The Sovereignty Council: Does it Represent the Marginalized Regions?

Yesterday, the military and civilian representatives who have spent months negotiating Sudan’s transition finally agreed on the constitution of the Sovereignty Council that will act as the country’s interim presidential body. Being comprised of both soldiers and civilians, today’s Sovereignty Council represents a hybrid of the civilian Sovereignty Council formed during the 1964-1965 transition and the Transitional Military Council that served a similar function in 1985-1986. Both those institutions used their presidential power to undermine more radical political actors calling for a more comprehensive social revolution – in 1965, the Sovereignty Council dissolved an interim cabinet dominated by leftists and the rise of the Transitional Military Council in 1985 sidelined Sudan’s radical trade unionists. The radical left do not appear to have much presence in the Sovereignty Council today. However, the Khartoum media has celebrated its increased representation of marginalized groups, pointing to the presence of two women in a ruling council for the first time in the country’s history – one of whom, Raja Nicola, also hails from the Coptic Christian minority – as well as that of individuals from the country’s eastern, southern and western margins.

So does the Sovereignty Council of today mark a sharp break with its predecessors? Among the military participants in the council, the most problematic figure in General Himeidti. As the one of the two representatives of Darfur, he is also the head of a militia that while representing a powerful private army in its own right also served as the former regime’s principal counter-insurgency arm in the region. At present, there is no representative of any of the rebel groups he fought against to counter-balance his involvement.

It is true that the many of the civilian members do hail from the peripheries, incusing Hasan Shaikh Idris (the East), Muhammad Hasan al-Ta’ishi (Darfur), and Siddiq Tawoor al-Kafi (South Kordofan). At the same time, they are all closely tied to political parties that some in those regions identify with a historic Khartoum elite – the National Umma Party in the case of Idris and al-Ta’ishi, and the Ba’ath Party in the case of al-Kafi. The National Umma Party (historically just the ‘Umma Party’) is more than simply a Khartoum party – through its ties to the Ansar religious order, it has historically been able to mobilize many supporters in the eastern and western regions  where this movement formed such a strong base during the Mahdist revolution of the late nineteenth century. Since the 1950s, the Umma Party established itself as the premier political player in Sudan’s parliamentary eras, alongside the Democratic Unionist Party that is represented on the Sovereignty Council via Muhammad al-Faki Suleiman.  However, the prominence of these parties outside of the riverain centre has been increasingly challenged by regionalist movements such as the Beja Congress in the East, and the Darfur rebels movements in the West. This has particularly been the case since al-Bashir’s coup of 1989 curtailed parliamentary politics and further stoked regional rebellion. The rebel movements aligned with the Sudan Revolutionary Front rejected the political agreements that brought about the Sovereignty Council, and will not be happy that the representatives of these regions on that council are so closely identified with parties like the National Umma Party which helped to engineer the agreement with the military.

Siddiq Tawoor al-Kafi, meanwhile, is ostensibly one of the most radical actors on the sovereignty council. In March he used the Ba’ath party newspaper al-Hadaf to condemn the efforts of Sadiq al-Mahdi and the US government to engineer a ‘soft landing’ for al-Bashir’s regime. Yet Abdel Aziz al-Hilu, leader of one the rebel factions most sceptical of the developments in Khartoum, has threatened to halt the current ceasefire following al-Kafi’s appointment. Al-Hilu was particularly angry about the Arabist ideology al-Kafi’s Ba’ath party espouses, seeing it as incompatible with the cultural history of the Southern Kordofan region. Meanwhile, much social media criticism has focused on the participation of al-Kafi’s brothers in the now departed Islamist regime. Arabism and Islamism are not one and the same, and in their heyday during the Khartoum street politics of the 1980s the Ba’athists played a major role in fighting the Islamists who were backing the last military regime of Jafa’ar Nimeiri, equating them with the Iranian Ayatollahs that their Iraqi patron Saddam Hussein was locked in combat with. However, from the perspective of the rebels of the marginalized areas, Arabism and Islamism are both ideologies which emerged in the educational institutions of the riverain centre, and were imposed by the graduates of those institutions like al-Kafi and his brothers on a region they do not really represent.

When the Transitional Military Council of 2019 was first formed, it had a very different composition to the body which is now being officially dissolved and absorbed into the Sovereignty Council. Civilian negotiators successfully pushed for the removal of figures they deemed unpalatable, mainly Islamists. It may be that as peace talks with the rebel movements develop the composition of the Sovereignty Council (and other interim institutions) also shifts for similar reasons. If the leaders of the new government are not able to bridge the gap between the marginalized regions and the riverain centre, their opponents could well exploit that. Yesterday Ali al-Haj, the leader of a major Islamist party with ties to Darfur’s rebel Justice and Equality Movement, announced a regionally based opposition government to topple the new order, using the presence of Himeidti on the Sovereignty Council in particular to call its legitimacy into question.  In this context, the leaders of the Forces of Freedom and Change will need to work hard to bridge the gap between the historic political parties and the rebel movements if their transition is to succeed.