Daily Times

Charred paramilitary trucks litter the streets of the Sudanese capital Khartoum as foreign nationals race to evacuate their citizens from the area. The seeds of Sudan’s collapse were sown decades ago but these things take a while to make themselves apparent-all it takes is one final trigger and everything comes tumbling down. Years of complacency and failures have chipped away at Sudan’s internal security, culminating in a situation that doesn’t at all surprise those who live there.

Now the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) a paramilitary group first formed in 2013, has entered a state of war with the government over who should run the country-trapping the Sudanese people at the crossroads. After a colossal revolution removed President Omar-al-Bashir’s thirty-year-dictatorship four years ago, power struggles continue to rage in what is now a deeply polarised country. The Sudanese people certainly didn’t ask for this-what they wanted was a respite from dictatorship and for a while there, it seemed like they might even have been successful. But the relief was short-lived. Sudan now joins the ranks of several Arab states who overthrew dictators only to see their hopes for democracy crushed only a few years later.

But the inevitability of Sudan’s collapse makes the whole situation particularly tragic. Last week’s events started 20 years ago when a rebellion against the government was brutally repressed by a group of fighters, acting as proxies to Bashir’s government. Bashir couldn’t even be bothered to send his own army into the fray, instead manipulating ethnic tensions and tribal differences to his favour.

A genocide ensued, killing thousands and displacing millions. This did not go unnoticed by the world, which promptly applied sanctions on Sudan that did little but diminish the public’s capacity to resist their government. A brigade of undemocratic governments in North Africa and the Middle East backed both the militia and the army, allergic to the prospect of democracy flourishing in their backyard, further annihilated all hopes for peace.

The war that blazes through Sudan now is just a glimpse of the past-calls for democracy were drowned out by reality as quickly as they were made. It is clear now that they were never going to materialise, to begin with. *