The foundation hosted its inaugural Africa Peace & Security Dialogue to identify solutions to the continent’s conflicts
Representatives of Sudan’s Transitional Sovereignty Council said it had chosen to abandon the Thabo Mbeki Foundation’s inaugural African Peace and Security Dialogue in Gauteng on Sunday in protest over the participation of the rebel Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
“The blood of the Sudanese people is not cheap and the attempt to force the Sudanese people to coexist with this criminal militia is unacceptable,” Malik Agar Eyre, the vice-president of the council told the Mail & Guardian.
Agar, who had been scheduled to address the conference, said the invitation of a delegation of what he called “the fascist militia owned by the Dagalo family” to participate in a conference on peace and security “constitutes a great underestimation of what the Sudanese are exposed to at the hands of these mercenaries”.
He was referring to RSF leader General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, who claims to control 72% of Sudanese territory, including the capital, Khartoum.
The Thabo Mbeki Foundation hosted the forum under the theme Towards a Peaceful and Secure Africa: Challenges and Opportunities.
It brought together foreign affairs and defence ministers from across the continent including Sudan, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Liberia, Tanzania, Rwanda and Mauritania, to evaluate factors that have obstructed peacekeeping in Africa.
The foundation has not yet commented on the departure of the delegates from Sudan’s Transitional Sovereignty Council.
But Chrispin Phiri, spokesperson for International Relations and Cooperation Minister Ronald Lamola, posted on X that the minister had met Agar as well as the RSF’s Brigadier General Omar Hamdan on the margins of the forum.
The Thabo Mbkei foundation hosted its inaugural Africa Peace & Security Dialogue to identify solutions to the continent’s conflicts. (Thabo Mbeki Foundation)
“Minister Lamola expressed support for dialogue between the warring factions,” Phiri added.
According to Human Rights Watch, the conflict in Sudan has been characterised by widespread war crimes and other atrocities against civilians, for which both the RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces were responsible.
The United Nations World Food Programme has said that Sudan is home to the world’s largest hunger crisis, with an estimated 26.6 million people facing food insecurity. But Hussein Elamin from Sudan’s ministry of foreign affairs rejected the statistics at the weekend.
“There is no issue of hunger in Sudan … we are contributing to food in the Arab world, how can we be starving?” Elamin said on the sidelines of the peace and security forum, saying the statistics were a ploy by the RSF to paint a negative image of the country.
Delegates at the conference said there was consensus that the African Union had not been successful in mediating conflict on the continent.
“AU structures have proven ineffective … as there are no anchor states protecting Africa’s vision,” said the group executive director of Discovery, Ayanda Ntsaluba.
Somalia’s former foreign affairs minister Abdisaid Muse Ali shared these sentiments, noting that the body was once an instrument for peacekeeping, but based on recent conflict resolution efforts, it had not been able to sustain that.
“I am not optimistic about the AU … it needs reform,” Ali told the M&G.
South Africa’s deputy minister of defence, Bantu Holomisa, said there was a need to “revive and strengthen the AU’s peace and security council originally envisioned as a key institution for conflict resolution on the continent”.
In 2019, the AU’s peace and security council suspended the participation of Sudan in all its activities “until the effective establishment of a civilian-led transitional authority, as the only way to allow Sudan to exit from its current crisis”.
In June this year, the AU proposed the deployment of a fact-finding mission to Sudan to investigate violations, analyse the gender dimensions of the conflict and determine if crimes under international law had been committed since the conflict began in April 2023.
Professor Philip Kasaija Apuuli, of Uganda’s Makerere University, suggested there was a limit to what the AU could do about the Sudan conflict.
“We need to be nuanced when we say that the AU is ineffective — I don’t think that would be correct. We [should] say that the AU has not been functioning the way it is supposed to function — I think it’s much better terminology,” he told the M&G.
“It is not a military wing — what are you expecting it to do? It is doing what it can do and it has come up with a proposal to end the conflict.”