On the revolution that no one wanted – Alex de Waal in LRB:

“Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, is being destroyed in a fight to the death between two venal, brutal generals. This is a war of choice; allowing it to happen was a failure of international diplomacy. But if we look at the city’s 200-year history, the fighting shouldn’t be a surprise. Khartoum was founded on a command post built for the purposes of imperial robbery – and every subsequent regime has continued this practice. In ordinary circumstances, Sudan is run by a cabal of merchants and generals who plunder the darker-skinned people of the marchlands and bring their wealth to Khartoum, a relatively opulent city and a haven of calm. But the logic of kleptocracy is inexorable: when the cartel is bankrupt, the mobsters shoot it out. We saw this in Liberia and Somalia thirty years ago. The ransack of the Sudanese state today is ten times bigger.”

(…)

“The last time Khartoum was razed was in 1885. The army of the Sudanese millenarian leader, Mohamed Ahmed ‘al Mahdi’, overran the besieged garrison of Egyptian troops commanded by General Gordon, massacred the starving residents and ransacked the town. The Mahdi, who was born to a family of boatbuilders on the Nile, set up a new capital at Omdurman on the opposite bank of the river. It’s now Khartoum’s twin city. His lieutenant, Khalifa Abdullahi al-Taaishi, who came from a nomadic tribe in Darfur, mobilised the mass armies of the Mahdist cause, with their uniform of patched tunics, as worn by wandering mendicants. He had emerged from the turmoil and bloodshed that followed the collapse of the sultanate in Darfur. When the Mahdi died a few months later, the khalifa – the word means ‘successor’ – assumed command. The next thirteen years of Darfurian despotism, administered from Omdurman by the khalifa’s armed tribesmen, remain unforgotten by the peoples of the Nile.”

(…)

“Khartoum accounts for more than half of Sudan’s economy. Within a day’s drive of the city lies the modestly prosperous ‘miniature country’: the only real estate, according to the former Islamist minister of finance Abdel Rahim Hamdi, that’s worth investing in. The rest of the country is a social and economic wasteland, ravaged by the heirs of Zubeir. In the 1970s, the Sudanese Marxist Fatima Babiker Mahmoud explained how the country’s merchant class reaped immense profits in the provinces and ploughed them in Khartoum. Where capital moves, people follow. The city had already trebled in size over twenty years to a population of around a million when she published The Sudanese Bourgeoisie: Vanguard of Development? in 1984. The population of greater Khartoum is now about seven million.”

(…)

“Khartoum prosecuted wars in the south of the country between 1955 and 1972 and again between 1983 and 2004; these conflicts also enabled racketeering by army officers and merchants. The wars finally ended with a peace deal in 2005, after which South Sudan took the exit option, voting for secession twelve years ago. With it went most of the oilfields and the revenue to which Khartoum’s traders had become addicted. By then, Darfur had also rebelled, after decades of neglect during which it was exploited by Khartoum as a kind of bantustan for cheap migrant labour. Khartoum’s generals carried out a counterinsurgency on the cheap, rallying the Arab tribes in the west and licensing them to repeat in Darfur the pillage, rape and starvation that had been used against the south. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as ‘Hemedti’, or ‘little Mohamed’ because of his youthful demeanour, was among the most capable of the Janjaweed’s junior commanders. His boldness on the battlefield, his folksy rapport with his troops and his business acumen brought him to the attention of President Bashir.”

(…)

“Is there a thread we can trace back through the post-independence era that might help us arrive at an explanation for what is happening in Khartoum now? There’s no doubt that successive experiments in modernity were stifled by crony capitalism, insider dealing, firesale bargains for the well-connected, a tangle of illicit trafficking and contrivances against years of sanctions, imposed on Washington’s insistence. During the 1970s – Sudan’s ‘development decade’ – the World Bank and Arab investment funds poured money into the country, but when debt payments fell due the minister of finance discovered that there was no central account of what had been borrowed from whom, for what, or what had happened to the money. In the 1990s, Bashir’s government imagined a path to Islamist modernity, but it couldn’t borrow on the international markets and instead began exporting oil. That windfall isn’t accounted for either, but the plotline can be read in the shining office towers of Islamist-owned, security-connected corporations – what Sudanese call the ‘deep state’ although there’s nothing inconspicuous about them. Bashir’s regime built vast dams on the Nile, drowning millennia-old villages and generating little electricity. Their main function was to facilitate kickbacks for the ruling party, which put millions of Sudanese on the state payroll, without thinking about the discontent that would follow when South Sudan opted for independence and the oil spigot was closed off.
Farmland was cheap, workers even cheaper, especially where villages had been bulldozed for commercial farms or burned by militiamen. The trees were felled, the soil tended by labourers paid a pittance to work land once their own. Much of the main crop, sorghum, is now exported for animal feed. For years, Sudan has relied on ever more ruthless exploitation of land and labour as well as imported fuel and machinery. Much of its scarce foreign currency is used to import wheat for well-off people in cities – until recently, this was massively subsidised. This is one of the world’s most dysfunctional food economies, now on the point of collapse.” (…)

“The army is chiefly a machine for swindling the public and putting on impressive parades of tanks and aircraft, while actual combat is waged by rented militias driving customised Landcruisers. Hemedti understood this better than the military academy graduates, who sowed the wind in Darfur and are now reaping the whirlwind in the battle for Khartoum.
Those of us who have lived and worked in Sudan for decades were inspired by the civil uprising and willing to trust its leaderless champions, many of them women. Many times I bit my lip, not wanting to deflate the optimism of the democratic activists. The worst has come to pass. Hemedti has taken the families of SAF members hostage and few doubt that he would have any qualms about murdering them. SAF generals and old guard Islamists openly threaten to kill Hemedti and those who they say have collaborated with him. Hemedti’s fighters ransack houses and shops, while al-Burhan’s jet fighters bomb them from the air. Now that most foreigners have left the country, resupplies and reinforcements for both parties are pouring in; the battle is set to escalate. This is the revolution no one wanted.”

Read the article here.

The army a machine for swindling the public, the world’s most dysfunctional food economy, the country outside Khartoum a waste land, ruthless exploitation of land and labor, speaking of failed states.

The word might not be interested at all, see the wars that ravaged Congo, the rest of the world becomes interested when their vital interests are at stake.

An op-ed in NYT recently had the headline ‘Does America Realize That Sudan Is Too Big to Fail?’ – the answers are, the failing happened already, also thanks to negligence and sometime disastrous politics of the West, and the US is busy with other things, and so is Europe.