It’s hard to get aid to Sudanese civilians, but weapons flow towards them endlessly through each of the country’s neighbours. The destruction they wreak forces people to flee: 10,000 children are displaced each day. The suffering now will be matched by future pain. Girls as young as eight are being raped by fighters, Unicef has reported, and babies born of sexual violence are being abandoned.
Famine is intensifying and 25 million people are experiencing acute hunger, as the belligerents block aid deliveries: Tom Perriello, the US special envoy to Sudan, warned that they are using starving women and children as their arsenal. But the destruction in the country’s agricultural heartland bodes ill for what lies ahead. The last hospital in the besieged city of El Fasher, in Darfur, is under assault.
The International Organization for Migration warns that the situation is at breaking point, with the prospect of tens of thousands of preventable deaths unless there is an immediate and massive global response. Heavy rains and flooding have exacerbated the humanitarian crisis, but its real cause is the conflict that began more than a year ago, when the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) under Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) under Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, turned upon each other.
The Sudanese military didn’t turn up for talks in Geneva on Wednesday that were supposed to pursue a ceasefire deal. The RSF – which the army birthed and worked with to eject the civilian government – did. But its leaders can hardly pose as the peacemakers while continuing their campaign of terror.
The SAF refuse to accept they will have to give any ground, though internal divisions may also have shaped the decision to stay away. The RSF make unfeasibly ambitious demands, and many doubt whether they could really come to peace anyway: they are united largely in their rampage and plunder. There can hardly be a ceasefire agreement when one side hasn’t even made it to the table. But talks do, at least, give the US and others an opportunity to press the RSF to rein in their brutality and protect civilians – abiding by commitments that they have already made.
It is also an opportunity to reiterate the need for US partners and others to pull back. Jockeying by outside powers, despite their denials of involvement, has fuelled the conflict. UN sanctions monitors have noted “credible” allegations that the UAE is supplying the RSF. Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which is cohosting these talks, are aligned with the SAF. All are present at these talks. Russia appears to have tried to play both sides, though it may be shifting towards the army. Arms made in China, Turkey, Iran and Serbia have been spotted.
James Elder, the Unicef spokesperson, described Sudan as “a crisis of neglect”. That is almost too kind a description. Refugees face an increasingly hostile reception in neighbouring countries such as Ethiopia. Egypt has expelled many of those who have fled a war to which it has contributed. Meanwhile, the UN relief effort is only one-third funded. The telescoping of Sudanese aspirations, from the grand horizon of the 2019 revolution and civilian leadership to the daily struggle for survival, has been sudden and brutal. It is the active interference of some countries, and the indifference of others, that has allowed the warring generals to wreak such devastation.
