Déclaration conjointe sur la situation à El-Obeid, Soudan, 24 juin 2026
Nous, ministres des Affaires étrangères et partenaires affinitaires (Allemagne, France, Irlande, Italie, Norvège, Pays-Bas, Royaume-Uni), nous déclarons profondément préoccupés par les informations faisant état de la poursuite des attaques à El-Obeid, malgré les appels à y mettre un terme et à assurer la protection des civils.
L’année dernière, le monde entier a assisté avec horreur aux atrocités commises à El-Fasher, des crimes qui, selon les rapports, présentent les « signes caractéristiques d’un génocide ». Nous ne devons pas laisser ces drames se reproduire.
Ces dernières semaines, des frappes de drones répétées sur El-Obeid ont tué des civils et ont entraîné de lourdes pénuries de carburant, de nourriture et d’eau. Alors que la saison des pluies approche à grands pas, les travailleurs humanitaires continuent de fournir une aide vitale, tout en étant délibérément pris pour cibles.
Des éléments crédibles laissent désormais penser qu’une offensive est imminente. Il s’agit d’un moment décisif et la communauté internationale doit agir.
Nous appelons les Forces de soutien rapide à mettre immédiatement un terme à leurs attaques. Les civils doivent pouvoir quitter la zone en toute sécurité, et l’ensemble des parties doivent garantir un accès humanitaire rapide, sûr et sans entraves. Les Forces de soutien rapide et les Forces armées soudanaises, ainsi que leurs alliés, doivent réduire les tensions, respecter le droit international humanitaire et honorer leurs engagements en vertu de la Déclaration de Djeddah.
Des soutiens extérieurs continuent d’entretenir le conflit. Nous appelons ceux qui alimentent le conflit à cesser leurs actions et ceux qui ont de l’influence à en faire usage sans délai pour éviter de nouvelles effusions de sang.
Nous continuerons de travailler étroitement au sein du Conseil de sécurité des Nations Unies et avec nos partenaires régionaux et internationaux pour apporter à l’unisson une réponse claire : les violences doivent cesser, les civils doivent être protégés et les responsables doivent rendre des comptes. Nous demeurons déterminés à soutenir une voie crédible vers la paix grâce au processus mené par le Quintette et nous appelons l’ensemble des parties à coopérer de bonne foi.
بيان مشترك بشأن الوضع في الأبيض، السودان، ٢٤ يونيو/حزيران ٢٠٢٦
نحن، وزراء الخارجية والشركاء في التحالف (ألمانيا، فرنسا، أيرلندا، إيطاليا، النرويج، هولندا، والمملكة المتحدة)، نعرب عن قلقنا البالغ إزاء التقارير الواردة عن استمرار الهجمات في الأبيض، على الرغم من الدعوات لوقفها وضمان حماية المدنيين.
في العام الماضي، شاهد العالم برعبٍ بالغٍ الفظائع التي ارتُكبت في الفاشر، وهي جرائم، بحسب التقارير، تحمل سمات الإبادة الجماعية. يجب ألا نسمح بتكرار مثل هذه المآسي.
في الأسابيع الأخيرة، أسفرت غارات الطائرات المسيّرة المتكررة على الأبيض عن مقتل مدنيين، وأدت إلى نقص حاد في الوقود والغذاء والماء. ومع اقتراب موسم الأمطار، يواصل العاملون في المجال الإنساني تقديم مساعدات حيوية في ظل استهدافهم المتعمد.
تشير أدلة موثوقة الآن إلى أن هجومًا وشيكًا. هذه لحظة حاسمة، ويجب على المجتمع الدولي التحرك.
ندعو قوات الدعم السريع إلى وقف هجماتها فورًا. يجب أن يتمكن المدنيون من مغادرة المنطقة بأمان، وعلى جميع الأطراف ضمان وصول المساعدات الإنسانية بسرعة وأمان ودون عوائق. ويتعين على قوات الدعم السريع والقوات المسلحة السودانية، إلى جانب حلفائها، خفض حدة التوتر، واحترام القانون الدولي الإنساني، والوفاء بالتزاماتها بموجب إعلان جدة.
يستمر الداعمون الخارجيون في تأجيج الصراع. ندعو من يؤججون الصراع إلى الكف عن أعمالهم، وندعو من يملكون النفوذ إلى استخدامه فورًا لمنع المزيد من إراقة الدماء.
سنواصل العمل عن كثب داخل مجلس الأمن التابع للأمم المتحدة ومع شركائنا الإقليميين والدوليين لتقديم استجابة موحدة وواضحة: يجب إنهاء العنف، وحماية المدنيين، ومحاسبة المسؤولين. ونؤكد التزامنا بدعم مسار سلام موثوق من خلال العملية التي تقودها اللجنة الخماسية، وندعو جميع الأطراف إلى التعاون بحسن نية.
Joint statement over the situation in El Obeid, Sudan, June 24th 2026
We, the Foreign Ministers of like-minded partners (France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, UK), are deeply concerned by reports of a continued assault on El Obeid, despite calls for a halt to the attack and protection of civilians.
Last year, the world witnessed with horror the atrocities in El Fasher - crimes that are assessed to bear the “hallmarks of genocide”. We must not allow such failures to be repeated.
In recent weeks, repeated drone strikes on El Obeid have killed civilians and driven acute shortages of fuel, food and water. With the rainy season fast approaching, humanitarian workers continue to provide life-saving assistance but are being deliberately targeted.
There are now credible signs of an imminent offensive. This is a critical moment, and the international community must act.
We call on the Rapid support Forces (RSF) to halt its attack immediately. Civilians must be able to leave safely, and all parties must ensure rapid, safe and unhindered humanitarian access. The RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), and their allies, must de-escalate, uphold international humanitarian law, and honour their commitments under the Jeddah Declaration.
External support continues to sustain this conflict. We call on those fuelling the conflict to cease, and those with influence must exercise it now to avoid further bloodshed.
We will continue to work closely at the UN Security Council and with regional and international partners to secure a clear and unified response: the violence must end, civilians must be protected, and those responsible must be held to account. We remain committed to supporting a credible path to peace through the Quintet-led process and call on all parties to engage in good faith.
#org_saf#org_saf#org_rsf#org_rsf
Ambassade de France au Soudan / سفارة فرنسا بالسودان
Sudan War & Military Situation
THE MYTH OF "REVOLUTIONARY HEMEDTI"
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Dismantling the Most Dangerous Political Fallacy in Contemporary Sudan
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A Marxist Critique of Manufactured Legitimacy and the Tools of Class Domination
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"The ideas of the ruling class are, in every epoch, the ruling ideas."
— Karl Marx, The German Ideology
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Introduction: Illusion as an Instrument of Domination
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Every system of exploitation needs an illusion — one that convinces the oppressed to see a savior in their executioner. This illusion is not a psychological accident. It is a social product, manufactured by material relations of power and reproduced through what Louis Althusser called the "ideological state apparatuses": media, schools, cultural symbols, and political propaganda.
In today's Sudan — devastated by war yet still standing on the legacy of the 2018–2019 December Revolution — this illusion takes the shape of Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, marketed as a revolutionary leader, a liberator from political Islam, and a champion of the "New Sudan" the marginalized once dreamed of.
Dismantling this myth is not an endorsement of the Sudanese Army or its allies. It is, in Marx's own terms, the precondition for any genuine revolution: clear sight, stripped of illusion. An illusion left unchallenged does not merely stall revolution — it eventually becomes fuel for reproducing the very authoritarian order the revolution sought to overthrow.
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Material Roots: From the Margins to Accumulation
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Hemedti cannot be understood outside the material trajectory of Sudanese peripheral capitalism and decades of accumulated state neglect. Born in the early 1970s to a poor Rizeigat family in North Darfur — one of Sudan's most marginalized regions — he had, in the absence of education, wealth, or political connections in Khartoum, only one accessible form of "primitive capital": the tribal militia.
This is precisely what Marx, in Capital, Volume I, described as primitive accumulation in its rawest form — accumulation achieved not through saving or production, but through direct violence, dispossession, and forced displacement.
By the mid-1990s, the Islamist Inqaz regime found in him the ideal proxy: a deniable strike force for Darfur. This forged what Antonio Gramsci called trasformismo — the absorption of marginal forces into the existing order rather than confrontation with it, stabilizing the system in a new guise. The Janjaweed thus evolved from armed gang into protected, state-funded instrument, and Hemedti from obscure fighter into a commander with expanding, state-backed power.
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Gold and the Gun: A Hidden Economic Empire
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Hemedti did not remain merely a military proxy. Through systematic control of gold mines in Jebel Amer, Kurnoi, and elsewhere in Darfur, he built something closer to an armed capitalist conglomerate, fusing raw military force with extractive rent in a single structure indifferent to state borders or law.
According to Global Witness and the UN Panel of Experts on Sudan, Hemedti controls over 30% of Sudan's gold output — most of it smuggled through the UAE rather than passing through state coffers. Reuters investigations have placed the value of this annual smuggling in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Today, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) command an integrated economic system: unregulated gold-mining companies, cross-border smuggling networks stretching from Libya to sub-Saharan Africa, vast farmland seized by force from its original owners, and shell companies or proxies operating through Dubai. What is loosely called "Hemedti's popularity" is, in material terms, simply the surface reflection of this economic power — a textbook case of "war capitalism," in which war is not an obstacle to accumulation but its most efficient instrument.
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The Janjaweed: An Ideology of Annihilation
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The Janjaweed are not merely an armed militia in the narrow technical sense. They are the armed expression of a deep class-and-ethnic contradiction embedded in Darfur's social structure. When the Inqaz regime armed Arab pastoralist factions against African farming villages, it was executing a complex economic-political operation: emptying territory of its inhabitants to clear the way for future extractive projects, and redistributing land and resources to factions loyal to the state.
Though Musa Hilal led the Janjaweed in its early years, Hemedti outmaneuvered him, building his own project on the ruins of an annihilation he helped engineer. What unfolded in Darfur was a violent application of what Marx called the forcible separation of producers from the means of production — carried out with guns, fire, and rape instead of bourgeois law.
The documented toll, per UN, ICC, and human rights reports, is staggering: between 200,000 and 400,000 killed in Darfur (2003–2009), over 2.5 million displaced, systematic mass rape as a weapon of war, and the deliberate destruction of villages, crops, and water sources. The ICC characterized these events as ethnic cleansing and genocide — a record that cannot be softened by "context" without that context itself becoming an ideological act serving the perpetrator.
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The October 2021 Coup: Assassinating the Democratic Transition
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On October 25, 2021, the army and the RSF jointly overthrew Sudan's civilian transitional government under Abdallah Hamdok, suspending the democratic transition born of the December Revolution.
Hemedti was not a reluctant participant; he was an active architect. He publicly backed the coup and ordered his forces to crush protesters and clear sit-ins. The reason is material, not psychological: civilian reform directly threatened the three pillars of his empire — unaccountable rentier accumulation, legal immunity for Darfur, and a security status allowing force without civilian oversight. The coup was a calculated class decision: armed capital refusing to let civilian statehood narrow its margin of impunity.
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The Current War: Genocide as Economic Policy
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Since April 2023, the UN, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International have documented systematic RSF atrocities: mass rape as a weapon of war in Khartoum, Gezira, and El Fasher; ethnic cleansing in Darfur and South Kordofan; looting and destruction of hospitals, schools, and infrastructure; child recruitment; and the deliberate starvation of besieged cities.
In February 2024, the US State Department formally determined that the RSF is committing genocide in Darfur and sanctioned Hemedti personally. The UN has called Sudan's the world's largest displacement crisis, exceeding 10 million people.
What purely humanitarian framing misses is the economic logic. The systematic looting of factories, farms, banks, and telecom infrastructure is not incidental plunder — it is the operation's core function. Every captured city becomes an organized looting site: machinery dismantled and trafficked, grain stores seized, land redistributed to militia loyalists. The RSF is replicating, at national scale, what it perfected in Darfur: capital accumulation through violence, property redrawn by force.
As Marx wrote, capital comes into the world dripping with blood from every pore. What the RSF practices is the inverse of productive economic activity: accumulation not through new value, but through the destruction of value others created.
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Manufacturing Legitimacy: How Legitimacy Is Bought
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Hemedti's positive image did not arise spontaneously from genuine admiration. It is a manufactured product, built according to the logic of the political marketing industry.
Investigations by Middle East Eye and the Stanford Internet Observatory documented tens of millions of dollars spent on Western PR firms specializing in "rehabilitating controversial figures." In 2019 he contracted Canadian lobbying firm Dickens & Madson, run by a former Israeli intelligence officer, for six million dollars to arrange meetings with US and Russian officials. In 2022 he engaged a French PR agency. Researchers also tracked coordinated social-media networks amplifying his narrative — a textbook case of "digital authoritarianism."
More insidious still is his investment in a parallel "infrastructure of popularity": clinics, sports clubs, and humanitarian aid distributed under the RSF's name rather than the state's — deliberately building loyalty to the militia over the nation. This is Gramscian hegemony in full operation: domination requires not just the gun, but the food bag, the clinic, and emotional belonging. Hegemony is not pure coercion — it is manufactured consent.
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Hijacking the Revolution
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Hemedti's public rhetoric borrows wholesale from the revolution's own vocabulary — "New Sudan," "freedom, peace, and justice," the rejection of political Islam, civilian rule — concepts he never produced and never paid for, but stole from those who died for them.
This is not rhetorical poverty but calculated strategy: when a ruling class loses traditional legitimacy, it rents the legitimacy of its ideological opponents — Gramsci's trasformismo applied to language itself, neutralizing opposition by absorbing its vocabulary. His public "regret" over the 2021 coup is, in Karl Mannheim's terms, ideology in its purest form: reproducing a position of power under the banner of reform.
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The UAE and Sudanese Gold: Regional Capital as War Fuel
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Hemedti's endurance cannot be understood without the regional and international network sustaining him. Between 2012 and 2022, the UAE imported 2,569 tons of illegal gold worth $115 billion. Roughly 90% of Sudan's gold output — some $13.4 billion in illicit trade — is smuggled to the UAE via Chad, Egypt, and Ethiopia. Gold production in RSF-controlled areas nearly doubled between 2022 and 2024, war notwithstanding.
Hemedti and his family operate over a dozen Dubai-based companies spanning gold trading, jewelry, and investment consulting. His company Al-Junaid controls Jebel Amer, one of the continent's largest gold mines. In January 2025, the US Treasury sanctioned Hemedti and seven UAE-based companies used to evade sanctions and procure weapons.
UN reporting reveals an even darker chain: Sudanese gold has helped finance the RSF's relationship with Russia's Wagner Group, and by extension Russia's war in Ukraine, while RSF fighters have been deployed alongside Emirati forces in Libya and Yemen. This is not a state-to-state partnership but extractive regional capitalism — one for which Sudan's fragmentation is not an obstacle but a convenience.
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The "Lesser Evil" Illusion: The Left's Theoretical Error
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Painfully, some civilian and leftist currents — and progressive intellectuals across the region — fell for Hemedti's "anti-Islamist" framing, sliding into silence or tacit support.
The reasoning seemed coherent: the Islamists and the army committed the atrocities and led the counter-revolution; Hemedti opposes them; therefore he is the "lesser evil." This commits two theoretical errors. First, it mistakes a contradiction over wealth and power between two factions of the same old order for an ideological contradiction. Second, it privileges short-term tactical calculation over the objective interests of the popular classes, who suffer from both factions equally.
Trotsky's classic warning against the "lesser evil" during fascism's rise applies with bitter precision: progressive forces defending the lesser evil pave the way for the greater one.
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The Parallel State: An Open Project of Fragmentation
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In March 2024, following military setbacks and growing isolation, Hemedti and allied armed movements announced a "coordinating council" — the explicit nucleus of a parallel government in RSF-held territory.
Read materially, this is not the birth of a unified civilian democracy but the fragmentation of the Sudanese state into autonomous military-economic fiefdoms, maximizing accumulation through control of resources, border crossings, and trade routes. This is the Marxist category of the capitalist warlord: seeking the benefits of statehood without its obligations — taxation without services, power without accountability, sovereignty without a people. The danger deepens when this project speaks the language of federalism and decentralization, potentially finding an audience among those exhausted by Sudan's historical over-centralization — fragmentation dressed in the vocabulary of rights.
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Conclusion: Hard Truth Against Dangerous Illusion
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A full materialist analysis yields four unambiguous conclusions.
First, Hemedti is not an aberration in Sudan's governing structure but its most exposed and extreme product — the inevitable result of a rentier state weaponizing militia instead of building institutions.
Second, his positive image did not arise spontaneously; it is a manufactured composite of paid propaganda, opportunistic alliances, and the systematic appropriation of a revolutionary vocabulary he never earned.
Third, any support from civilian or leftist forces is a double error — analytical, in confusing a power struggle for an ideological one, and ethical, in trading commitment to victims for narrow short-term gain.
Fourth, Hemedti's actual project — visible in practice, not rhetoric — is not liberating Sudan from political Islam, but liberating Sudan's wealth from civilian oversight for the benefit of a military-capitalist accumulation network and its regional backers.
No paid PR campaign, no tactical alliance, no borrowed revolutionary slogan can transform the architect of Darfur's annihilation, the saboteur of the October transition, and the man now reducing Sudan to ash, into a revolutionary leader or a guardian of civilian rule.
The Sudanese people, who paid in real blood for these accumulated illusions, deserve a revolutionary left that reads reality without distortion — one that refuses, even unintentionally, to serve as cover for war capitalism and its agents.
"Violence is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one."
— Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I
"A real revolution is not built in alliance with the executioner — it is built by confronting him, whatever costume he wears."
— Karl Marx
#حراك_HIRAK
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Sources:
International and Journalistic Sources
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· UN OHCHR reports (2004–2024)
· UN Panel of Experts on Sudan
· US State Department genocide determination, Darfur, February 2024
· Human Rights Watch, Sudan 2023–2024
· Amnesty International, RSF crimes documentation 2023–2024
· Stanford Internet Observatory, Sudan influence networks
· Global Witness, Sudanese gold smuggling via UAE
· Reuters investigations, RSF economy
· Middle East Eye, PR firms linked to Hemedti
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Theoretical References
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· Marx, Capital, Vol. I (Primitive Accumulation)
· Marx & Engels, The German Ideology
· Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto
· Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (hegemony, trasformismo)
· Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia
· Althusser, Ideological State Apparatuses
· Trotsky, Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It
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