The 2019 JPA, established to resolve Sudan’s various armed conflicts in the west, south, and east of Sudan, remains contested. Members of the BSCNIC, eastern Sudan constituents, continue to be dissatisfied with the JPA and suspicious of the political interests of the Forces of Freedom and Change-Democratic Bloc (FFC-DB), which includes Gebreil Ibrahim, a JPA signatory (as leader of the Justice and Equality Movement) and current minister of finance.
The Beja Nazirs Council was established in 2020 as a counterweight to the Sudan Revolutionary Front’s (SRF’s) monopoly of representation in eastern Sudan within the JPA framework. The group’s opposition to Sudan’s transitional government, led by then Prime Minister Hamdouk, culminated in numerous acts of popular mobilization, including the closure of crucial trade routes connecting Port Sudan to Khartoum (Sudan Tribune, 2021). Despite the complexity of the group’s political position—siding with neither civilian politicians nor armed actors—the Beja Nazirs Council’s resistance narrative was widely co-opted, by both themselves and the military as a reason for the fall of the 2019 transitional government through the October 2021 coup (Jamal, 2023). The subsequent political shifts caused further fragmentation within the already fragile JPA settlement. As a result, the Beja Nazirs Council split into two wings: one led by al-Nazir Tirik, a member of the FFC-DB that aligned with the JPA after the coup, and the other by al-Nazir Ibrahim Adroub. Adroub opposed the alliance of Tirik with the SRF, declaring it a betrayal of the process and outcomes of the 2020 Senkat Conference, which challenged the Khartoum-backed eastern track within the JPA (Mubark, 2022; Sudan Tribune, 2022c).
Disputes between both sides—former allies, now enemies—did not, however, preclude their mutual support of the army against the RSF after the war began. Eastern Sudan elites developed political animosity towards the RSF during Hemeti’s presidency of the Supreme Committee to Address the Eastern Sudan Crisis, perceiving him as the architect of the JPA and responsible for weakening the Beja Nazirs Council in central politics (Asharq News, 2021; Sudan Tribune, 2022a). This prompted the Red Sea state government to withdraw the allocation of land for RSF training camps (Democrat, 2022).
Even before the ongoing war, the Forces of Freedom and Change-Central Council (FFC-CC) had no land to till in the Red Sea. Instead, their rivals, the FFC-DB, achieved ascendance through marginalized regions such as the east. Tirik managed to create an alliance between the JPA signatories, within the transitional government, and the native administration in the east, which in turn gave the FFC-DB the popular legitimacy that the (pre-split) Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC) had lost following its alliance with the sovereign military council in 2019.
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