Tensions between General al-Burhan’s army (SAF) and the rebel groups that signed the 2020 Juba Peace Agreement are threatening to derail plans for a technocrat cabinet and could reopen new fronts in the two-year civil war, politicians and analysts said on Wednesday.
SAF chief and Sovereign Council leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan last month named controversial diplomat Kamil Idris as prime minister with a mandate to form a non-partisan “government of competencies.” The announcement initially lifted hopes for a political reset, but leaders of former insurgent factions now accuse Burhan of sidelining them.
Under the Juba accord the movements – including Minni Arko Minnawi’s Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) and Jibril Ibrahim’s Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) – were allocated three seats on the Sovereign Council, five ministries (about a quarter of the cabinet) and 75 seats in a yet-to-be-formed transitional legislature. Leaked lists of the new cabinet show few, if any, of those posts going to the groups.
“The army seems to be walking away from the partnership it forged in Juba,” Minnawi said in a statement, warning that exclusion could “destabilise the fragile military front” against the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Ibrahim called the mooted line-up “a breach of trust.”
Political analyst Walid Ali told Russia’s Sputnik news agency the SAF believes it no longer needs the rebels’ support after re-arming and recruiting parallel militias. “Khartoum thinks it can renegotiate the Juba quotas from a position of strength,” he said. Civil-society leader Adel Abdel Bagi said the dispute “risks triggering a new rebellion that would alter the balance of the war.”
The row flared after the RSF captured the remote “Triangle” border zone with Libya and Egypt this month, prompting some Juba signatories to pull fighters from the area in protest at being frozen out of Burhan’s talks.
Burhan has held two crisis meetings with movement leaders in recent days and promised a face-to-face with Idris, but the factions say they want written guarantees that their ministers – notably in finance and minerals – will stay.
Sudan has been mired in conflict since 15 April 2023, when fighting erupted between the SAF and the RSF, devastating Khartoum and large parts of Darfur and Kordofan and displacing millions. Aid groups warn that any split between the SAF and its rebel allies could prolong the war and deepen the humanitarian crisis.
