Implementing Peace
Continuity and change in Sudan’s political violence and protests after the Juba Peace Agreement
On October 3, 2020 Sudan signed the Juba Peace Agreement (JPA). It was reached after months of negotiations facilitated by South Sudan between Sudan’s Transitional Sovereign Council, represented by its deputy head and commander of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti), and a broad front of Sudanese armed groups including the largely non-Arab Sudanese Revolutionary Front (SRF) but also Minnawi’s SLM/A group, who withdrew from the SRF but participated in the negotiations. Two other major rebel groups, SLM/A-N (al-Nur) and SPLM-N al-Hilu, did not join them instead. The JPA, which reset the schedule of the post-Bashir three-year transition towards the general elections (now to be held not earlier than 2024, with all the peace signatories now allowed to run for them –– some former rebels have already joined the cabinet), had important goals, including bringing peace (a permanent ceasefire) to the country ––especially to the regions most affected by armed violence such as Darfur and the Two Areas––, the dismantling and integration of armed groups into the army, and more in general a new regional governance system.
Yet, back in the days when the deal was signed in Juba, South Sudan, many country experts issued a warning about the obstacles and limitations to its implementation, mostly related to the lack of funds, inclusivity, and the changing patterns of violence. The very choice of Juba as the place where to strike a deal aiming at solving (ethnic) insurgencies, security fragmentation, power struggles, and political and economic marginalization, also raised concerns about the implementation, given that similar deals truly worked wonders for South Sudan in the past.
One year on, did the JPA help bring ‘peace’ to Sudan? Sudan established a mechanism to monitor and evaluate the implementation of the deal only 363 days after its signature (that is, three days ago), but recent data from Acled, Ocha, and Unitams shows that a) after an extremely brief lull, violence picked up again, even at higher levels than the year before, across most of the country; b) little to nothing was done to reform the security sector; c) funds are still lacking, as per the Unitams chief’s recent declarations; d) the military front, who limited the civilian front’s participation in the peace negotiations and implementation, is more empowered than before.
Comparisons to previous trends
In the first calendar year of JPA implementation which wraps up today, fatalities from political violence have not only increased by 31% year-on-year, but they have also hit a four-year high. Looking at subnational trends, this increase was driven mostly by a resurgence of violence in the Darfur region (notwithstanding the SCR 1591 arms embargo in place since 2005), in some parts of the Two Areas (Blue Nile and South Kordofan), as well as in Gedaref, close to the border with Ethiopia where the disputed land of Fashaga lies.
Although it is true that, when looked against a 10-year fatalities baseline, post-Juba violence remains below historical levels, some exceptions do exist: Gedaref, where the tension with Ethiopia has reached unprecedented levels of intensity, and Darfur — where fatalities in the past year overcame (albeit only for two quarters) the region’s 10-year average.
Changing patterns of violence
One of the reasons why Sudan experts anticipated the deal would not bring ‘peace’ was in the changing patterns of conflict in Sudan ––thoroughly analysed in Dan Watson’s Riders on the Storm. With the deal focusing on (not even the most active*) rebel groups, it failed to address patterns of intercommunal violence whose intensity in the peripheral regions of the country has long become more significant than clashes between the military and rebels, now at a historical low.
*The most active rebel group today, the Sudan Liberation Movement led by Abdel Wahid al-Nur (SLM-AW), declined to engage in peace talks with the transitional government and despite its commitment to a unilateral ceasefire, clashes with the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese army in the mountainous area of Jebel Marra it controls are continuing. Thousands of people have been displaced as a result in the Darfur region as well as in the southern areas of Kordofan and Blue Nile — at least six times that of the year before, according to Unitams data. The withdrawal of the African Union-UN peacekeeping mission Unamid from the area in December 2020, when it was most needed, and its replacement with the “rather small” political mission Unitams, did not help.
Although Darfur and the Two Areas have attracted most attention before and after the deal, the geographic scope of the JPA was much broader — with Eastern, Northern, and Central tracks too. In the weeks running up to the first anniversary of the JPA, rising tensions in the Eastern region of the country indeed showed that JPA failures are not limited to Darfur and the Two Areas only. In September a number of Eastern tribes, headed by the local Hadandawa leader Muhammad al-Amin Tirik, blocked the highway (and the economy) linking the main maritime ports on the Red Sea with the rest of the country to protest the Eastern track of the JPA as they argued the groups that negotiated the deal (Beni Amir people) did not represent the region. They also urged the government’s military component to intervene against the civilian rulers accused of mismanagement.
The latter aspect fuelled rumours that these tensions too may have been partly stoked by the military themselves to show civilians are not able to stabilise the country. The same thoughts circulated after the September coup attempt, blamed on Bashir loyalists, suggesting that the military was implied.
Over the past year, the military did its best to support the narrative that the civilian component is inadequate to address successfully the multiple challenges of the country, not only those concerning its security but also economic policies. Besides the cases mentioned above, also the growing clashes and war of words against Ethiopian forces in relation to Gedaref and the GERD — as well as some of the violent attacks in Darfur, which saw the participation of Hemedti’s RSF — are to be seen as byproducts of the internal agitation and disagreement on security sector reforms within the transitional government.
The September coup attempt triggered a new public rift inside the country’s two-headed transitional government between the civilians, who are not spared of internal divisions, and the military (also internally fragmented), who is supposed to hand over the leadership of the Transitional Sovereign Council to the other side not later than July 2022. After the coup attempt, Hamdok convened an emergency council of ministers and reiterated the need to reform the security and military apparatus, including by integrating RSF militiamen into the national armed forces — a move required by the JPA but rejected last May by Hemedti. The announced creation of a joint force in Darfur comprising regular armed forces and signatory rebel groups alone cannot make up for it. As military leaders continue to have different incentives and ideas of how security sector reform should be sequenced, and budgetary constraints limit even more modest JPA provisions, there is no optimism about “a reform agenda that could offer an alternative to the ‘business as usual’ marketplace playbook that has essentially always governed the provision of security services and division of security-related resources” in Sudan.
