National Congress Party

• When the 2019 uprising against long-time dictator Omar al-Bashir created a military-civilian transitional government, the Sudanese hoped that their country would transition to democratic rule.
• But their hopes were dashed in October 2021 when Abdel Fattah al-Burhan led a coup against his civilian counterparts in the transitional government.
• In the latest round of conflict that began on 15 April 2023, civil war looms as the security actors who benefited from Bashir’s downfall battle for supremacy.
• I have studied Sudanese politics for 15 years, and this latest round of conflict is the worst in the country’s recent history.

The ideology of Islamism

• When Bashir staged the coup in 1989, he was acting as a representative of a cell in a military carefully cultivated by the National Islamic Front.
• The National Islamic Front was led by Hasan al-Turabi, who had run Sudan’s Islamic Movement since the 1960s.
• He had grown frustrated at his failure to introduce his version of Muslim law (Sharia), through parliamentary means.
• This policy, the legacy of which still remains, enabled them to give adherents of Islamism and security bosses willing to ally with them control over almost every part of public life in Sudan.

Making amends

• However, after the split with Turabi in 1999, the Bashir regime attempted to repair its international image by distancing itself from such militant groups.
• In the later Bashir period, the Sudanese government supported the Saudi-Emirati coalition against the militant Islamist Houthis in Yemen.
• These are socially conservative authoritarian politics, including the return of morality policing; a hostility to the Sudanese left; and corruption.

A difficult dismantling

• The military that overthrew him has been reading the same script.
• Four months after the military had removed Bashir, it signed a constitutional declaration with the main civilian coalition, the Forces of Freedom and Change.
• But even before this coup, dismantling Bashir’s regime was an enormous challenge.
• The remnants of this continue to undermine democratic transition in Sudan, with ultimately disastrous consequences.