No Trust, No Transition: Saudis Can’t Stitch A Civilian Bloc Around Burhan – OpEd
By Carla Davies
Saudi Arabia’s attempt to rebrand Sudanese army chief Abdel Fattah alBurhan as the civilian face of a new political order risks collapsing under the weight of his own record and the realities on the ground. While, according to African Intelligence, Riyadh quietly courts prominent figures from Abdallah Hamdok’s Somoud coalition and other technocrats, the core bet remains the same: that a General synonymous with war, obstruction, and repression can be repackaged as the anchor of a civilian transition. For many Sudanese civilians and political actors, that proposition looks not just implausible, but incendiary.
Since March, Saudi officials have reportedly held discreet meetings with key Somoud personalities in Riyadh, seeking to lure civilian figures into Burhan’s camp. The logic is straightforward from a Saudi perspective: the Jeddah process has stalled, international patience is thinning, and only a civilian front with some international credibility can help relaunch negotiations and rehabilitate Burhan as a viable partner. Yet this is less a peace strategy than an exercise in political engineering from above, one that tries to solve a legitimacy crisis with optics rather than accountability.
Analysts warn that this project fundamentally misreads Sudanese public opinion and Burhan’s political toxicity. The army chief is not a neutral arbiter emerging from the chaos of war; he is one of its principal architects. His October 2021 coup dismantled an already fragile civilianmilitary partnership, derailed the transition that followed the 2019 uprising, and confirmed fears that the generals had never accepted genuine civilian oversight. Since the conflict with the Rapid Support Forces erupted, Burhan has repeatedly been accused of working against ceasefire efforts, obstructing negotiations, and betting on a battlefield solution over compromise. For the thousands of Sudanese killed, displaced, and starved in the course of this war, the idea that he could now front a civilian project feels like a cruel inversion of reality.
The conduct of the Sudanese Armed Forces under his command further undercuts any attempt to launder his image. Rights groups and UN investigators have documented indiscriminate shelling, air strikes on civilian areas, and retaliatory abuses in recaptured zones. Civilians perceived as sympathetic to the RSF have faced arbitrary detention, torture, and extrajudicial killings. Even allowing for the RSF’s own catalogue of atrocities, Burhan cannot credibly be separated from the actions of his troops. Any civilian coalition formally tied to him would be forced to carry the political cost of those crimes.
Saudi planners also appear to underestimate the depth of mistrust among Sudan’s civilian constituencies. Many political parties, grassroots resistance committees, and professional associations already see Burhan as the man who shattered the postrevolution transition and opened the door to the current catastrophe. Bringing a handful of elite politicians into a Riyadhbrokered framework will not erase the memory of the coup, nor the reality that much of Sudan’s civil movement has consistently rejected military tutelage. For them, a “civilian bloc” orbiting Burhan looks like a ruse designed to repackage military rule, not a genuine path to democracy.
Then there is the Islamist factor. Over the course of the war, Burhan has leaned increasingly on former regime networks for fighters, financing, and logistics. Far from being a side note, these Islamist channels are now central to his war machine and reararea support. Any Saudibacked plan that seeks to assemble a more palatable civilian front around him inevitably runs into these entrenched alliances. As Kholood Khair of the Khartoumbased Confluence Advisory puts it: “There are many things the Saudis ignore in their plans to Frankenstein together a civilian bloc around Burhan, including Burhan’s contempt for civilians, plus civilians don’t trust Burhan after 2021 coup. Islamists won’t accept plan and Islamist money and weapons lines are indispensable to Burhan.” Attempting to square this circle risks pleasing no one: not the Islamists, who will resist being sidelined, nor the civilians, who will see only continuity with the old order.
In trying to manufacture a civilian coalition that orbits a deeply compromised general, Saudi Arabia is not resolving Sudan’s legitimacy crisis but reproducing it. A genuine civilian project would begin by decentring Burhan and the military, prioritising accountability, and allowing Sudanese civilians to define their own leadership without being engineered into place. So long as Riyadh insists on making Burhan the pillar of its plan, its efforts are likely to remain what many Sudanese already suspect they are: an attempt to change the packaging while leaving the system itself intact.
