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Talaat, one of the main organizers of the Armenian genocide, is still immortalized, remembered and admired in Turkey. Avenues, mosques, schools and hospitals are named after him, even in Armenian neighborhoods like Şişli.

a wholesale project of social engineering that continues in different forms, even though its original architects are long gone. The inability of the Turkish public to face the realities of its past has multiple uses for any regime, including the Erdoğan regime. As long as it continues to be a useful and essential building block of institutions, capital, political leadership and the public imagination, this engineered identity and history of lies and half-truths will feature prominently in Turkey

“For decades the official policy of Ankara has been to cement the denial of the Armenian genocide by way of constant indoctrination through schoolbooks, civil and military education, control of the media discourse and reproduction of the myth of Talaat. These efforts were also manifested in the giving of names to streets and squares. Symbolism is a solid part of denialism.”

“Talaat is by no means the only mass murderer that is being glorified in the current Turkish imagination. There are other [such] figures … ranging from the lesser-known Topal Osman, a well-documented figure responsible for conducting multiple atrocities in the Pontic genocide, a significant theater of the larger Greek genocide, to Nurettin Paşa, a prominent figure in the Greek genocide who crowned his career with the massacre of civilians and the burning of Smyrna/Izmir in 1922,

Also significant in this context was the systematic replacement of Armenian place names (on streets, buildings, neighbourhoods, towns, and villages) with Turkish names. The erasure of Armenians from collective memory was completed during the Turkish Republic; in their history textbooks, Turkish children hear nothing about Armenian culture or learn simply that they were enemies of the Turks.

the Turkish state and its governments have systematically removed all markers of the Armenians’ civilisation

Current scholarly discussion on the Armenian genocide, however, focuses almost exclusively on the human destruction, not taking into consideration the systematic annihilation of Armenian sites and monuments that has taken place since then

This is cultural death, and it is especially dangerous because it legitimates the denial of diversity by authoritarian states and their societies.

Historical records document previous erasures of peoples and their culture: the Native Americans and First Nations of north America; the Mayas and Aztecs of Mesoamerica; and the Roman destruction of Carthage (north Africa), which some scholars point to as the earliest recorded organised genocide.

the harrowing plight of Syrian journalist Ali Mahmoud Othman, co-founder of Le patrimoine archéologique syrien en danger. Othman was arrested by government forces in March 2012 and has not been heard of since his televised “confession” in May 2012

Recurring Internet images of ISIS fighters beheading western men obscure the equally outrageous and horrific acts of sexual violence against women, torture of children, and destruction of homes, markets, churches, Shi’a mosques, and ancient monuments. All of this constitutes the challenging environment in which cultural activists must do their work.

Lemkin’s teachings still have something to say to us today: without monuments and cultural objects, social groups are atomised into disaffected, soulless individuals

Ali Kemal fled into exile in 1909 in London and was in favor of a British protectorate over Ottoman lands, believing that a war for independence between the Turks and the imperial powers would further provoke the Great Powers and create a dark future for the Turks. Apparently he was badly misguided in this stance against Ataturk, who would ultimately lead Turkey to independence and expel foreign forces from Anatolia.

How Ali Kemal's life came to an end is horrific. While he was being transferred to Ankara to be tried by an Independence Tribunal, he was seized from a train and lynched by a mob organized by Gen. Nurettin Pasha, commander of the First Army. It is said that he was lynched because of his opposition to the independence war. It is also a well-known fact that during the attack, the mob called him Artin Kemal, Artin being a popular Armenian name.

It is said that prominent figures of the newly established Turkish Republic, among them Ismet Inonu and Ataturk, abhorred Nurettin Pasha for what he did. He was never, however, punished for that deed or the other atrocities in which he was allegedly involved as he escaped arrest. Nurettin Pasha also organized the lynching of Chrysostomos Kalafatis, the metropolit of Smyrana, today's Izmir.

on the one hand we need to give him credit for his being in favor of putting perpetrators of the Armenian genocide and war crimes on trial, but on the other hand we need to criticize him for his rigid opposition to the War of Independence and his unconditional support of the British back then

Without the sickly and frantic fervor of CUP ideologue Ziya Gökalp’s imaginings of the Turks as Übermensch, there would be no mythical “nation” to appeal to

After 1923, homogeneity, sameness, consistency, and obedience were qualities strictly enforced — a kind of ethnic chauvinism that repudiated the weak pluralism of the Ottoman state.

As Philliou meticulously demonstrates, “only by insisting officially on total rupture between the Ottoman and Republican Turkish states could the hesitations, about-faces, and imperfect pedigrees of the new nationalists be effaced. And only with total rupture could the myriad and possibly incriminating habits, associations, and values of Unionism be expunged from the record. Only with the insistence of total rupture could the resemblances in political culture, affiliation, and habits be submerged.”

As much he tried to deny it, what Kemal inherited was, in essence, the entirety of the CUP shorn of its Central Committee (soon to be cathartically liquidated by Armenian assassins as nemesis for the genocide). Even the guns and cash needed to shock the nationalist insurgency into action in mid-1919 had been arranged by Talât’s enforcers as part of a Gladio-like stay-behind plan. The great majority of the movement’s leading men were identical to those who had staffed the CUP’s government. Eighty percent of the state bureaucracy continued into the Republic; nine out of every 10 army officers still served; hundreds of party bosses, provincial governors, and police chiefs remained in their jobs.

Even after the Kemalists had been explicitly voted out in 1950, the siege mentality lingered because the Democrat Party was (again) not a break from the past but an outgrowth of the Republican People’s Party. Menderes’ victory “did not signal the entrance of an entirely new elite,” Philliou insists. “The new trappings of freedom and democracy were built on the quasi-fascist foundations of the republic and the RPP. … The institutional foundations of political authority had not been fundamentally altered.” It was not a leap for those who considered themselves guardians of the Kemalist legacy to intervene if they thought the nation to be at risk; it was a duty.

The 1971 and 1980 interventions were carried out to better smash the emerging Kurdish movement, labor militancy, and the spree of Armenian shootings of Turkish diplomats. And it is not by chance that the 1997 “Memorandum” — the so-called postmodern coup — came not long after the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) used suicide bombing for the first time in the summer of 1996.

Finally, Erdoğan and his party inherited the role that had once been the preserve of the men in bunkers and directorates. Clothed in the aura of honor, they gave up the delusion of democracy to guard against anything that might threaten the sacred state. Finally, they fulfilled the only authentic political tradition that has ever existed in Turkish history.

Throughout “A Past Against History,” Philliou evokes the concept of muhalafet to examine the liberal wing of Ottoman and Turkish politics from 1908 to 1965. It is clearly meant to evoke the plight of journalists and writers in Turkey today; Refik Halid can stand in for a Can Dündar or an Ahmet Altan, or any number of imprisoned nonconformists.Muhalafet is a slippery term, though, malleable and effervescent, meaning anything from “internal dissent” to “partisan opposition.” Philliou writes, “Today, the word carries a charged valence, of the principled heroism — often doomed to tragedy — of someone from a position of privilege, that is, within the Turkish elite, who speaks truth to power.” Yet if there is anything that can be gleaned from human struggles for liberation, it is that “speaking truth to power” has never worked. So long as it remains a principle and not a practice, so long as “speaking truth” remains in the realm of the imaginary, it will always be defeated. Power, in the form of a mass of organized people all heaving in one direction, must be wielded, not just spoken about.

Kemal understood this basic point, too. The nation would succumb to its partitioners unless its people — newly homogenized — could be hauled up from their postwar despair and pointed in the direction of a clearly defined enemy

a liberal or even a socialist opposition will be doomed if it rests on a purely aesthetic model of politics. Morals and theories alone won’t save you. “Cease quoting laws,” the Roman general Pompey once said, “to men with swords.”

The destruction of the marshes did not begin in 1991, or even in 1980, but a century earlier. For millennia, the marshes had stood out as a stateless zone, comparable to what James Scott describes of upland southeast Asia. Hydrologically incorrigible and physically impenetrable, the area was a natural haven for escaped slaves, dissenters and brigands. At the turn of the 20th century though, the Ottomans and British began using advanced cartographic technologies and steamship navigation to assert mastery over the marshes and encourage the transition from peripatetic tribalism into modern citizenship based on settled agriculture. “Reclaiming” the marshes for agriculture was a cornerstone of development policies in Iraq.

Similar stories could be told about British and German uses of concentrations camps and “hunger wars” in southern Africa, Soviet eradication of the herds of Kazakh nomads, American defoliation of Vietnamese rice paddies and Portuguese attempts to defeat insurgency by building a dam in Mozambique. Third World states have since adopted similar tactics, as in Guatemala’s genocidal 1982 “beans and bullets” campaign in the central highlands. The logic of ecological intervention continues to influence counterinsurgency today.

Development and counterinsurgency are thus often linked, both tactically and doctrinally.

Conversations within the community center on the divide between the elites and the impoverished Alawites who are commonly linked to the discourse of sacrifice. Economic implosion and the decimation of the Syrian pound have effectively thrust a formerly comfortable middle class into poverty. Whereas Alawites are disproportionately represented in the public sector, the average state salary – a meager 50,000 SYP ($21) per month – means that the vast majority live well below the poverty line, as the average family, according to a Syrian newspaper, requires 700,000 SYP ($304) per month in order to live comfortably. 

In October alone, the price of gasoline increased twice, while the cost of diesel – used for residential heat and cooking, in addition to operating bakeries and fueling Syria’s cheapest mode of transportation, microbuses – more than doubled. Basic necessities have become virtually unaffordable.

Many of the communities impacted by the fires are subsistence farmers that depend on the profits accrued from harvesting crops such as olives, citrus, and tobacco. They commonly require a mixture of short- and long-term loans from the state’s Agricultural Cooperative Bank. Yet systemic corruption, mismanagement, and a collapsed economy have depleted state coffers, making it unlikely that the regime will compensate those whose homes and livelihoods have been destroyed.

in an interview with pro-regime radio station Sham FM, a resident of Alawite al-Fakhoura asserts the funds are being distributed by local officials in a nepotistic fashion. This example illustrates that, in the improbable case that Assad secures the necessary finances, his regime cannot prevent its clientelist networks from capturing them

diffusion of power since 2011 has led to unprecedented corruption amid the rise of relatively autonomous war profiteers, from militias to businessmen

Outside of individual members hailing from a class of intellectuals, artists, and political dissidents, few Alawites actively joined the uprising in 2011. Those who did generally partook in cross-confessional protests that stressed national unity.

In August 2015, the president’s cousin, Suleiman al-Assad, shot and killed a decorated Syrian Air Force colonel in Latakia City in a bout of road rage. According to the colonel’s brother, Suleiman had disparaged the Syrian military before killing the officer. Protests calling for Suleiman’s execution ensued in the Alawite neighborhood of Al-Zira’a. The debasing of the army – viewed as the only buffer between Alawites and a vengeful, sectarian opposition – by a privileged member of the ruling class struck a political nerve.

The spread of parasitic pro-regime militias operating with impunity and their disregard for breadlines, gas queues, and ration restrictions, in addition to their harassment of people desperately awaiting their turn, has contributed to an atmosphere in which fights break out. In Latakia and Hama, these fights have reportedly resulted in a few deaths.

time-tested tactic of externalizing blame and deflecting responsibility is currently being sustained by several exogenous factors. These include the presence of Turkish and American troops on Syrian soil and their support for rival armed actors, the sporadic persistence of Israeli strikes, and the implementation of U.S. sanctions through the Caesar Act, which collectively breathe life into the regime’s otherwise exhausted rhetoric

People considering organizing widespread civil disobedience are deterred by the specter of pre-emptive detention by the dreaded mukhabarat. The regime’s periodic security reshuffling further blurs the ability to identify potentially dangerous agents within their own community, magnifying the perceived threat posed by the omnipresence of informants.

the regime’s inability to check its repressive impulses could lead to a situation in which Alawites related to members of the officer corps are arrested and tortured – or worse, disappeared – for public critiques of the government, causing backlash from its own coercive forces

the deterioration of living standards could ultimately lead to a breaking point. 

Any organized dissent would require the support of its rank-and-file soldiers, most of whom share similar, if not identical, grievances with the wider community, and could thus be sympathetic. This could potentially cause a schism within the Alawite community as familial allegiances are weighed against loyalty to the Assad dynasty and its regime, particularly if ordered to repress protests in Alawite areas.

The only conceivable scenario in which Assad’s departure can occur at the hands of the Alawites while salvaging the state and avoiding further regional instability would be through a palace coup led by disgruntled officers and backed by Russia. However, the likelihood that Russia could simply replace or abandon Assad, its growing frustrations notwithstanding, is low, not least due to lack of an alternative.

Iranian entrenchment, both within the formal institutions of the regime and the state’s security landscape more broadly, continues to exploit Assad’s tenuous authority in order to obstruct Russian attempts to monopolize patronage.

Iran is a force for regime continuity. By creating a parallel network of control that bypasses the state, Iran has thus far been able to reproduce its influence, particularly through its ongoing relations with a patchwork of non-state militias, while resisting Russian efforts at vertically integrating these actors into the formal structures of a centralized Syrian state

the regime played the leading role in engineering facts on the ground critical to corroborating the false binary at the heart of its survival: Either accept the stability and security of the state – however perilous – or test the genocidal dispositions of the “jihadist” opposition.

This idea – that the president is innocent despite being surrounded by villains – is not uncommon among the Alawites.

Apart from the Turkish-backed factions in the north, the threat of Sunni reprisals occupies less of an immediate concern to most Alawites than their ability to secure food, shelter, and transportation amid a shattered economy and unstable currency

Kahanists are the FBI’s prime suspects in the 1985 assassination of popular Palestinian-American activist Alex Odeh who died in a bombing outside Los Angeles because he called for a two-state solution (which became the official policy of the US government less than a decade later).[2] Odeh’s murder had far-reaching implications, scaring off a generation of Arab-American activists from advocating on behalf of Palestinians.

even many sectors of the Israeli right were embarrassed by Kahane’s shameless racism, and by the end of his first term in 1988 he was banned from running again.

Six years later, in 1994, the Israeli government, then led by the Labor Party, declared his Kach party a terrorist organization. But by that point, the Kahane movement had already been active for over a quarter of a century, leaving a wake of destruction. To date it has produced more than 20 killers and taken the lives of over 60 people, most of them Palestinians.[3] Credible allegations put the death toll at well over double that number, but even the lower confirmed figure yields a higher body count than any other Jewish faction in the modern era.

For decades, Kahanists—as followers of Kahane are called in Israel—have repeatedly attempted to leverage their violence to trigger a wider war and bog Israel down in perpetual armed conflict with its neighbors. And once Israel’s military might is truly unassailable, Kahanists say, Jewish armies must march across the Middle East and beyond, destroying churches and mosques and forcing their Christian and Muslim worshippers to abandon their beliefs or die at the sword.

Just months after the Oslo Accords were signed in Washington, DC on the White House lawn, a former candidate for Knesset in Kahane’s Kach party, Baruch Goldstein, committed the largest mass murder by a single person in Israeli history, shooting dead 29 Palestinians and wounding over 100 more at a mosque in Hebron. During the protests that followed, the Israeli Defense Forces killed perhaps two dozen more Palestinians. Exactly 40 days later, at the end of the traditional Muslim mourning period, Hamas began its retaliatory campaign of suicide bombings. Over the next three years this campaign would claim over 100 Israeli lives and harden many Jewish hearts against the prospect of peace with Palestinians. Today, Kahanists can convincingly claim credit for crippling the fragile peace process while it was still in its infancy.

In Hebron in 1983, on the Jewish holiday of Purim, Kahanist Israel Fuchs sprayed a passing Palestinian car with bullets. In response, Israel’s defense minister ordered Fuchs’s Kahanist settlement razed to the ground. A decade later in 1994, when Goldstein carried out his massacre, also on Purim, Israel’s defense minister put Hebron’s Palestinian residents under curfew and ordered the local Palestinian commercial district locked and bolted. The market has been shuttered ever since. Last year, Israel’s defense minister announced that the market would be refurbished and repopulated—by Jewish residents. On the same day, the state renovated nearby Kahane Park, where Goldstein is entombed, and where Kahanists gather every year to celebrate Purim and the carnage Goldstein wrought.

Many of Kahane’s American acolytes followed him to Israel, including top JDL fundraiser and Yeshiva University provost Emanuel Rackman, who took over as rector, and then chancellor, of Israel’s Bar Ilan University. Under Rackman’s tutelage, Bar Ilan’s Law School became an incubator for the Israeli far-right. The most infamous of these students was Yigal Amir. Inspired by the Goldstein massacre, Amir assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, dealing a death blow to Israel’s liberal Zionist camp. Amir carried out the murder on the five-year anniversary of Kahane’s killing.

Both American-born followers of Kahane, Leitner and Ben Yosef went from armed attacks against Palestinians to court room advocates for their fellow religious extremists. Both enlisted at Bar Ilan Law School after serving short prison sentences. Together with his wife Nitzana Darshan, who he met there, Leitner established the highly profitable Israel-based lawfare group Shurat HaDin or Israel Law Center (ILC). After Ben Yosef earned his law degree at Bar Ilan, his American allies founded the Association Center for Civil Justice (ACCJ), a US-based lawfare group that has earned millions of dollars and has for years funneled significant sums to Fuchs, Ben Yosef and other Kahanists.

After Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995, his Labor-led government was replaced by the secular right-wing Likud party, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, who promptly appointed ex-Kahanists Tzahi HaNegbi and Avigdor Liberman to cabinet positions. But that did not satisfy the appetite of the Kahanists, who resolved to coax the Likud even further to the right. Founded by longtime Kahane supporter Shmuel Sackett, the Likud’s Jewish Leadership faction succeeded in catapulting its candidate Moshe Feiglin into the role of deputy speaker of the Knesset where he called on the government to “concentrate” the civilian population of Gaza into “tent camps” until they could be forcefully relocated.

Today, prior membership in the Kahanist camp no longer carries any stigma within the Likud.

the original Kach core group has rebranded itself to sidestep Israeli law, now calling itself Jewish Power, and are consistently courted by the rest of the Israeli right

Kahanists have had even greater success penetrating the halls of power at the local level where their representatives on Jerusalem city council have been included in the governing coalition since 2013. In 2014, Kahanist Councillor Aryeh King—now deputy mayor—used widely-understood religious references to incite an assembly of religious Jews to kill Palestinians. Later that very night, a group of religious Jews did exactly that, kidnapping and beating Palestinian teen Mohammad Abu Khdeir, forcing gasoline down his throat and torching him to death from the inside out.

After Kahane’s death, top Chabad rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh, also an American immigrant to Israel, inherited Kahane’s position as the most unapologetically racist rabbi in the country. In 2010 Ginsburgh helped publish an influential and vicious religious tract authored by one of his leading disciples called The King’s Torah, which sanctions organ harvesting from non-Jews and infanticide (if a Jew suspects that the child will one day constitute a threat).[9] Ginsburgh’s frequent tributes to Kahane’s memory, including repeated proclamations that “Kahane was right” have cemented the loyalty of third-generation Kahanists, including the latter’s namesake grandson, settler youth leader Meir Ettinger.

Thirty years ago, even if Israeli rabbis thought like Kahane and Ginsburgh they would not dare to speak these sentiments out loud, much less publish and promote them. Under Netanyahu’s rule, however, such sentiments are routinely supported financially and politically by the institutions of the Israeli state. In 2019, Israel’s education minister presented Ginsburgh with the Torah Creativity award at an annual event sponsored by his ministry.

The principles that Rabbi Meir Kahane popularized—that liberal democracy is an undesirable alien idea and that non-Jews must be driven down, and preferably out of Greater Israel altogether—have seeped deep into mainstream Israeli society.

Under Kaftancioglu’s guidance, Imamoglu and other mayors took a new tack, dubbed the “Radical Love” strategy, which is the antithesis of Erdogan’s ferocious style of polarization and antagonism. This involved making overtures to marginalized groups, using positive, inclusive language (extremely rare in the vicious world of Turkish politics), and trying to heal the cultural fault lines that Erdogan has taken a jackhammer to. Imamoglu’s positive slogan was “Everything’s going to be OK,” and he recited a prayer at a mosque—a rare move for a CHP politician—as a form of outreach to pious Muslims.

“This is the first time I’ve seen the CHP this organized,” said Nevsin Mengu, a columnist from a CHP background. “Kaftancioglu has played an important role in this.”

She has expressed opinions that are extremely controversial within the party and indeed the country, acknowledging the Armenian genocide, calling the state a “serial killer,” and criticizing a popular Kemalist slogan for its militant language, tweeting “I refuse to say we are the soldiers of Mustafa Kemal, but we are his comrades.”

Within 48 hours of Kaftancioglu being elected the party head for Istanbul in 2018, a prosecutor opened a terrorism investigation into her (she’s now appealing a 10-year jail sentence) and Erdogan himself devoted 10 minutes to slamming her during an AKP meeting the next day, reading each of her tweets that he took issue with.

the government’s wider antagonistic strategy of treating any and all opposition as an existential threat

More recently, a criminal complaint and investigation were opened against Kaftancioglu after the CHP Istanbul municipality lodged a complaint against Erdogan’s powerful Communications Director Fahrettin Altun for allegedly building illegal constructions in Istanbul.

“I’ve been subjected to hundreds of sexist, nationalist, ultrareligious groups’ threats, and it still goes on. I knew that as a woman I was going to face this, but I never thought of taking a step back,”

“If [the government] can’t identify an enemy outsider, they create abstract enemies and pretend to be in a fight with them. Sometimes they call it foreign powers, sometimes terrorism, sometimes secular people.”

“What really makes her a juicy target is her flagrant absence of the ‘yerli ve milli’ [local and national, a favorite phrase of the government], the national spirit. She and the people around her … don’t just exist outside of the national spirit type of thing, they deny that kind of nationalism,” Koru said. “Erdogan can get up and say, ‘Look, this is being disrespectful on purpose. She hates you, she hates what you are, and she wants to change you in the way that Kemalists wanted to change you, in the worst possible way.’”

just as Kaftancioglu’s approach turns many people off, it also caters to others who previously may have felt excluded, such as younger people, leftists, liberals, and religious and ethnic minorities. “A certain segment of the party … didn’t like her iconoclastic approach to politics,” he said. “But it may also be that some other people who previously [felt] alienated from the party are now more interested for the same reason.”

the CHP’s increasingly national ambitions. The party hasn’t won an election since 1977, but its most popular figure, Imamoglu, polls almost as high as Erdogan. It’s far too early for the party to announce a presidential candidate, but two of the main contenders would likely be Imamoglu or Mansur Yavas, the popular mayor of the capital, Ankara. Kaftancioglu will likely continue her behind-the-scenes role.

Some governance experts no longer consider the country a democracy, but rather a competitive authoritarian system, especially after Erdogan was left with few limits on his power when the government was transformed into an “executive presidential” system following a referendum in 2017, which Kaftancioglu describes as “one-party rule transformed into one-man rule.”

“For the first time in a long time people are talking about the CHP like it can realistically win national elections.”

The April 2019 revolution, which ended Omar al-Bashir’s 30-year military rule, brought hope that a civilian regime would emerge to govern Sudan. But – less than a year since the appointment of the transitional prime minister, Abdalla Hamdok – this hope is fading fast.

In February 2020, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) described Sudan’s economic prospects as “alarming” – unusually blunt language by its standards. Then came covid-19 and the associated global economic downturn. The IMF revised its assessment: Sudan’s GDP would shrink by 7.2 percent in 2020. By April, inflation had risen to almost 100 percent (one independent estimate finds that inflation may have hit around 116 percent). Adding to this grim catalogue of calamities, the swarms of locusts that have ravaged the Horn of Africa in the worst outbreak in 70 years are widely expected to arrive in Sudan in mid-June. The United States Agency for International Development estimates that more than 9 million Sudanese will require humanitarian assistance this year.

Despite the fact that a “constitutional declaration” places the civilian-dominated cabinet in charge of the country, the generals are largely calling the shots. They control the means of coercion and a tentacular network of parastatal companies, which capture much of Sudan’s wealth and consolidate their power at the expense of their civilian partners in government

In particular, Hamdok will need to establish civilian authority over the parastatal companies controlled by the military and security sector. The task is daunting and fraught with risks, but Hamdok can acquire greater control by taking advantage of the rivalry between Hemedti and General Abdelfattah al-Buhran, the de facto head of state.

draws on 54 recent interviews with senior Sudanese politicians, cabinet advisers, party officials, journalists, former military officers, activists, and representatives of armed groups, as well as foreign diplomats, researchers, analysts, and officials from international institutions

Sudan’s chance for democratisation is the product of a difficult struggle against authoritarianism. For three decades, Bashir ruled as the president of a brutal government. He took power in 1989 as the military figurehead of a coup secretly planned by elements of the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood, before pushing aside Islamist ideologue Hassan al-Turabi, who had masterminded the plot. During his rule, Bashir survived US sanctions, isolation from the West, several insurgencies, the secession of South Sudan, a series of economic crises, and arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Darfur. He presided over ruthless counter-insurgency campaigns that deepened political rifts and destroyed the social fabric of peripheral regions such as Darfur, South Kordofan, and Blue Nile.

he turned pro-government tribal militias from Darfur into the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), an organisation led by Hemedti, as insurance

Throughout the 2010s, the Bashir regime put down successive waves of protests. But the uprising that began on December 2018 – triggered by Bashir’s decision to lift subsidies on bread – proved too much for the government to contain

a coalition of trade unions called the Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA) established informal leadership of nationwide demonstrations

As junior officers vowed to protect demonstrators, the leaders of the military, the RSF, and the NISS put their mistrust of one another aside, overthrew Bashir, and installed a junta

On 3 June, the last day of Ramadan, the generals sent troops to crush the sit-in. RSF militiamen and policemen beat, raped, stabbed, and shot protesters, before throwing the bodies of many of their victims into the Nile. Around 120 people are thought to have been killed and approximately 900 wounded in the massacre.

prompted Washington and London to pressure Abu Dhabi and Riyadh to curb the abuses of their client junta

envisioned a transition that would – over the course of a little more than three years, and under the guidance of a civilian-led cabinet of ministers – reach a peace deal with armed groups from the peripheral regions of Sudan, while establishing a new constitutional order and free elections

When Hamdok, a UN economist picked by the FFC, took office on 21 August, there were grounds for cautious optimism. The peace talks with armed groups began in earnest and seemed to make rapid progress. Hamdok inherited a catastrophic economic situation and political structure in which the generals remained in high office but the constitutional declaration put civilians in the driving seat. Western countries expressed their full support for the transition. The journey would be difficult, but its direction was clear.

Sudanese citizens have gained new civil and political rights since the transition began. The new authorities have curtailed censorship. The harassment and arbitrary, often violent detentions conducted by NISS officers have largely ended. Minorities such as Christians now have freedom of religion. The government has repealed the public order law, which allowed for public floggings. And it is in the process of criminalising female genital mutilation.

The authorities have not achieved much on transitional justice.[3] The head of the commission in charge of investigating the 3 June massacre of revolutionary demonstrators said he could not protect witnesses. The authorities said they are willing to cooperate with the International Criminal Court to try Bashir and the other wanted leaders, but the generals are blocking a handover of the suspects to The Hague

By 2018, the authorities were struggling to finance imports, and queues were forming outside petrol stations. The economic slide continued, prompting Bashir’s downfall. It has only continued since then. The Sudanese pound, which traded at 89 to the dollar in the last weeks of Bashir’s rule, now trades at 147 to the dollar.

Although the state sponsor of terrorism designation does not impose formal sanctions on Sudan, it sends a political signal that stigmatises the country, deters foreign investment and debt relief, and casts doubt on Washington’s claim to support civilian government. Unfortunately for Hamdok, Sudan does not sit high on the list of priorities of the current US administration. President Donald Trump decided not to fast-track Sudan’s removal from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, allowing the process to take the bureaucratic route and become enmeshed in the conflicting perspectives of the State Department, national security and defence agencies, and Congress

The European Union has pledged €250m in new development assistance (along with €80m in support against covid-19) to Sudan, while Sweden has pledged €160m, Germany €80m, and France €16m-17m. Yet these are paltry figures in comparison to Europeans’ declared commitments

The path to debt relief under the Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HPIC) Initiative is long in any circumstances. But US indifference, European timidity, and the indecisiveness of Hamdok’s cabinet have combined to kill off hopes that the diplomatic momentum Sudan established in September and October 2019 would quickly translate into substantial international assistance

Donors want the Sudanese government to commit to reforms that will have a social cost in return for a promise of unspecified levels of funding. The pledges Sudan receives in June could fall far below the estimated $1.9 billion the government needs, forcing the authorities to create the social safety net only gradually.[8] This would go against the logic of a temporary programme designed to offset one-off price hikes. In these conditions, subsidy reform – however necessary – is a gamble for the government.

Failure to stabilise Sudan’s economy would have far-reaching consequences for not only the country but also the wider region. Since Hamdok’s appointment, the domestic balance of power has once again tilted in favour of the generals, who could seize on the climate of crisis to restore military rule. If they remove civilian leaders from the equation, rival factions within the military and security apparatus will be set on a collision course.

Within the government, the configuration of power that has emerged since September 2019 bears little resemblance to the delicate institutional balance – enshrined in the constitutional declaration – that the FFC fought so hard to achieve in its negotiations with the junta.

The generals’ public relations machine is now well-oiled. The military opened a bakery in Atbara, the cradle of the 2018-2019 uprising. Hemedti has established health clinics and a fund to support farmers; his forces have distributed RSF-branded food supplies and launched a mosquito-eradication campaign.

Neither Hamdok nor the FFC has attempted to mobilise public support when faced with obstruction by, or resistance from, the generals. As such, they have given up one of the few cards they held and created the impression that they have been co-opted by the old regime. The popularity of the FFC has collapsed; Hamdok earned considerable goodwill with the Sudanese public in late 2019, but their patience with him is wearing thin. Many activists say that they would be back on the streets if it were not for covid-19 (which has so far had a limited health impact on Sudan but, as elsewhere, led to restrictions on public gatherings).

The so-called “Arab troika” of the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt have taken advantage of the revolution to sideline their regional rivals Turkey and Qatar, which had long supported Bashir’s regime. The Emiratis, in cooperation with the Saudis, are playing a particularly active role in shaping Sudan’s political process, reportedly spending lavishly and manoeuvring to position Hemedti as the most powerful man in the new Sudan

The Emiratis are widely known to be generous with their covert financial contributions, which flow either directly to various political actors or, indirectly, through Hemedti.[20] Mohammed Dahlan, the Palestinian exile who runs many important security projects on behalf of Emirati ruler Mohammed bin Zayed, handles the UAE’s Sudan file.[21] Former Sudanese general Abdelghaffar al-Sharif, once widely considered the most powerful man in the NISS, reportedly lives in Abu Dhabi and has put his formidable intelligence network at the service of the UAE.

The Arab troika has also worked to undermine Hamdok and prop up the generals

Saudi Arabia and the UAE have avoided financing transparent mechanisms such as the World Bank’s Multi-Donor Trust Fund. Meanwhile, Hemedti appears to have a large supply of cash with which to support the central bank. In March, he deposited $170m in the bank. These developments suggest that the Gulf powers could be using their financial might to shape the outcome of Sudan’s domestic political process, redirecting flows of money to prop up Hemedti and exacerbating the economic crisis to position him as a saviour

The levels of resentment between the RSF and SAF are such that many officers fear a local incident could escalate into broader clashes between the two forces

Beyond subsidies, the economic debate in Sudan has recently turned to the issue of how the civilian authorities can acquire greater revenue – particularly by recovering assets stolen by the Bashir regime, and by gaining control of the sprawling network of parastatal companies affiliated with the military and security sector.

It is not difficult to identify who to tax: companies owned by NCP businessmen, Bashir’s family, the SAF, the NISS, and the RSF play a dominant role in the economy, yet benefit from generous tariff and tax exemptions

the military and security apparatus has shares in, or owns, companies involved in the production and export of gold, oil, gum arabic, sesame, and weapons; the import of fuel, wheat, and cars; telecommunications; banking; water distribution; contracting; construction; real estate development; aviation; trucking; limousine services; and the management of tourist parks and events venues. Defence companies manufacture air conditioners, water pipes, pharmaceuticals, cleaning products, and textiles. They operate marble quarries, leather tanneries, and slaughterhouses. Even the firm that produces Sudan’s banknotes is under the control of the security sector.

These companies are shrouded in secrecy; high-level corruption and conflicts of interest make the boundaries between private and public funds porous

The generals are using dark money to keep the civilian government on life support, ensuring that it remains dependent on them

Following decades of consolidated authoritarianism, Sudan has entered a rare period of instability in its balance of power.

The US, Europe, and international financial institutions have left Sudan to its own devices, allowing its economy to tank and its political transition to stall. In the interim, the generals have expanded their reach and FFC leaders have returned to Sudan’s traditional elite bargaining, at the expense of institutional reform. Western inaction has also enabled regional actors – chief among them Abu Dhabi and Riyadh – to play a prominent role in Sudan, dragging the country closer to military rule or a civil war.

Across the region, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have demonstrated their preference for military governments over civilian-led democracies. Their recent actions in Sudan suggest that they may hope to repeat their success in helping return the military to power in Egypt in 2013. But this would be both cynical and naïve. A strong civilian component in the government is a prerequisite for stability in Sudan. The country’s conflicts are a direct result of state weakness – a weakness that pushed Bashir’s military government to use undisciplined militias to repress citizens, fuelling cycles of instability and the emergence of a fragmented military and security apparatus. In the current political environment, any attempt to formally impose military rule could ignite further instability and even a civil war.