Washington withholds Burhan’s UN visa as it declares both Sudanese generals unfit to govern

Al-Harith Idriss Al-Harith, Sudan’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, wrote to Secretary-General António Guterres on 21 September requesting “immediate intervention” with US authorities after his delegation failed to obtain visas for the General Assembly. “Should this situation persist, it would effectively prevent the head of state of a member state of the UN from participating in person in the work of the General Assembly,” the letter said, grounding the complaint in the 1947 UN headquarters agreement. Reuters, which has the document, reported that the ambassador confirmed on the record that neither Burhan nor his party had been issued visas. The UN spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric, said the Secretary-General was “deeply concerned,” and Guterres urged Washington to meet its headquarters obligations. The State Department declined to comment on the visa.

The claim that the visa is being held against acceptance of a ceasefire rests on two unnamed people — “a Sudanese diplomatic source and a Western analyst close to American and Sudanese officials,” in Reuters' formulation. The proposal in question is a 90-day truce authored by Massad Boulos, the US Senior Advisor for Arab and African Affairs; Sudan’s army registered reservations about it earlier in the summer. “Burhan rejects this take-it-or-leave-it approach. Any proposal is subject to suggestions and changes,” the anonymous Sudanese diplomatic source told Reuters. A separate single source said Foreign Minister Mohieldin Salem would deliver the address instead. The speaking date is itself unsettled: Reuters reported Thursday, while Sudan Tribune has been relayed as giving 26 September.

On 22 September, the same day the visa story broke, State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott issued the sharpest American formulation of the war to date. “Neither the Sudanese Armed Forces, the Rapid Support Forces, nor their respective leaders represent legitimate, constitutional governance for Sudan — they rule through force of arms alone,” he said, adding that “the conduct of each leader of the warring factions renders them ineligible to govern the country,” and that Washington “will seek to raise the cost of continued conflict on all belligerents and the networks which fuel the conflict.” The US mission had told the Security Council roughly a month earlier that the brutality of the war “has discredited their claims to be legitimate governors of the Sudanese people.” The word “ineligible” is new.

Assessment: Two things are established here and one is not. Established: the visas were not issued, the UN is unhappy, and Washington has moved from calling the generals discredited to calling them ineligible. Not established: that the two are a single instrument. That linkage is carried by two unnamed people and a State Department that will not comment, and it should be read as a claim, not a lever we have seen pulled. Note what a visa can and cannot buy. It denies Burhan a podium; it does not touch the war. The more consequential sentence of the week is Pigott’s “networks which fuel the conflict” — that is aimed past both generals at their suppliers, and it comes due, if it comes due at all, at the Security Council in October rather than on First Avenue this week.