Sudan Between an Arms Embargo and the Reshaping of the Balance of Power - Part 1

It is no longer possible to read the latest developments concerning Sudan, culminating in the Security Council session the day before yesterday, as isolated initiatives or passing diplomatic pressures. Behind the multiplicity of initiatives and the changing labels attached to them, there appears to be a recurring political trajectory: weakening the Sudanese state’s ability to use the instruments of force necessary to protect its citizens and defeat the militia’s rebellion against the national army, while leaving the door open to external supplies of weapons and mercenaries that have enabled the militia to continue the war.

For this reason, the proposal put forward yesterday at the Security Council to expand the arms embargo to cover the whole of Sudan, should not be viewed in isolation from the long series of proposals and practices that preceded and accompanied the war.

Each time, they were presented under a different title, while their potential outcome remained essentially the same: reducing the capabilities of the Sudanese Armed Forces and thereby altering the balance of power in favor of the terrorist malitia . The pattern is increasingly clear: the more the militia loses ground on the battlefield, the more mechanisms are devised to weaken the Sudanese army.

The issue here is not the call to protect civilians or facilitate the delivery of humanitarian assistance. These are legitimate objectives about which there should be no disagreement. The problem begins when such noble principles are transformed into political and military instruments that are selectively used to weaken one side—the institution of the state—while the sources of strength of the militia side, remain effectively unaddressed.

From the early stages of the war, calls from the regional and foreign powers that provide sanctuary, support, and sponsorship to the militia, emerged for arrangements such as imposing a no-fly zone and removing heavy weapons from the Sudanese capital. A sinister proposal that was deliberately promoted through two of Sudan’s neighbouring countries, with the aim of giving it an African character and an ostensibly African imprint.

At first glance, such a proposal may appear logical to those who view the war simply as a military confrontation between two generals, whose means of destruction must be curtailed. But the question that should have been asked from the outset was: Who, in practice, would actually be deprived of the means of force?

The Sudanese army possesses air power and heavy weapons as part of a regular military structure, while the RSF has operated inside cities and residential neighborhoods, employing methods of warfare that place civilians directly within the theatre of operations.

Consequently, removing heavy weapons or restricting air power without equal and enforceable guarantees on the ground would, in practice, have reduced the army’s ability to retake cities and protect civilians, rather than eliminating the sources of violence.

This is where a problem began to take shape that would later recur in different forms: transforming a measure ostensibly intended to protect civilians into an instrument for redistributing the military balance of power.

The pressure did not stop at the military sphere. International pressure also extended to Sudan’s economy, including restrictions affecting the gold trade and efforts to tighten the country’s financial and economic isolation, once again justified as measures intended to contain the war and dry up its sources of financing.

Yet this rationale exposes a striking contradiction: while Sudan was being pressured over its gold trade, the very state accused in documented international reports of supporting the militia was simultaneously enabling and benefiting from the militia’s systematic looting of Sudan’s gold and other economic resources.

In other words, measures ostensibly designed to cut the war’s sources of financing risked placing additional pressure on the Sudanese state and legitimate economy, while leaving the networks through which Sudan’s wealth was being extracted and diverted largely intact.

But the more fundamental question is whether these restrictions actually reached the militia’s informal and illicit sources of financing—or whether, in practice, they placed a far greater burden on the Sudanese state and its legitimate economic resources, while leaving the networks through which the militia extracted and profited from Sudan’s wealth largely untouched.

Once again, it appears increasingly clear that the objective is not necessarily to weaken the war itself, but rather to weaken the party representing the state, without diminishing the opposing side’s capacity to continue fighting.

The most striking contradiction in this war is that, while pressure has increasingly been brought to bear on the Sudanese state and its legitimate economic and financial resources, the external powers supporting the militia have, throughout the years of war and up to the writing of these lines, continued to sustain its war-making capacity through external supply networks. Weapons, ammunition, fighters, and mercenaries have continued remrselessly, to flow through multiple air and land routes, as documented in reports by the United Nations and other international agencies and organizations.

The contrast is difficult to overlook: measures ostensibly aimed at cutting the sources of war financing have placed growing pressure on the state, while the external channels sustaining the militia’s military capacity have remained operational.

If the international community were genuinely serious about stopping the flow of weapons, the logical question should not have been : How do we prevent Sudan from purchasing weapons? Rather, it should be: How do we stop all illicit sources of weapons reaching the militia?

Such sincere call has been repeatedly voiced in Western parliamentary chambers in recent months, but has yet to find a receptive ear among the very governments, expected to translate such parliamentary positions into policy.

In other words, fair arms embargo must stop weapons from reaching the party that acquires them illegally and must dismantle the external financing and supply networks that sustain it. It should not, in practical effect, equate a sovereign state with an outlawed militia.

Another instrument that has emerged during the war has been the campaign to discredit the Sudanese Armed Forces and accuse them of using prohibited weapons, including allegations concerning chemical weapons.

Make no mistake, the battle over the image of the professional Sudanese army that celebrated its centenary last year, is not separate from the battle over its military capabilities, rather, the objectives of such vilifacation, when made without sufficient evidence or independent and transparent investigative mechanisms, is to gradually turn it into a tool for preparing international public opinion to accept harsher measures against the Sudanese Armed Forces.

The transition from accusing the army of violating international law to demanding sanctions or military measures against it becomes easier when its image has already been portrayed as that of the party posing the greatest threat to civilians.

On the other hand, there is also evidence of deliberate distortion and, at times, exaggeration of Sudan’s humanitarian crisis in an effort to transform it into a pretext for external intervention, regardless of Sudanese sovereignty. The ultimate objective, in this reading, is to weaken the state’s ability to defend its territory.

When a humanitarian crisis is transformed into a political instrument, the likely outcome may be the exact opposite of what humanitarian principles are intended to achieve.

It is true that Sudan has become the scene of a genuine humanitarian catastrophe. But it is equally true that this catastrophe did not arise from natural causes or merely as an incidental consequence of war. It has been directly aggravated by systematic practices of the militia and the forces encouraging and supporting it, which have turned food and livelihoods into weapons of conflict.

The free world watched with deep sorrow, how since the outbreak of the militia's coup in April 2023, how it deliberately targeted the foundations of life and food production in Sudan, by looting crops and food stocks, destroying agricultural facilities, silos and storage infrastructure, seizing property, and blocking roads connecting production areas to markets. International reports have documented how the destruction of agricultural assets, the looting of food stocks, and disruption of access to markets have severely weakened Sudan’s food system.

The destruction of food sources has not been the end of the matter. Starvation has acquired an even more dangerous dimension through the use of excessive violence, sieges and forced displacement. Civilians in numerous towns and villages have faced immense pressure that has forced them to flee—not in search of a better life, but out of fear for their lives, their security, their dignity and their property.

Recent research has found that the destruction of dozens of agricultural communities emptied them of their inhabitants and disrupted farming seasons, thereby undermining food sources for populations trapped under siege.

Thus, the war has evolved from a military confrontation into a direct assault on the very foundations of society’s survival: land, crops, food stocks, markets, transportation networks and water sources—and ultimately the human being, who is forced into displacement when life and dignity are threatened.

Therefore, the discussion of Sudan’s humanitarian catastrophe should not be reduced to statistics concerning displaced people, hungry populations and those in need of assistance. It must also address the causes that produced this catastrophe, including the deliberate use of violence, siege, destruction, looting and forced displacement as instruments for subjugating civilian populations.

Perhaps the tragedy of the civilians of El Fasher captures this entire story in its starkest form. History may well remember El Fasher as one of the most appalling examples of international abandonment and collective failure in the modern era—a moment when the world had both the knowledge and the means to act, yet chose to look away.