The only people surprised that rival generals in Sudan were marshaling forces to battle for supremacy were the U.S. State Department and its Africa desk, Republican and Democratic senators alleged during a May 10 hearing on “options for an effective policy response” to the unfolding catastrophe.
As a result, the senators said, when fighting exploded on April 15 in Khartoum between the Sudanese army, led by Gen. Abdel-Fattah al-Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by Gen. Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo, there was confusion and delay in organizing evacuations of U.S. citizens.
The chaotic departures of more than 700 Americans on British, French, German, and Saudi aircraft in the days after the violence erupted and the April 28–29 departure of another 600 U.S. citizens in overland convoys to Egypt prompted several lawmakers to reference another recent evacuation many say the Biden administration bungled.
“It seems to me that the Biden administration was caught flatfooted, similar to the way it was in Afghanistan,” Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.) said during the two-hour hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“After seeing what we saw in Afghanistan, I think the American public is shocked,” said Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.), a former U.S. ambassador to Japan. “My office is hearing a great deal of concern about American citizens who are left behind.”
But Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Assistant Administrator Sarah Charles told the committee there is no comparison between the situation that unfolded in Kabul and what is happening in Khartoum.
The only Americans they are aware of “left behind” are those who want to remain in the embattled country, Nuland said.
“In total, we evacuated 2,000 people—the majority of whom are our citizens and their family members, along with” more than 70 embassy staff, Nuland said. “So, whether U.S. citizens left aboard a Saudi, Canadian, French, British, or any other flagged carrier, we helped coordinate every transport that included known U.S. citizens.”
While the State Department estimated as many as 16,000 Americans were in Sudan in mid-April, it now estimates that fewer than 5,000 remain. The department has had an advisory since October 2021 cautioning that travel to Sudan was dangerous and should be avoided.
Not Sanctioning Generals Questioned
Nuland said the focus is now on sustaining the “sixth or seventh” ceasefire and getting aid shipments idling in the Port of Sudan delivered to the 10 million Sudanese in danger of starving while talks between al-Burhan and Hemedti, which began May 6 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, continue.While it’s a good plan, Sen. James Risch (R-Idaho) said, it should have been an actual plan instead of a reaction to “a humanitarian catastrophe in Sudan that was predictable.”
The State Department “should have done more to warn our citizens and position our diplomats” to quickly arrange negotiations, he said. “This was a predictable scenario that we all saw unfolding. We’ve seen this movie before.”
Committee Chair Sen. Bob Menendez (R-N.J.) said he was “not going to ... blame the Biden administration” for a “foreign policy failure many years in the making,” before noting that there were memos “warning of risk with potential scenarios” in Sudan circulating about the State Department’s Africa offices that were “heavily redacted and never got to [Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s] desk.“
Menendez said, “It was known that Hemedti and al-Burhan were massing forces around Khartoum” and, “at lower levels” in the State Department, “statements were being made about ... a possibility of conflict breaking out.”
Among those disputed policies was not imposing personal sanctions on the warring generals who had worked together in April 2019 to end the 30-year reign of dictator Omar al-Bashir in a popular revolt, before al-Burhan then deposed a transition government in October 2021.
The late 2021 coup set the stage for what proved to be 18 months of fruitless negotiations among the army, the RSF, the United States, the United Nations, and the African Union, as well as regional nations such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that preceded the eruption of gunfire on April 15.
The administration “fell short of the challenge“ and ”refused to call a coup a coup” in 2021 by not sanctioning the generals, Menendez said. It was “legitimizing and entrenching those with guns.”
He said Assistant Secretary of State Molly Phee was among “a select few individuals” who “monopolized” discussion on Sudan and “shut the rest of the inter-agency team out of deliberations and silenced a chorus of dissent” over U.S.–Sudan policy.
“[Phee] seems to have an aversion to sanctions at any time or any place. That’s a problem,” Menendez said. “I don’t know how else you induce two individuals like this to act when ... there are no ramifications of consequences for their actions.
“Sanctions have the proven ability to get us there in the right way.”
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) agreed, adding that the State Department should have sanctioned both generals in the span between October 2021 and April 2023, especially Hemedti, whom he called “a war criminal” guilty of atrocities in Darfur two decades ago and was allowed “to build his power base in Sudan.”
Sudan policy was a consensus within the State Department, but not without objections, Nuland said.
“The debate within the bureau, the debate within the building, the debate within the interagency [groups] has been robust and difficult,” she said. “We have never taken any options off the table, but we were believing that this framework [of the transitional government] that the Sudanese themselves put forward was making progress, and we had the sanctions at the ready.
“Then, we had this choice by the generals [to go to war].”
Nuland said the State Department did impose “harsh penalties against Sudan” after October 2021 that paused financial assistance and debt relief for the Sudanese government and targeted members of the Sudan Central Reserve Police to be prosecuted for using lethal force against demonstrators protesting the military coup.
“There were questions internally whether that was the right thing to do because some of that has an impact on the Sudanese people,” she said.
At least one person in the hearing audience heckled Nuland as she testified. The inaudible jeering continued for several minutes before being muted.
Perilous Time Ahead for Millions
The State Department will continue to work with the “trilateral mechanism” that includes the U.N., African Union, IGAD (Horn of Africa’s multilateral forum), and “the Quad” (the United States, the UK, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) to end the conflict, Nuland said.Some policies are being rethought, she assured.
“You can question whether there was a broad enough community of civilians involved” in the post-October 2021 talks mostly geared to accommodate Hemedti and al-Burhan.
Nuland said progress was being made in establishing a democracy in Khartoum over the past 18 months, with only a few items remaining to be ironed out.
“That structure did work” as a good “preparatory for civilian rule,” she said.
“We were left with one issue, whether or not the generals were going to integrate their forces. You can’t have more than one army in the country at one time.”
She said that there was “an incredible effort made, including by ... Secretary [Blinken] himself, on proposing ways the two forces could be integrated.”
“Unfortunately, they chose the path to war, not to integration.”
She said 16 million of Sudan’s 45 million people require humanitarian assistance to meet their basic needs, including 10 million who rely on aid for food. An estimated 1.3 million people in the region did not receive food assistance in April because of the conflict, she said.
The U.N. World Food Programme estimates that the number of “acutely food insecure people” in Sudan could increase to more than 19 million within six months and that as many as 50,000 children could die of starvation.
More than 700,000 people have been internally displaced across Sudan, and more than 170,000 have crossed into neighboring countries, according to the International Organization for Migration.
The U.N. estimates that up to 860,000 could flee into neighboring countries if the conflict progresses, “meaning that the ramifications of this conflict do not end at Sudan’s borders—they stretch out into the region, compounding existing humanitarian needs across several countries,” Charles said.
She said 19 of the 33 humanitarian organizations operating in Sudan in April still remain in the country and that “there are a lot of supplies flowing into the Port of Sudan, including more than 33 metric tons of USAID assistance,“ and those supplies are ”anchored in the [port] right now” ready to be distributed by the groups in-country.
Van Hollen said that with as many as 170,000 refugees already fleeing the country as a vanguard for at least eight times more, unrest is spreading across the region, particularly in Ethiopia, where another conflict looms.
“We have a very fragile peace in Ethiopia, and there are territorial disputes between Sudan and Ethiopia” being aggravated by refugee traffic across their border, he said.
“Warnings were ignored,” Menendez said, quoting a Sudanese critic of U.S.–Sudan policy who claimed, “The U.S. built a ‘dream palace’ that has now crashed down.”
When foreign policy “dream palaces” come down, people across the world pay a price now and in the future, he said.
“Disillusioned actors have lost faith in the United States. That’s bad news.”
