KHARTOUM, Sudan: Two warring generals whose rivalry has plunged Sudan into bitter conflict were for years legitimised by an international community more focused on appeasement than on accountability, experts say.'The international community has a lot to answer for here,' Sudanese analyst Kholood Khair told AFP, as deadly fighting raged in the country for nearly a week.'It was their poorly thought out political process which really ratcheted up tensions,' said Khair, founder of the Confluence Advisory think tank.Since the fall of dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019, international mediators have sought to bring civilians and the military to the negotiating table.But in the process, analysts believe, they gave too much credit to army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his deputy turned rival Mohamed Hamdan Daglo — commonly called Hemeti — who leads the powerful paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). 'There was a lot of handholding and appeasement of these generals throughout this political process, because the international community framed them as reformers,' Khair said.Once trusted to steer a transition to civilian rule, instead they staged a coup together in October 2021 derailing that very transition.Their alliance disintegrated, and disagreement over integrating the RSF into the regular army — a key condition in the latest internationally brokered agreement — erupted Saturday into all-out war.Jeffrey Feltman, former US special envoy to the Horn of Africa, said the fighting should be a moment of reckoning for Western powers.'Wishful thinking' 'We reflexively appeased and accommodated the two warlords,' he wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece a year and a half after unsuspectingly leaving Khartoum just hours before the generals' coup.'We considered ourselves pragmatic. Hindsight suggests wishful thinking to be a more accurate description.'In dealing with military commanders accused of atrocities, the international community 'avoided exacting consequences for repeate
d acts of impunity that might have otherwise forced a change in calculus', Feltman wrote.When security forces attacked pro-democracy demonstrators in central Khartoum in June 2019, killing at least 128 people, witnesses said the bloodshed was led by the RSF — which grew out of the Janjaweed militia, implicated in war crimes in Darfur.
Even as Washington slapped sanctions on Russian companies involved in mining for serving as a front in Sudan for Russian private military contractor Wagner, Daglo continued to be welcomed in world capitals.'You have a long history of Hemeti being backed, in terms of finances and international recognition,' a specialist on regional diplomacy told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.
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