Cross, Harry. Undoing a Revolution: Sudan and the Politics of Debt. London: C. Hurst & Co. Publishers, 2025.
A longer version of this review will be published in a future issue of Sudan Studies by the Sudan Studies Society (UK) - sssuk.org
by James Morton
This important book challenges the way the West undid Sudan’s 2019 revolution by imposing IMF economic adjustment policies on the civilian-led Transitional Government. To set the scene, Cross traces the history of Sudan’s economic dealings with the West in two phases. For the first three decades, from Independence in 1956 to the coup of 1989 which brought the National Islamic Front to power, western lenders led by the IMF and aid donors kept the Sudanese economy afloat in return for Sudan’s acceptance of the West’s policies on the Middle East, Israel in particular. The Islamic coup put an end to that deal. For the next three decades Sudan had to do without western support and came under ever stronger western sanctions. It proved surprisingly resilient, so much so that Omar Al Bashir’s Salvation regime outlasted all its predecessors. The heart of the book is its analysis of what happened after his overthrow in 2019. How the West returned immediately to business as usual, offering minimal economic support in return for maximum and immediate acceptance of western policies. This offer was made to a Transitional Government which had no mandate beyond a precarious compromise between military and paramilitary forces and disparate civil society groups. To cap it all, economic support was conditional on the usual stringent IMF package of fiscal adjustment policies. The book ends by showing how this undid Sudan’s popular revolution and buried its progressive hopes, arguing that the International Community must find a better way to support to popular revolutions, a way that escapes the orthodoxy of fiscal adjustment and debt repayment.
Almost since independence, Sudan’s need for external financing has dominated domestic politics. In 1958 the political parties’ inability to agree on a proposed US loan of $30 million led to General Abboud’s coup. Egypt’s Jamal Abd al Nasser commented at the time that the US was using aid and soft loans to replace British imperialism. It is difficult not to agree. For the next 30 years the West’s support for Sudan’s finances was conditional on Sudanese support for western, especially US policies. As Cross describes it, international creditors ‘weaponised’ aid and credit to impose their politics on Sudan. They had to recognise, however, that it could not pay its debts without that aid and credit. Which made ‘insolvency a bargaining chip in the hands of the debtor.’
Sudan had to play the insolvency card many times. As long as it accepted western political demands the card always took its trick. In 1984, when it defaulted on external loans totalling $1.9 billion the country was insolvent again. From then on, a pattern of ‘extend and pretend’ allowed Sudan to negotiate a series of refinancing agreements with the IMF; each agreement required devaluation, budgetary control and the elimination of subsidies. Government never met these conditions and the adjustment policies clearly did not work. That did not matter. Sudan was the only Arab nation to support Egypt’s recognition of Israel, so Western governments continued to provide aid “on a ‘drip feed’ of liquidity that purchased political influence and loyalty in Khartoum.”
High on the list of western requirements was an end to the civil war in South Sudan which had been set off by President Numeiri’s introduction of Islamic Shari’a law. Four years after his overthrow, the democratic government’s attempt to end the war by softening the Shari’a laws set off Sudan’s third military coup. This time, however, the officers leading it were not socialist or Nasserist. They were Islamist and they went on to rule for 30 years, well over three times longer than any previous regime.
In response “western aid fell off a cliff and Sudan’s external accounts collapsed” while sanctions on Sudan grew ever stronger. In 1993 the US designated it as a State Sponsor of Terrorism; putting Sudan off limits for any company with business in the US and cutting it off from international financial networks. Fatally, the Sudanese Government justified the designation by harbouring the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and by its involvement in the EIJ’s 1995 attempt to assassinate Hosni Mubarak in Addis Ababa. Expelling the EIJ and Osama Bin Laden and handing Carlos the Jackal over to the French was not enough to recover the position. Sudan was still blamed for EIJ’s 1998 attack on US embassies in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam and, in 2000, for the bombing of USS Cole. As punishment for the first, Bill Clinton bombed the Al Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum on the grounds that it was making weapons of mass destruction; grounds later admitted to be false. Of the alleged masterminds of the attack on USS Cole, two were Saudi and three were Yemeni. No matter. In 2008 US law was amended with retrospective effect to allow American judges to order Sudan to pay $8 million in compensation to the victims.
Cross’ speculation “that the 1995 assassination attempt was deliberately leveraged to exert sanctions and diplomatic pressure against the regime” was made explicit in 1997 when Madeleine Albright called for regime change in Sudan. Partly in response to that pressure, Al Bashir split with the National Islamic Front but any chance of international rehabilitation disappeared with the destruction of the World Trade Centre and the start of the Global War on Terror. Sudan would have to find other ways to support its economy. Over the next 20 years Sudan’s National Congress Party government did just that, demonstrating “innovation and resourcefulness as it reoriented the economy under a state of siege.” It drew in investment from the Arab Gulf states and most importantly China. It by-passed financial sanctions through banking networks in the Gulf. With Chinese investment it was finally able to realise its oil resources.
Islamic finance played a key part in the rise of the National Islamic Front. This was not just patronage for NIF supporters. From 1989 onwards credit to small businesses and low-income households resulted in an “economic democratisation (which) consolidated a new business class who identified with the regime and who operated within national supply chains capable of resisting economic sanctions.” This was at the expense of the commercial classes which supported Sudan’s traditional political parties. Devaluations during the 1990s were “another means of economic democratisation and a means of redistributing wealth from the supporters of former regimes to a new Islamist guard.” These are large and over-simplified claims. Nevertheless, the point stands. Under onerous sanctions the National Congress Party government managed positive developments in Sudanese society and built a genuine constituency for Islamic rule.
The Forces for Freedom and Change, the civil society grouping which dominated the transition after Al Bashir’s fall, had little contact with this constituency and no wish to represent it. Islamist groups were excluded from the transition process and elections were held back for three years for fear that the voters might give the wrong, Islamist answer. The most influential civilian voices in the transition, many of them anglophone and some in the diaspora, were more attuned to western ideas of root and branch regime change. In a re-run of the de-Baathification error which threw Iraq into chaos they sought to eliminate Islamists from every level of government and the military. In this light the Sudan Armed Forces’ participation in the 2021 coup was at least partly defensive, as was Islamist support for that coup.
The civilian government appointed by the Transitional Sovereignty Council was equally out of touch with the grass roots. The Prime Minister, Abdallah Hamdok, and Ibrahim El Badawi, his Minister of Finance, were economists who had been working overseas in various international agencies since the 1990s. They were primed to accept the economic policies proposed by the IMF.
In his book When Peace Kills Politics, Srinivasan argues that western dominance of Sudan’s peace processes has created a political class focussed on international actors and out of touch with their national constituencies; what he describes as the ‘extroversion and withering of civil politics.’ Cross argues the point more forcefully. With elections delayed and diaspora technicians in key positions, this offered “a rare opportunity for Sudan’s Anglophone elite with links in the West and with international institutions to reform the country in their image, with the influence of both the military and the religious, regional and sectarian constituencies of the provinces temporarily checked.” Another very strong claim, but it is difficult to disagree when reading that the Transitional Government had time to appease western tastes by overturning the law banning alcohol in Sudan. As a mark of disrespect to Sudan’s religious community from a government with no democratic mandate it could not have been bettered.
However, it was the Transitional Government’s compliance with the West’s economic demands which played the biggest part in undoing Sudan’s revolution: demands for an extreme form of austerity which led to public expenditure being cut by 24%, an 85% devaluation and fuel prices increased by 400%. For developing countries, the West’s economic policy is simple: ‘Never forgive and never forget.’ Sudan defaulted on its debts in 1984 but those dating as far back as the 1970s remained on its balance sheet, still gathering interest and charges. Because of sanctions, Sudan was one of only two countries not to benefit from the Highly Indebted Poor Countries initiative to settle its debts with the IMF and World Bank and write down its other debts. To qualify for HIPC the IMF’s conditions had to be met. On top of this Sudan had to get the US to remove its designation as a State Sponsor of Terrorism by recognising Israel and paying $335 million compensation for its alleged involvement in attacks on US embassies. That was around a third of Sudan’s foreign exchange reserves. No reverse compensation was offered for bombing the Al Shifa pharmaceutical factory.
One can disagree with several points in the book. Most significant is the way Cross seeks to “resist explanations that point to the ‘corruption’ or ‘mismanagement’ of Sudanese politicians, as such explanations typically lack precision and overlook structural factors leading to large debt overhangs.” This is far too easy. There is ample evidence that corruption and mismanagement, without inverted commas, are deeply rooted in Sudanese governance and politics. In places it is just naive: the suggestion, for example, that the Sudanese Armed Forces abdicated their responsibility for security in Darfur because “it was unfamiliar to most senior officers and [its] heavy military vehicles were ill-adapted to the semi-arid terrain…” Darfur is no more arid than any other part of Sudan and the SAF had had half a century to learn how to operate in the region. Since the Numeiri era, however, the military leadership concentrated on defending its economic and political interests in Khartoum. It never provided the material, financial and above all human resources necessary to do its job properly in Darfur. And Sudanese politicians never held the SAF to account for this failure.
None of this detracts from the book’s central point. That the West, in particular the US, repeatedly moved the goalposts to ensure that the National Congress Party government could never escape sanctions. And when it finally got the regime change it wanted it moved the goalposts again and set the Transitional Government up to fail by attempting to force the Sudan to settle 50 years of financial accounts before it could draw breath. The case Cross makes for a new approach seems proven beyond any reasonable doubt. Such an approach would include unconditional short-term assistance for any new government installed with popular support and a form of sovereign bankruptcy which would allow highly indebted countries to escape the cycle of adjustment and insolvency tied to political compliance.
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James Morton the reviewer was Mid Career Fellow at St Antony’s in 1991/92. Before that he worked for two years in the Yemen Arab Republic and six years in Darfur. With a degree in Arabic and a PhD in Economics he has published widely on development economics:https://ssrn.com/author=1666442
