The two men who have been
basically running the country for the past
few years
are now at war with each other
and it's tearing the country apart.
The streets of Sudan's
biggest cities have become battlegrounds.
Schools, hospitals, and the country's
main airport have been bombed.
We would wake up every morning to the sounds of bullets
and missiles.
Our house was hit by a missile
and the missile didn't go off,
it just went through the roof.
People have been shot in their homes.
Kids have had to take shelter in the basements of schools
where they've been shot when they venture out.
You've just got large numbers of people trapped.
So, they haven’t got access to electricity
and they're terrified of
running out of food, of water.
You're hearing gunshots.
You are hearing missiles.
More than 250,000 people have fled the country
and more than a million have been forced from their homes.
Militia entered my house.
They killed my husband and wounded my son.
I was also tortured.
My two daughters saw everything.
She still screams at night and cries out to me:
“Why are these people coming to kill us?”
World leaders are scrambling to help both sides negotiate an end to
this conflict, which has created a humanitarian disaster
and is threatening to destabilise
the entire region.
Understanding what's actually
going on here can be a bit complicated.
So, before we get started,
there are two main things to keep in mind.
This is more than just a fight between two men,
and a lot of people don't believe
the reasoning given by either of these men as to
why they're fighting.
To properly get to the bottom of this
I'm going to split this video up into four sections.
The first two, are going to be about who these men are
and what they say about why this fighting is happening.
The third and fourth part
are all about the bigger picture here and why
so many people don't trust either
of these men.
To kick things off,
let's start with who these men are
and how they went
from being the leader and deputy of Sudan
to plunging the country into chaos.
The first thing you've probably noticed
is that these leaders don't look like politicians.
Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo,
more commonly known as Hemedti,
are military generals
and that's because Sudan isn't a democracy,
it's one of the few
countries in the world that has a military government.
What makes Sudan even more unique
is the fact that
there isn't just one major military force in the country
and that's actually part of the problem here.
Burhan is the general of Sudan's
regular army, the Sudanese Armed Forces,
while Hemedti is the commander of a completely separate
and independently run militia known as the RSF
and the fighting happening right now
is between these two groups.
So, why are these two men fighting?
There's a key bit of context here
that's important to properly
answer this question,
and that's the fact
that there isn't just one fight going on in Sudan right now,
there are actually two.
The first, of course, is the fight
that's happening on the surface between the two generals.
The second is a struggle that the people of Sudan
have been fighting for years and one that will likely
still be here when this war ends,
and that is the fight for democracy.
Now, if you ask either of the generals why they're fighting,
they'll both say that the other
is to blame for starting the violence
and that they're the one that's trying to protect
the future of democracy in Sudan.
So, who's telling the truth?
This is where things start to get a little bit murky.
A number of experts and a lot of people
involved in the pro-democracy movement in Sudan
don't really believe either of these men.
Neither of them have clean hands.
Their history speaks for itself.
Both sides trampled
international humanitarian law.
This is a fight over power.
Both sides would like to rule Sudan.
There are two main reasons
why a lot of people
don't really trust either of these generals
and think that the recent fighting
is just a power grab.
The first, is what the generals have done in the past,
and the second is the fact that
both generals have a lot to lose
if Sudan does end up swapping
its military government for a civilian-led democracy.
Let's start with the past first.
Sudan has a long history of military control
and dictatorship that both Burhan and Hemedti
have helped to protect.
Since gaining independence,
Sudan has spent close to 60 of the following
67 years
under various forms of military control.
Sudan's longest serving leader during this period,
and one of Africa's longest serving dictators, was
Omar al-Bashir.
Both Burhan and Hemedti
rose to power under Bashir, and fought
to protect his regime.
Burhan with Sudan's army,
while Hemedti was one of the
leaders of the Janjaweed,
a notorious group of Arab
militias employed by Bashir
to brutally crush his opponents.
Bashir then formed the RSF
as a more organised offshoot of the Janjaweed in 2013,
and installed Hemedti as its commander.
This is why Sudan now
has two major military forces,
something that's actually pretty common under dictatorships,
as it prevents one single group from becoming
too much of a threat to a dictator's authority.
In 2018, after three decades of Bashir's
rule, pro-democracy protests took off around the country.
The thing is, Burhan and Hemedti actually sided
with the protesters,
teaming up to arrest and remove Bashir from power.
This may sound pretty pro-democracy,
but a lot of what happened after this is a big reason
why many people in Sudan simply don't trust the generals
to this day.
After removing Bashir, the generals refused
to hand over power to civilian leaders,
instead deciding to appoint themselves as the head
and deputy of a new military government.
So, protesting continued,
We have no trust in the military council.
Everyone that is sitting here agrees that Burhan is dirty.
Hemedti thinks that the people here are scared of him.
How can we trust you?
Because I have been betrayed and destroyed for 30 years.
We are standing here all the nights.
We're going to stay here until the government is going to fall.
We will never leave this place.
We will shout it out together.
A big part of this continued protesting was a peaceful
sit-in protest, camped outside the military's headquarters
in Sudan's capital.
On June 3rd.
military forces decided to break up this sit-in
and ended up killing more than 100 protesters
in what became known as the ‘Khartoum Massacre’.
Why did we have the revolution?
To have a civilian government.
The military took over the revolution
and the blood of the martyrs was wasted.
This led to intense pressure from both inside and outside
of Sudan, eventually forcing the generals to compromise
to a power sharing agreement with civilians.
But even then, they still held onto Sudan's
highest positions of power,
as the head
and deputy of the country's sovereign council.
The generals were originally supposed to hand over
these positions to civilian leaders in 2021,
but that never ended up happening.
What the people of Sudan got instead
in 2021, was a military coup
led by the generals
who seized
full control of the country
and removed the little power
civilian leaders had gained, which is how things
largely remained until this recent fighting.
Both generals justified all of this by saying they were
protecting the country from infighting and instability.
But experts say it shows they were likely
never in support of democracy and were willing to do
whatever it took to hold onto power.
The military, of course, we now know clearly and most
knew at the time, was never intent
on giving power to a civilian government.
We can see that clearly because when the American envoy
goes a day before October 25th,
and says you need to hand over power to a civilian government,
Burhan wages the coup the next day.
Now, whether or not you believe the generals
about their motivations in the past,
one thing that's hard to deny
is that they both have a lot to lose
if Sudan does transition to civilian government,
something that started to look a lot more likely
by the end of 2022.
Mounting pressure had once again forced the generals back into
talks with civilian leaders, and by December
they’d agreed to finally start Sudan's transition to democracy.
However,
when it came time to sort out the details,
both Burhan and Hemedti couldn't come to an agreement,
and, after repeated failed negotiations,
fighting between the two began.
So, what exactly are civilian leaders demanding,
and what do the generals actually stand to lose?
The first thing is a loss of power and autonomy.
Civilian leaders want the RSF to be folded into
Sudan's military and for the military
to come under the control of a civilian government
as is the case in most countries.
The second thing, is a loss of economic power.
Civilian leaders are keen to get Sudan's wealth
back into the hands of civilians
as, right now,
both military groups control huge chunks of Sudan's economy.
But even beyond money and power, there's also a genuine
fear of losing freedom, something
they've already seen happen to their old boss.
During that brief window of civilian/military power-sharing,
the government agreed to hand over Bashir
to the International Criminal Court
to stand trial for war crimes he'd been accused
of committing during his dictatorship.
Both Burhan and Hemedti have also
been accused of having ties to atrocities
not only for the massacre of protesters in 2019,
but also for their involvement
fighting in wars under Bashir, in particular,
the brutal war in Darfur in the mid-2000s.
We concluded, I concluded, that genocide
has been committed in Darfur and that the government
of Sudan and the Janjaweed bear responsibility.
You’d have aerial bombardments of Darfur
that the military would engage in,
executed by Burhan,
and then the militias of Hemedti
would enact ‘scorched earth’ policies,
which would mean burning villages, sexual assault, too.
They bombed from the sky.
Then the soldiers and the Janjaweed came to our village.
When the Janjaweed come, you have two choices.
You can run away or die.
That being said,
Hemedti and the RSF, especially with its historical
ties to the Janjaweed,
do have more of a reputation when it comes to accusations
of brutality and committing atrocities,
which is partly why there are many people inside Sudan
that would still prefer to see the army defeat the RSF.
But, and this is important,
that doesn't mean that they want Burhan
to lead the country once this war ends.
At the end of the day,
even if you're willing
to give these generals the benefit of the doubt
about what they've done in the past
and believe that they're willing to lose
their economic and political power,
and potentially even their freedom,
the bottom line here is that it doesn't really change
anything for a lot of people in Sudan
who simply don't want to see either of these men
anywhere near a future civilian government.
Protesters, they are looking for a new Sudan.
We need to rebuild our country from scratch, basically,
and we have no other option.
We have no other choice.
We want a purely civilian government.
Civilian democratic rule is the only way for the country
to advance.
The military needs to return to the barracks
and the Rapid Support Forces need to be disbanded.
All people agreed on one main goal:
that Sudan can't be ruled by the military.
All of this is why, no matter how the fight between
these two men ends, supporters
of civilian government in Sudan
believe that their fight
for democracy
will continue.