IGAD's secretary-general inaugurated the bloc's mission headquarters in Khartoum on Thursday — the first regional-body return to Sudan's capital since the civil war began in April 2023. [1][2]

A flag over a building is a fact, and the fact matters: East Africa's trade bloc now keeps an address in a city the war has divided, looted, and half-emptied. Sudan Tribune and Sudan Horizon covered the ceremony as an institutional milestone, and so it is — presence is the first entry in any ledger of return. [1][2]

But presence is not capacity, and the same day's wires carried the counterweight: testimony from former child soldiers describing the Colombian mercenaries who trained them for the Rapid Support Forces. The war economy has its own institutions, and they did not close for the ceremony.

What the office can actually do — its staffing, its mandate, its security arrangement, whether either belligerent constrains it — remains undefined on the record. What it cannot do is equally plain: an office does not reopen a trade corridor. The return is a ledger entry, not a recovery. Whether an instrument follows the flag is the question the next edition inherits, and inherits it should. [1]

-- LUCIA VEGA, São Paulo