When a Truce Becomes Nothing More Than a Maneuver

Al-Asma‘i Bashri

In the war that erupted on April 15, drones, bullets, and artillery are no longer the most dangerous weapons. Instead, narratives, competing images, media-driven storylines, and short humanitarian truces have become powerful political tools—shaping events on the ground as much as, if not more than, actual fighting.

What is happening in Sudan today reveals a dangerous transformation in the way the conflict is managed. Each side is attempting to redraw the international landscape—not merely through military power, but through the work of shadow armies, hidden in dark rooms, producing paid narratives far removed from reality.

Gains on the Battlefield

The Rapid Support Forces (RSF), widely accused of grave abuses, are not failing to document their violations out of stupidity or confusion. It is part of a deliberate strategy aimed at generating external pressure at a moment of their choosing.

The recently announced three-month truce is not a humanitarian gesture; it is a calculated move following battlefield gains—timed to allow the RSF to regroup while shifting responsibility onto the international community to pressure the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) into concessions.

As for the Port Sudan authorities, their political rhetoric is little more than an attempt to prolong their rule—mobilizing the public with existential narratives and driving society toward despair. Any talk from either side about a “humanitarian truce” is, in reality, empty posturing and a way to implicate the other party in further violations.

When the RSF besieged and attacked El Fasher, it showed no flexibility or willingness to halt the fighting. As the aggressor, it saw the continuation of war as an opportunity to impose a new reality. Only today—after battlefield dynamics shifted—has it begun advocating a truce and speaking the language of peace.
The real objective is not a ceasefire, but to craft a new image of itself as the “open and reasonable” party, while pushing the army into appearing “rigid” if it refuses.

The Truce as a Political Entry Point

The so-called “humanitarian truce” has become a maneuver used by both sides to flip the narrative—from aggressor to victim, from perpetrator to a peace-seeking actor.

But the real danger comes after the truce.
Once hostilities pause, a familiar process begins—one seen in many conflict zones: mounting international pressure for immediate political negotiations, reviving proposals for power-sharing arrangements or forms of regional autonomy. This is essentially another attempt to re-engineer Sudan politically and geographically in ways that entrench division and weaken the state.

Here, a truce is not the end of the war; it is the political doorway through which Sudan’s future is reshaped—often from outside the will of its own people.

Meanwhile, the international arena, itself confused and inconsistent, uses the humanitarian truce as a tool—pushing the crisis back to square one, reshuffling roles according to the interests of the sponsoring states.

What a Truce Really Means

A truce is the suspension of hostilities by agreement between warring parties. Traditionally, truces occur in international conflicts and must be accepted by the states involved. There is no explicit definition of a “humanitarian truce” in the UN Charter, but legal scholars draw from international humanitarian law:

A truce may be established to deliver humanitarian aid

To ease pressure on civilians

Or to create a window for evacuation or relief efforts

The laws governing truces are outlined in Chapter V of the Hague Regulations on the Laws and Customs of War on Land (1907). A truce may be full or partial, depending on the areas of conflict.

The Jeddah talks between the Sudanese army and the RSF attempted to test this idea early in the war. Though brief and ultimately unsuccessful, these truces still allowed many civilians to move to safer areas or return home, search for missing relatives, or flee besieged neighborhoods.

Article 43 of the Hague Convention states that:

A truce takes effect after its agreed-upon start time

Each side must inform its forces

A breach by one party releases the other from its obligations

Monitoring mechanisms must be in place

A successful truce can lead to political negotiations, as ceasefires often mark the first step toward peace agreements.

A ceasefire, similarly, is the suspension of all military operations for a defined period. In 2004, for example, an African Union mission monitored the ceasefire in Darfur.

Why the Jeddah Platform Failed

The Jeddah platform tried to place both Sudanese warring parties under the obligations of international humanitarian law. But the sheer number of internal and external actors aligned with each side made this nearly impossible—revealing one of the core reasons for its failure.

The road to peace in Sudan is rugged, burdened by false intentions and a long history of broken agreements. Sudan has never had a political leadership genuinely committed to achieving lasting peace. Past peace deals—whether in the South or in the various agreements of the 1990s—were:

temporary arrangements driven by exhaustion, or

opportunistic deals aimed at securing narrow political or economic goals (such as oil infrastructure), rather than ending war itself.

Peace, in Sudan’s history, has rarely been pursued as a value—only as a tactic.

A Comprehensive Crisis

The absence of political will for peace has defined all previous agreements. They were partial, addressing isolated regions—South, West, East—rather than confronting the national crisis as a whole. None tackled the root causes:

absence of justice

imbalanced development

marginalization

a dysfunctional central governance model

attempts to impose cultural uniformity

The war in Sudan is not an anomaly; it is the product of a comprehensive national crisis. Fragmented peace efforts can pause violence but cannot resolve it. No Sudanese peace agreement has ever aimed to “silence the guns once and for all.” Instead, they revolved around power-sharing quotas and wealth distribution, often sidelining people and communities—the primary victims of war.

Sudan will not achieve peace while the underlying conditions that ignite war remain untouched.
We face:

a broken central governance system

severe inequalities in development, education, health, and services

a misguided belief that cultural differences must be erased in favor of one dominant identity

Unless peace becomes a goal in itself—rather than a political maneuver—Sudan may manage to extinguish a war here or there, but it will erupt again. Absolutely.