The Quintet went to Khartoum and met only the side that holds Khartoum

The international Quintet — the African Union, IGAD, the European Union, the Arab League and the United Nations — held consultations in Khartoum on Wednesday 9 September. The delegation comprised Mohamed Ibn Chambas, the AU High Representative for Silencing the Guns; Pekka Haavisto, the UN Secretary-General’s Personal Envoy for Sudan, who had arrived the preceding Friday; Annette Weber, the EU Special Representative for the Horn of Africa; Lawrence Korbandy, IGAD’s Special Envoy; and Ambassador Zaid Al-Sabban of the Arab League. They met Lt Gen Abdelfattah El Burhan, Prime Minister Kamel Idris, the Democratic Bloc Alliance and the Sudanese-Sudanese Dialogue Preparation Committee. Idris said the dialogue “belongs to the Sudanese people” — the rendering carried by the state agency SUNA; Dabanga translates the same Arabic as “the property of the Sudanese people”. His media office said he briefed the delegation on what it called “wrong narratives” about the war. Stéphane Dujarric, spokesman for the UN Secretary-General, called it a “good offices mission”.

Running alongside, and separately, is the Quad track — the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United States. Massad Boulos, the US Senior Adviser for Arab and African Affairs, told The National on 15 September there is “no future” for either Burhan or Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo in Sudan, and conceded the roadmap agreed last year has stalled. “We all bear the responsibility that it has not borne fruit yet,” he said. “If we want real results on the ground for the benefit of the Sudanese, our road map needs to be put into effect.” The same report says Washington has in recent weeks pushed to widen the UN arms embargo from Darfur to the whole of Sudan and imposed measures on the Sudanese government over alleged chemical weapons use, and that Burhan has vowed to fight until the RSF is defeated.

Assessment: Two cautions. First, a Sudanese-Sudanese dialogue convened in the capital under the authority of one belligerent, with its government, its allied political bloc and its preparatory committee in the room, is a consolidation exercise as much as a peace process. Whether the Quintet intends to travel to Nyala is the question its EU-issued statement should answer. Second, read The National’s framing against its address: it is Abu Dhabi-based, and the UAE is both a Quad member and the party most often accused of arming the RSF. An outlet in that position foregrounding “no future for either general” and new US measures against Khartoum is making an argument. The chemical weapons allegations remain, in everything we could verify, a second-hand characterisation of other outlets' reporting.