Sudan’s Civilian Bloc Wrote to the Quintet to Complain About the Mediators, Not the Belligerents

Bakry Eljack, spokesman for the Somoud coalition, told Sudan Tribune on Tuesday 28 July that the coalition had written to the Quintet mechanism — the United Nations, African Union, European Union, IGAD and the Arab League — setting out critical observations on the current mediation methodology, and proposing instead a Sudanese-led process that prioritises an immediate humanitarian truce. Somoud called for a joint preparatory committee representing the main anti-war coalitions to manage preparations. The Quintet has been trying to bridge divisions among Sudanese political and civic factions over the structure, venue and participants of a proposed peace process. The Somoud statement reached this desk through the Africa Center for Strategic Studies' media review of 29 July, which summarised the Sudan Tribune report; the original has not been read here.

The complaint lands against a parallel track with a poor delivery record. On 3 February, US Senior Advisor for Arab and African Affairs Massad Boulos said the Quad — the United States, UAE, Egypt and Saudi Arabia — had reached a peace document acceptable to both parties, and announced a goal of raising $1.5 billion for Sudan. On 14 July, Sudan Tribune reported the RSF submitting its response to Boulos’s proposals: it accepted a truce while rejecting demands to withdraw. Crisis Group’s April briefing describes the Quad framework as organised around a humanitarian truce, unfettered access, a ceasefire and a political process, and notes that Djibouti, the current IGAD chair, is close to Abdel Fattah al-Burhan while Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda maintain warm relations with Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo.

Assessment: Civilians attacking the mediators rather than the men with the guns is a reliable signal that they expect to be excluded from the outcome. The interesting content of the Somoud letter is procedural: whoever writes the participant list writes the post-war state, and Somoud is bidding for the pen before the truce, not after. Read the Quad’s February announcement of an agreed document against the RSF’s July refusal to withdraw and the sequence is clear enough — the framework exists, the concessions do not. And as the Africa Center’s own mapping argues, both belligerents are shifting coalitions rather than unified commands, which is why a truce “applying to all forces including affiliates” is a sentence, not a mechanism.