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00:00 Joining me in the studio is our Chief Foreign Editor Rob Parsons.
00:02 Rob, tell us more about these two generals and their power struggle.
00:06 Well, you know, both of them really emerged in the period after the overthrow of Omar
00:12 al-Bashir, the Sudanese strongman who ruled the country for decades before he was overthrown
00:18 in, first of all, effectively by massive demonstrations across the country, particularly in the capital
00:25 Khartoum in 2019.
00:28 But they emerged on the scene by effectively hijacking the demonstrations and launching
00:33 a coup d'état which got rid of al-Bashir and then tried to establish themselves in
00:38 power.
00:40 General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan is commander of the armed forces.
00:44 General Mohammed Hamdan Daggalo is commander of the so-called Rapid Support Forces, which
00:50 in turn emerged out of the notorious Janjaweed that fought in the Darfur Civil War in 2013
00:58 and onwards.
00:59 You know, neither have a great reputation.
01:03 Burhan seems set on trying to consolidate himself in power by using his position as
01:08 the senior general in the armed forces.
01:11 He effectively hijacked what was meant to be a civilian military transitional government
01:16 in October 2021 and put the government back into military rule with the Council of Generals
01:24 with General Daggalo, otherwise known as Hemeti, as his deputy.
01:30 And ever since then, the two men have been effectively daggers drawn, both in dispute
01:35 about what course the country should take in the future, how fast the transition to
01:40 a civilian government should be, and critically, what should the role of the Rapid Support
01:45 Forces be inside the new armed forces, the idea being to merge the two together.
01:51 And who would lead the armed forces once the Rapid Support Forces were merged into them?
01:57 That's 100,000 people we're talking about, so it's not a tiny little contingent.
02:02 And General Daggalo has used that force to push forward his agenda.
02:07 He claims that he's fighting in the interests of the Sudanese people and democracy against
02:12 Islamists inside the armed forces.
02:15 But his credibility is not particularly strong, particularly in view of the human rights record
02:20 of the RSF, and not least the fact that he allowed his men or ordered his men to use
02:26 armed force against protesters in 2019 during the efforts to overthrow Omar al-Bashir.
02:32 120 of them were killed.
02:34 How did we get to this point, given that this country now appears to be almost on the brink
02:38 of civil war?
02:39 Again, yeah, I mean, that is effectively the context.
02:43 This is the country that's been consistently badly run.
02:46 During the decades of Omar al-Bashir, there was a civil war which led to separation of
02:53 South Sudan, now a separate country, in 2011.
02:57 But it's a civil war that cost 1.5 million deaths and did untold damage to the country.
03:04 This is a country which is oil rich, but the people of the country never saw the benefits
03:08 of that.
03:09 After that, there's been civil war in Darfur that I referred to, and the emergence of that
03:16 Janjaweed militia, which was particularly brutal.
03:20 And then the failure of the military government to heed the demands of ordinary people to
03:26 push the country forward towards democracy.
03:28 We're locked now in this conflict between two military leaders who claim that they're
03:35 protecting the interests of the country, but who, at least on the surface, seem much more
03:39 interests in promoting their own personal agendas.