Ruthless warlords emerge from the shadows to expose a broken international system

29 Jun 2023

Men like Yevgeny Prigozhin and Sudan’s Mohamed Hamdan Degalo, aka Hemedti, are not just mercenaries. They are warlords. They run commercial operations that make war to make money, while at the same time operating as extensions of state military and intelligence agencies, all while aspiring to state power themselves.

It has taken a former hot dog salesman and a camel trader to illustrate how broken the international security system has become in protecting the most vulnerable populations, many of them Africans.

Even as Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin’s putsch died on the road to Moscow last weekend, his comrade-in-arms Mohamed Hamdan Degalo, aka Hemedti, leader of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), tightened his control of the streets of Khartoum.

Read more in DailyMaverick: Wagner mercenaries have entirely captured Central African Republic, The Sentry report finds

With most of the air force grounded for lack of spare parts, the Sudanese Armed Forces under General Abdel Fatah Burhan have lost much of their ability to bomb the RSF from the air, their one strategic advantage, and are battling to hold on to their remaining precincts in the city.

Meanwhile, refugees who have fled across the border have described horrific ethnic cleansing in the West Darfur city of el Geneina by Hemedti’s “Arab” RSF against the “black” Sudanese, the Masalit, 120,000 of whom have fled to refugee camps in the east of Chad.

Videos of piles of bodies are circulating on social media, evoking comparisons with the Rwandan genocide of 30 years ago.

The RSF have also now reportedly entered the city of Zalingi, the capital of central Darfur, with fresh reports of atrocities.

The United Nations International Organization for Migration reported this week that nearly 2.8 million people have been driven from their homes since fighting began on 15 April between Burhan’s SAF and Hemedti’s RSF.

Conflict reignites tensions

Like a bonfire, the conflict has reignited age-old local rivalries and resentments throughout Sudan. It has spread into South Kordofan and Blue Nile states where two factions of the Sudanese Liberation Movement, one allying with Hemedti and the other with Burhan, are engaged in a mini-civil war of their own.

Meanwhile, the Islamists — who ruled Sudan for decades during the presidency of Omar al Beshir — are back in the circle around Burhan. Elbaga Elnazir, the press secretary to former Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, who was ousted by Burhan and Hemedti in the 2021 coup, says that there are multiple Islamic State cells operating and working with the former Muslim Brotherhood-aligned Islamists to exploit the conflict.

While Burhan is supported by Egypt, Hemedti has been armed by Wagner and Wagner-aligned Russian forces via Syria, Libya and the Central African Republic.

He is also, according to sources, being sheltered by another warlord, Khalifa Haftar, at his headquarters in Benghazi. Haftar has de facto control over eastern Libya, having been rescued from defeat at the hands of the Turks three years ago by Wagner troops after a failed attempt to capture Tripoli.

Prigozhin and Hemedti are cut from much the same cloth. They were both incubated and instrumentalised by the predatory governments and powers that they later turned on.

The British writer Michaela Wrong suggested that Vladimir Putin in Russia and Burhan in Sudan should have read up on Machiavelli who had a lot to say in the 15th Century about the folly of using mercenaries to do one’s fighting: “Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous; if one holds his state based on these arms, he will stand neither firm nor safe; for they are disunited, ambitious and without discipline, unfaithful, valiant before friends, cowardly before enemies; they have neither the fear of God nor fidelity to men…”

For profit and power

But these men are not just mercenaries. They are warlords. They run commercial operations that make war to make money, while at the same time operating as extensions of state military and intelligence agencies, all while aspiring to state power themselves. Their power resides in their willingness to use violence and their ability to buy off state officials.

At least part of the solution would be to cut off their ability to operate businesses through enabling places like the United Arab Emirates - and the US has started to do this by imposing sanctions on Prigozhin and on Hemedti’s gold trading companies.

But in the meantime, the back and forth of failed negotiations and ceasefires in Sudan has only emphasised the impotence of the international community, even as the UN General Assembly commenced its annual debate on the “responsibility to protect” and the “prevention of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.”

George Okoth-Obbo, Special Adviser to the Secretary-General, told the meeting in New York this week that countless civilians continue to be victims of genocide and war crimes. “The responsibility to protect thus remains imperative today… The lives of millions depend on that responsibility being given meaning.”

However, among the many high-minded speeches, the debate showed countries divided and paralysed in their attitudes to preventing mass atrocities, with few practical answers as to how to act meaningfully to save lives.

Some delegates, such as those from Venezuela and Cuba, pointed out that “the responsibility to protect” had been abused to interfere in the affairs of sovereign states and to effect regime change — for instance in Libya 10 years ago.

But the alternative in places like Sudan is to rule out any protection for civilian populations, leaving the field to the men with guns.

Unless there is willingness by the international community to get behind a global security architecture, one premised not on superpower logic but on protecting the most vulnerable, the era of the warlords will be only just beginning. DM

Phillip Van Niekerk is the editor of Africa Unscrambled, a newsletter covering the continent in a way you won’t read anywhere else. Get unscrambled by signing up right here. He is also the editorial director of Scrolla.Africa

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Conflict reignites tensions

For profit and power