The War on the Sudanese Nation: From Empowerment to Exposure

By: Dr. Al-Waleed Adam Madibu. In the northern desert, where thousands of young men chase meager livelihoods underground, risking their lives in collapsing pits, bombs fell on October 10th upon unarmed miners in Jebel al-Uqaidat. The 'Emergency Lawyers' group reported at least 72 dead, accusing the Egyptian Air Force, while the Egyptian military announced the continuation of its campaign to 'impose full sovereignty within the borders of the Egyptian state.' The Sovereignty Council labeled the event an 'incident' and formed a committee, without naming anyone. Months earlier, General Al-Burhan had demanded that citizens 'adhere to the borders and not head to the other side,' as if the state, which officially insists on the Sudanese identity of Hala'ib—where survivors state the attack occurred twenty kilometers inside its territory—has accepted the de facto line as a final border. Thus, the miner tracking gold on his own land becomes an 'infiltrator' in the eyes of his own authorities before being seen as one by his neighbor. This is not limited to land. In April 2016, Egypt and Saudi Arabia signed a maritime border agreement transferring the islands of Tiran and Sanafir to Saudi sovereignty, treating the Hala'ib coast as Egyptian. In December 2017, Sudan sent a letter to the United Nations declaring its 'total rejection' of the agreement and any legal or sovereign measures resulting from what it described as Egypt's occupation of the Hala'ib Triangle by land and sea. Cairo responded that Hala'ib and Shalateen are Egyptian territory. Sudan has a coastline on the triangle; therefore, the maritime border cannot be fully demarcated in this part of the Red Sea without resolving Hala'ib. Either Sudan cedes it, making the coast Egyptian, or the adjacent waters remain a disputed zone. This is linked to a 1974 Sudanese-Saudi agreement on the joint exploitation of Red Sea resources, which the then-Sudanese Foreign Minister stated contradicted the new agreement. This reveals the complexity surrounding the triangle and makes the phrase 'do not head to the other side' more dangerous than it appears; in politics, words are not innocent, and a phrase uttered in haste on land may tomorrow be read as a document of surrender at sea. Humiliation is not that a Sudanese person is killed; death in war is a fate known to many nations. Humiliation is being killed without cost, for one's own state to call the killing an 'incident,' and to be asked to respect borders one's own state has neither demarcated nor defended. The Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe called this type of power 'necropolitics': the essence of sovereignty becoming the right to decide who deserves to live and who may die without accountability. The miners in Al-Uqaidat fell into the gray area between two sovereignties: one that bombs and one that stays silent, both treating their bodies as surplus unworthy of inquiry. I do not read this event as just another piece of war news, but as a revealing incident that shows the underlying structure in a flash—like lightning on a dark night illuminating terrain that was always there. The blood spilled in the desert has caused a rare spiritual awakening. The pens of the 'Ingaz' (Salvation) era scrambled to find a pretext to justify the crime, from 'crossing borders' to 'chaos' and 'smuggling,' yet nothing could withstand the image of unarmed workers killed while searching for their livelihood. They are now betting on forgetfulness, having been surprised by the unity of a conscience they worked to tear apart for decades. However, emotion, no matter how sincere, flares and fades quickly, easily redirected toward an external enemy invoked during every catastrophe, turning from an energy of awareness into an energy of mobilization. The goal is for this moment to transform from a tragedy we mourn into a foundation upon which we build. Emotion may fade, but with thought, vision clarifies. The most pertinent question is not: Who dropped the bombs? But rather: Who left the country so exposed? Let us start from the root. The founding literature of the Muslim Brotherhood does not view the homeland as a final political bond, but as a contingent vessel for an international project. Sayyid Qutb phrased this in his famous expression, 'The Muslim's nationality is his creed.' When a group with this perception governs, the homeland turns from an end into a platform, the state from a public asset into a tool, and the citizen from a rights-holder into fuel. This is the danger of ideological groups when they govern: they believe they possess a mandate superior to the will of the governed, living in constant 'alienation' from the society they rule. They inhabit the state but do not reside in the homeland, seeing neither sanctity in the nation nor value in the lives of its citizens. From this root branched the first transformation: from the national state to the organization's state. Since the June 1989 coup, Sudan was faced with a clear equation: either the state submits to the organization, or it is reshaped until it does. Under the slogan of 'Empowerment' (Tamkeen), tens of thousands were purged from the civil service, regular forces, and universities under the banner of 'public interest,' and public office was reduced to loyalty. Alongside the army, armed formations with other loyalties emerged, from the Popular Defense Forces to the Popular Security and what were later known as the 'Shadow Brigades.' Thus was born what Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal called the 'soft state': a state that issues laws but does not implement them, where those with influence stand above every officer. However, the Sudanese version added a sharper paradox: softness before the law and the public interest, and rigidity against the citizen—brutally oppressive internally, yet weak-handed at the borders. This was the first aspect of exposure: a power capable of subjugating people without a state that people feel is theirs. And a state that its citizens do not feel belongs to them cannot protect them, neither in a remote desert nor on a disputed border. Then came the second transformation: from exporting the revolution to offering concessions. In its early years, the project wanted to make Sudan a platform for a cross-border message, hosting Osama bin Laden and Islamic movements from around the world. Consequently, in 1993, Sudan was placed on the U.S. list of State Sponsors of Terrorism. Then came the attempted assassination of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Addis Ababa in 1995, for which Sudan paid with international sanctions and the effective loss of Hala'ib, not an inch of which has been recovered to this day. The revolutionary utopianism of those years was like someone setting fire to their own house to light the streets of others. When the mischief of the project turned back on itself, and the organization found the state and society—which it had weakened—in their most miserable conditions, the utopianism turned into bottomless pragmatism. 'Carlos' was handed to France, Bin Laden was exiled, and Al-Turabi—the organization’s own theorist—was ousted in the 1999 'split.' After September 11, the security apparatus became an intelligence partner for Washington, providing information on groups Khartoum once harbored. Thus, the organization's principles turned into a form of 'political taqiyya': raised in public, folded away in closed rooms, and reinterpreted whenever they clashed with survival calculations. Meanwhile, the state eroded at its edges like banks receding when the guard deserts them: Hala'ib in the north, Al-Fashaga where Ethiopian farmers expanded throughout the Ingaz era, the Renaissance Dam which was supported and then its Declaration of Principles signed in Khartoum in 2015 without a binding agreement, the Eastern file handed to Asmara’s mediation, and the 2011 separation of the South, leaving unresolved conflicts in Abyei, Bahr al-Arab, and border contact zones. The historical comparison is telling: in 1958, the elected government of Abdallah Khalil moved its forces to Hala'ib, and Cairo retreated. After 1995, the army withdrew from the triangle under the organization's rule. An army reaches its noblest moments when it derives its legitimacy from its people, and its weakest when it is kidnapped to serve a group. The third and most dangerous transformation was from monopolizing the state to exposing society to disintegration. Sudan’s cultural, religious, and ethnic diversity is a historical fact upon which a state of equal citizenship could have been built—a mosaic that grows more beautiful the more its colors vary. But the 'Civilizational Project' treated this as a problem to be subjected to a single center, wanting to pour the entire nation into one mold. The war in the South was dressed in the garb of 'Jihad,' and the Southerner became in official discourse an enemy in creed, not a partner in the homeland. When the grievances of Darfur exploded in 2003, the regime did not resort to politics, but to tribal militias operating haphazardly, known as the Janjaweed. Sheikh Musa Hilal was their most prominent leader, and in 2013, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) were legalized as a regular force to be a shield for the regime's survival. A power that failed to win over society invested in its divisions, then created with its own hands the force that would turn against it and the nation together. It is an irony of fate that the Muslim Brotherhood, who would not go by moral appeal, were visited by youths of their own making who inflicted upon them severe torment, broke their pride, and rubbed their noses in the dirt. Hannah Arendt taught us that power and violence are opposites: where one prevails absolutely, the other is absent, and violence appears when power is in danger. This is exactly what the December revolution revealed. When the youth of Khartoum chanted, 'Oh racist, you arrogant one, the whole country is Darfur,' and the spirit of the people descended into the sit-in square before the General Command, the organization's claim to monopolize speech in the name of religion and nation fell; nothing remained for it but violence. On the night of June 3, 2019, blood mixed with the sword. Human Rights Watch reports assign the most prominent role in the dispersal to the RSF, but they relay witness accounts of men in black clothing and gunmen in police uniforms whose identities were never known. I have received statements from some RSF leaders confirming that their forces refused to use excessive force and were surprised by the 'Shadow Brigades' who abused the protesters with unprecedented brutality. The two accounts are not necessarily contradictory, and resolution awaits an independent investigation whose results have not been published to this day. However, the political message was clear: the organization, unable to break the street's unity with discourse, decided to break it with blood. The October 2021 coup returned many of the former regime's cadres to their positions and froze the Empowerment Removal Committee. When a settlement emerged through the 'Framework Agreement,' stipulating the army's exit from politics and the integration of the RSF into a single army, the organization was at the forefront of those rejecting it, because democratic transition was not a choice for them to compete within, but an existential threat that had to be failed. When the war of April 2023 broke out, they worked to shift the conflict from its true axis—civilians against military rule—to an alternative axis of ethnicity and region; the first axis threatens their survival, while the second ensures their return and distracts the citizen from the struggle of transition. It is the 'engineering of enmity': redrawing the lines of conflict so the citizen stands against his neighbor, not against the one who robbed them both. Ahmed Haroun, head of the National Congress, did not hide this when he told Reuters: 'It is no secret that we support the army in response to the call of the Commander-in-Chief, to ensure our survival.' That last phrase summarizes the entire article. Evidence for this path is accumulating: organized mobilization that led Washington in March 2024 to designate the Islamic Movement and the Al-Bara bin Malik Brigade as a terrorist organization, targeted identity-based violence in the 'Kanabi' of Al-Jazeera after the recapture of Wad Madani, and public calls from Islamist leaders to continue fighting and reject negotiations. It is the same trick of Bashar al-Assad, who, sensing the cohesion of the national front against him, incited citizens against one another until the fuse of civil war was lit, and arrows were directed at the chests of the people instead of the authority. If you cannot defeat a unified people, divide them. It is a trick that hides today behind a false legitimacy called the 'legitimacy of the national state,' raised by a group that does not believe in the national state to begin with; like one borrowing an opponent's clothes to hide while raiding. The connection between these three transformations is not just a chronological sequence, but a deeper idea: the more options narrowed for the organization, the higher the priority of its survival became, until both state and society were sacrificed for this goal. Therefore, the Muslim Brotherhood's project in governance is no longer just a failed political experiment, but part of the danger Sudan must overcome, given the humiliation, defeat, and national degradation it has left behind. Ibn Khaldun wrote a chapter in his Muqaddimah titled 'Injustice is the harbinger of the ruin of civilization.' What we see today is not just the ruin of civilization, but the ruin of the meaning that makes a people a nation. Sudanese people are asked today to align behind the 'Battle of Dignity.' But what dignity exists when a miner is killed in Jebel al-Uqaidat and his state does not name his killer? What dignity is there in millions begging for safety in displacement camps? National dignity was lost the day the state became spoils for the organization, and the humiliation we live today is but its late harvest. The 'Kizan' (Islamists) kept talking about conspiracies until everyone discovered they were the great conspiracy against the Sudanese people, their sovereignty, their land, and their unity. From here, the most painful question presents itself: if the organization handed over its guests when they threatened its survival, folded its slogans when they became a burden, ousted its own theorist when he challenged its power, lost Hala'ib in a gamble, and accepted the country's partition—why is it asked of the Sudanese people to sacrifice their homeland for its survival? That is the final exposure. It is not just military or political, but an exposure of the nature of a ruling project, of the contradiction between its slogans and its priorities, and of the price paid by the Sudanese when maintaining power became more important than protecting the state and society. Exiting this requires an intellectual awakening that reads the war as a war on the nation, not a war between its components, and a spiritual awakening that wards off strife and restores solidarity among the Sudanese—not because they are identical, but because their destiny is shared. Nations are not built on matching faces, but on a unity of destiny, and they are not restored by weeping over ruins, but by re-establishing the contract that binds their people together. The blood of the miners in the northern desert, and the blood of civilians in Darfur, Khartoum, Al-Jazeera, and Kordofan are not separate tragedies, but a single cry from a homeland exhausted by conflict. Sudan will not regain its health when one Sudanese defeats another, but when Sudanese people together defeat every project that makes some of them fuel for the survival of others in power. auwaab@gmail.com