The roots of the conflict run deep, right down to the foundations of modern Sudan, created almost 70 years ago by foreign rulers, that unified a country of absurdly distant and ethnically diverse regions as one centralized state. That includes the marshy south, inhabited by dark-skinned Christians and animists who have more in common with neighboring countries such as what are now the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Kenya, and the Darfur region, which is inhabited by a mixture of Muslims. ethnic group. Darfur is loosely and sometimes inappropriately divided between Black and Arab communities, many of whom have deeper ties to the Sahel people of Chad and Niger. This enigmatic country has since been ruled by an Arab elite drawn from tribes along the Blue and White Nile near Khartoum—an elite favored by the British, and under military and civil rule, has refused to give power to local authorities, instead instead of collecting hefty taxes and sending almost nothing in return.
These mismatched sections have formed a trap of sorts, plunging Sudan into a cycle of violent strife. Rebels in the south waged two civil wars against the Khartoum government. At least two million people died in that war. The territory that broke away through a referendum in 2011, becoming the Republic of South Sudan, is generally considered the most widely recognized country on Earth.
Like their compatriots in the south, armed groups of mostly Black African rebels rose up in Darfur in 2003, demanding greater autonomy and a share of the country's wealth. The government in Khartoum responded as usual. Instead of negotiating with or even fighting the insurgents on the ground with their own troops, they supply weapons to the Arab militias in the region, giving them the freedom to terrorize the insurgents and civilians alike. Hundreds of thousands of people will die in that war; millions will flee their homes. Twenty years later, many of them are still in camps in the Sudan and in Chad. Ultimately the president of Sudan, al-Bashir, will become charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Court for his role in the massacre.
But the Arab militias that al-Bashir has relied on to foment “counter-insurgency on the cheap,” in words from the Sudanese scholar Alex de Waal, which proved to be his undoing. Al-Bashir gathered these militias into the armed forces as a new paramilitary called the Rapid Support Force and put a Darfur Arab leader, Mohamed Hamdan, also known as Hemeti, to lead it. When a powerful civil protest movement rose against al-Bashir in 2019, Hemeti and military general Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, joined forces to oust and arrest al-Bashir.
But hopes of re-establishing democratic government in Sudan were quickly dashed when the military massacred protesting civilians and pushed out the fragile transitional civilian government in a coup. By now, the two generals who overthrew al-Bashir have exchanged fire, with the Sudanese caught between them.