A Stammering War
A Stammering War
Sikka: Mamoun Eljak
Translated by: Salah Mohamed Khair
Introduction
"The sword wiped out the lines of rhetorics"
King George VI, the king of the Great Britain was suffering from stuttering. When the World War II began, he had to announce personally the participation of Britain in it. In the statement of its declaration, the war was not the king's concern, not even the soldiers who would have been sent to death. However, the king was preoccupied with loosening his tongue because any stammering or stuttering would make the king a laughing stock and his speech would be misunderstood.
This war cannot be harnessed by any rhetoric. Every written reference to the facts and atrocities of this war seems incomplete and insufficient to capture it. We are not here at the point of the allegation that poetry is incapacitated before reality as "this absurd and abhorrent war has violated everything which is habitual to us. So, this war deserved its appellation and epithet, because it turned everything upside down. This war made us like the one who scurries northwards to find himself in the south; like the one who is waiting for the democracy to be realized by a contractual militia owned by a single man; or like the one who is waiting for the human dignity to be given by a man that everyone has known his dishonesty and immorality."1
Most of the writings that have attempted to define this war, explore its causes, and determine its nature, whether in its time span since the December Revolution and the three-decade rule of the Inqaz (the Salvation Revolution); the writings that have gone further since the creation of the post-colonial state; or even the writings that have gone to the last two centuries have deliberately restricted their exploration to Khartoum. These writings view Khartoum as the center of the historical incidents and the country's capital since its founding. The ruling class in Khartoum has sparkled war in the far remote areas in the south, west and east of the country. This reading is generally correct for its neglect of small details and for its reliance on historical continuity in the country's rule, which is the hegemony of race and class. This is adopted by the present reading, albeit the linear and cumulative interpretation of history reinforces the discourse of one of the two parties to the war. Moreover, simplistic perceptions do not take into account the complexity that has become a refrain of today's world, its geopolitical interactions, and that the linear reading of history is not only from the past, but it is no longer objective and interpretative.2
According to the studies I have reviewed, this war seems inevitable. Far from the tension before it broke out, both parties to the war allege that it is a pivotal war to end the 56 State or to preserve the Sudan's geographical area. From the perspective of the previous wars in the Sudan, this war is justified because the modern state does not endure two armies and this structural imbalance should be redressed. For the other party, the monopolization of sovereignty by Khartoum is no longer available and all accounts must be reconciled. According to Alex de Waal, this war is "unsurprising"3, in the context of the Sudanese history. He argues that this war could have been prevented "by the Western diplomacy."4Unlike de Waal, Sharath Srinivasan argues that" Foreign powers’ obsessive focus on a transition process empowered generals and weakened democracy activists, paving the way to war."5
Footnotes
Getting Away with War to its Repercussions, Yousof Hamad, Mowatinoon Website, July 30, 2023.
The Sudanese State and the Making of the Reality of Disillusion: Are There Any Opportunities for the Emergence of a National State in the Sudan from the Wreckage of the 15 April 2023 War? Bakri Al-Jack, Al-Taghyeer Newspaper, June 29, 2023.
The Revolution No One Wanted, Alex de Wall London Review of Books, May 18, 22023.
ibid
Support Sudan's Revolution, Not an Elite Peace Deal, Sharath Srinivasan, Foreign Policy Magazine, June 29, 2023.