Qatar’s Darfur Peace Office closed by Sudan’s transitional council after Bashir’s overthrow

Mohamed Abdel-Ghaffar

Qatar is desperate to gain any political weight in the region and play a role greater than its size, but with its failure to achieve this through known diplomatic methods, it has resorted to devious ways, with the support of terrorist and extremist organizations such as the Brotherhood, which it supported in Sudan in various ways, including through the Darfur Peace Office.

Darfur Peace

The Darfur region, located in southern Sudan near the state of Kordofan, has witnessed an armed conflict since February 2003 between two rebel groups on the one hand – the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) – and the Sudanese government on the other, under the pretext that Khartoum was persecuting the region’s non-Arab residents.

After the intensification of the crisis, initiatives emerged to form committees to communicate between the two parties, and the Sudanese government sought to do so in order to preserve its existence.

The committee, which included the office to follow up on Darfur peace, aimed to hold meetings with the leaders of the armed factions and the people of the Darfur region in neutral cities such as Addis Ababa, London, Bonn and Juba, in order to reach a state of peace.

The Sudanese regime took a keen interest in the new office, as it was chaired by then-First Vice President of Sudan Lieutenant General Bakri Hassan Saleh, who later became Prime Minister.

Qatar takes advantage

Qatar has tried to take advantage of the Darfur Peace Office, whose headquarters were located in the presidential palace, to find a foothold in the crisis in the Darfur region. It took advantage of the terrorist Brotherhood elements deployed in Sudan during the rule of the Islamist political movement headed by Bashir.

Brotherhood elements such as Amin Hassan Omar, Majdi Khalafalla, Majzoub al-Khalifa and others who sought rapprochement with Doha chaired the office, due to the close relationship that binds the two parties intellectually and ideologically.

This was evident in the meetings that brought the two parties together and their reciprocal statements. In April 2018, the head of the Darfur Peace Office, Magdi Khalafalla, praised what he described as “the great efforts of the State of Qatar in implementing development projects,” considering that it had made a major shift in light of security and stability in the region.

Khalafalla noted that his office will continue to work with Qatari institutions such as Qatar Charity and Red Crescent, with the aim of supporting development projects in the areas of health and security within the Darfur region.

The leadership of the office also met again and again with the Qatari ambassadors in Al-Souda. In June 2018, Ambassador Rashid bin Abdul Rahman Al-Nuaimi met with Khalafalla, a meeting that was repeated with the change of the ambassador. On October 18, 2018, the new ambassador, Abdulrahman bin Ali Al-Kubaisi, also met with the office leaders.

On the Qatari side, Doha paid $800 million to the Darfur Peace Office, allegedly to support reconstruction efforts in the Darfur region.

With all these steps, Doha aimed to end the events in the region, dismantle the armed movements, and restore calm to the region so that the rule of former President Omar al-Bashir was not affected, which happened in the first days of the Sudanese revolution in 2018.

Decision to dissolve

In the midst of the Sudanese war against the terrorist Brotherhood there, the Transitional Military Council announced a decision to dissolve the Darfur Peace Office and relieve its chief, Magdi Khalafalla, from his post.

The decision, issued on August 7, 2019, was part of several decisions issued by the ruling Transitional Military Council in Sudan against groups and institutions affiliated with the Brotherhood organization in the country.

This means that the ruling council cut off one of Doha’s many hands scattered in Sudan’s various official institutions, although many others remain.