The scale of foreign interference in Sudan's ongoing war is no longer a secret. Numerous international reports and media outlets have documented it, and the Sudanese government has raised the issue repeatedly, backing its complaints to the UN Security Council with photographs and documents showing the continued flow of weapons and fighters to the Rapid Support Forces. Even so, the world's response remains limited, never rising to measures capable of halting the interventions or stopping the flow of arms and mercenaries, as competing interests have prevailed.
Yesterday's Reuters report on Boeing 727 aircraft linked to the business network of a retired American military contractor (planes said to have carried mercenaries, weapons and drones for the RSF) affirms Reuters' own earlier reporting, along with that of other news agencies, broadcasters, research centers and international organizations. Drawing on documents and satellite imagery, their work has exposed the scale of foreign intervention and the role of certain neighboring states that have become corridors for these supplies and logistical bases for training.
What is new in the Reuters piece is its use of a draft UN report due out this September. Backed by credible information, testimony from two sources in Nyala and official correspondence from two states, the draft details transfers of military equipment, including drones, as well as the movement of RSF mercenaries and fighters. According to the draft, which Reuters has seen, the aircraft took off from the military apron at N'Djamena airport and took "deliberate steps to avoid detection while in flight," concealing their takeoff and landing routes and evading the Sudanese air force, which has been striking arms depots and had announced the destruction of planes at Nyala airport carrying material and fighters for the RSF.
The report was prepared by the panel of experts that the Security Council mandated to monitor the arms embargo imposed on Darfur in 2005, and it is an important addition to the documented record. But it will not shift the course of the war, nor bring deterrent measures against the parties implicated in it. International and regional interests are too tangled up in the Sudanese crisis, and the political will needed to halt the interventions is absent, or nearly so.
Against this background, the interview Sheikh Musa Hilal (head of the Awakening Council and leader of the Mahamid tribe) gave a few days ago to Sudan's Al-Balad channel takes on particular significance. He disclosed a good deal about the nature of today's war and noted that the scheme to destabilize Sudan, dismantle it and sever Darfur is nothing new. He recalled a meeting in Nyala in 2006 with a former US envoy to Sudan who offered him money under the cover of developing Darfur's regions. In his judgment, what was really being put to him and to other tribal leaders was that they encouraged the Rizeigat to rebel against the Sudanese state, so as to break the country into several entities.
The account carries particular weight because of when it took place: the period following the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement between the Sudanese government and John Garang's SPLM, the agreement that paved the way for the referendum on self-determination in the South and, in 2011, for secession. The implication is that the states which supported and encouraged the South's secession were working at the same time to repeat the scenario in Darfur.
This reading also intersects with remarks made by the former American general and politician Wesley Clark, in 2003 and again in 2007, that he had seen a memorandum describing an American plan to reshape the region after September 11, covering several countries, Sudan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon among them.
Proponents of this view also cite a 2007 lecture by Avi Dichter, the former Israeli minister of internal security, setting out Israel's strategic vision for the region across seven arenas that include Sudan, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq. That strategy ranges from the use of force and diplomacy to the creation of chaos and the provoking of strife, as well as the exploitation of ethnic and sectarian groups and of opposition forces willing to cooperate in return for support on their way to power.
Asked why Sudan was of interest, Dichter (after discussing Israel's intervention in the South and in Darfur) said Israeli assessments going back to the 1950s had held that Sudan, with its resources, vast territory and population, should not be allowed to become an additional regional power capable of altering the balance of power in the region and threatening Israel.
In sum, what international reports confirm about the dimensions and scale of foreign intervention in Sudan, together with the accounts of present-day actors and of former officials and politicians, illuminates aspects of this war that some refuse to see: its connection to the risks and schemes of fragmentation and partition that have never ceased.
