was awash in well-intended exhortations—but from it all, and taken in conjunction with Idris’s posture, one is forced to conclude that there is no meaningful prospect for substantive, sensible discussions with General Abdel Fattah Burhan and his rigidly Islamist regime. It lives in an alternative reality in which its adversary is fit for nothing but root-and-branch elimination—because nothing short of that will ensure the Muslim Brotherhood continued authoritarian grip on the Sudanese state and its people. 

The biggest takeout from the Munich panel has to be that these talks will go nowhere. Cooper came closest to a way forward: there are as many as a dozen nations involved in providing arms to this conflict; it ends when the arms flow ends. So either the savagery and Sudan’s disintegration continue, or there is some brutal arm twisting on all of those nations. As the American saying goes: Talk is cheap, money buys whisky.

© Eurasia Review