Political developments threaten to reignite fighting in Nuba Mountains
SPLM-North leader aligns with RSF at Nairobi conference
Deepening political ties between the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N), led by Abdelaziz al-Hilu, threaten to widen and intensify Sudan’s ongoing civil war, reigniting fighting in the Nuba Mountains, a region that has remained relatively quiet.
Al-Hilu’s participation and speech at an RSF-affiliated political gathering in Nairobi on Tuesday, which proclaimed a ‘parallel government’ to the military-led government in Port Sudan, signals an emerging partnership between the two armed groups.
The Nuba Mountains suffered two long wars from 1987 to 2002, and from 2011 to 2016 (when a ceasefire was signed, but no peace deal that ever formally ended that war), pitting Nuba rebels against the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). These wars left the region partly under control of Al-Hilu’s SPLM-North, which is a breakaway faction of the SPLM, the ruling party of South Sudan.
In the latest civil war, which erupted in April 2023, the region was largely spared fighting, even as battles raged in western and central Sudan.
Speaking at the Kenyatta International Convention Centre in the Kenyan capital, Al-Hilu declared, “The State must be stripped of the machinery of violence, and power and sovereignty belong only to the Sudanese peoples.”
He referred to the RSF Commander-in-Chief Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo as a “comrade” and stood alongside Dagalo’s brother, Abdelrahim, during the event.
Al-Hilu’s speech was interrupted several times by chants from the crowd calling for the toppling of “56” and “Port Sudan,” shorthand references to the military government that is now based in Port Sudan. “We want to build a new state, that is different from the old Sudan, which was based on separation, discrimination, hatred, corruption, and so on,” Al-Hilu said.