Sudan War: Gold, a Key Port, and Two Armies With No Legitimate Claim
Posted on October 30
The Rapid Support Forces (RSF), one of Sudan’s warring parties, have taken over El Fasher, a city in Darfur, western Sudan. This city is the largest in the region, and its capture signals the RSF’s control over this gold-rich area. Gold is one of the two key elements to understanding Sudan’s conflict. The other is Port Sudan, located on the Red Sea coast. There, the geopolitical ambitions of foreign interests in the country intersect.
As the RSF took over El Fasher, which had been under siege for almost 18 months, horrific footage of civilian massacres emerged. The RSF claims to be “cleaning” the city of collaborators with the rival force, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). But there is a strong ethnic and racial component to the killings. Those supporting SAF in El Fasher through the Tasis coalition were predominantly non-“Arabized” Sudanese.
The RSF was built upon the Janjaweed militias, a paramilitary group created by Sudan’s deposed president Omar al-Bashir. The main purpose was to protect him by counterbalancing the power of the army and avoiding the fate of most of his predecessors, including the prime minister he deposed through a coup in 1989. The Janjaweed participated hand-in-hand with the SAF, under the command of Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, in the Darfur genocide between 2003–2005, under the auspices of al-Bashir.
The genocide killed an estimated 200,000 people during the Darfur War. The genocide was part of the war, but it had an added component: it was the killing of people because they belonged to the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa tribes, and Khartoum held them responsible for secessionist claims. These are Sudanese tribes that are not “Arabized.” The government had a racial policy against populations it considered more “African,” and the SAF and RSF used racially motivated killings as punishment during the Darfur War.
Current events in Darfur might be read as a continuation of the Darfur War because the war morphed from a struggle for autonomy into one over gold. The war was initiated by a secessionist movement with similar claims to those of South Sudan, which gained independence from Sudan in 2011. Around that same time (2010–2011), a significant gold deposit was found in North Darfur. This was critical because Sudan had lost 75% of its oil reserves and 95% of its foreign exchange, which had been coming from the oil reserves in the south.
Until 2010, gold was of minor importance in Sudan’s economy, which largely depended on oil exports (mainly to China) and agriculture. Oil was what kept the machinery of the Sudanese state—and the presidency of al-Bashir—running. With the loss of oil revenue and soaring gold prices, the mineral became a viable substitute for income, and al-Bashir moved to centralize and control gold production, founding the Sudan Gold Refinery in 2012. That same year, gold constituted 60% of Sudan’s exports.
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Ultimately, the conflict in Sudan reflects the failure of the nation-state system inherited from Western colonies. A state presupposes a somewhat homogeneous group of people that embodies the nation and upon which to claim the abstract concept of will to representation that legitimizes the state. The legislative power of the state is only useful when others accept it as the legitimate source of law. This was not the case of the post-independence Sudan, proof of it is that there have been more than 20 coups since 1953.
Without the claim to nationhood, a centralized state stands only insofar as it can impose itself upon other legitimacy claims. Once the state is unable to do so, either economically or by monopolizing violence, competing claims to legitimacy emerge and attempt to claim the state’s resources by force. When a vacuum of power occurs, or it is provoked, others will try to fill it.
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Sudan War: Gold, a Key Port, and Two Armies With No Legitimate Claim | naked capitalism |
