Africa’s forever war: how Sudan descended into hell — again

History is repeating itself in Sudan.
Ten million are displaced inside the country, two million are refugees. Half of the country’s 47 million people need food aid while 750,000 are already starving in what could become the worst famine in 40 years.
Hundreds of towns and villages have been torched amid a vicious civil war. Women and girls are raped, young men are shot on sight or beaten to death on the barest suspicion of belonging to the wrong group, even in the capital, Khartoum. Some experts fear the death toll from starvation and disease will rise above two million by the end of the year, far higher than other current wars.
Yet, compared with 15 or 20 years ago, when similar catastrophes unfolded there, the world is indifferent.
How has Sudan’s past, and international neglect, led to this unique emergency?
Sudan is unlucky. The country was created by fire and sword 200 years ago, its boundaries drawn according to how deep into the interior European slave traders and freebooters had reached by the time Europe’s foreign ministers met in Berlin to draw lines on Africa’s map.
In the early 20th century, Britain developed Khartoum as the capital of its then colony, and built the cotton-growing Gezira Scheme, at the time the world’s biggest irrigated farm. The far-flung south and Darfur were neglected.
Since independence in 1956, Sudan, with its extreme inequalities in wealth and power lethally overlain with ethnic and religious diversity, has torn itself apart.
The country has alternated between mercurial military rulers and indecisive, overwhelmed civilian governments; between brutal wars and unstable periods of peace.
For a decade — from 2002 to 2011 — Sudan was the focus of one of the most sustained international peacemaking efforts of modern times. It was a decade of bloodshed, but also of real hope for a better future.
Horrified by long years of war in southern Sudan raging since the early 1980s, the administration of George W Bush partnered with Kenya and northeast African nations to midwife the ambitiously named “Comprehensive Peace Agreement”.
The UN sent 10,000 peacekeepers to oversee a ceasefire, reconstruction and — most importantly — self-determination for the long-oppressed southern Sudanese.
When the referendum duly came in January 2011, 99 per cent of southern Sudanese voted to form a new country. Securing the disputed border between north and south, including a contested district known as Abyei, demanded political attention at the highest level — and 3,500 more peacekeepers.
South Sudan, despite becoming embroiled in its own civil war within two years, was born high on the international agenda and with high hopes.
Today the young country is still racked by conflict and struggling to recover from devastating floods in 2021.
In Sudan’s westernmost region of Darfur, a separate civil war exploded in 2003.
The government formed the Janjaweed militia, a group recruited from Arab nomadic tribes from across the Sahel region that became notorious for massacre, rape and driving millions from their homes.
In response, tens of thousands of young people attended rallies in New York, Washington, London and Paris to hear celebrities such as the actor George Clooney demand that the world save Darfur. The World Food Programme set up its largest aid operation yet. The United Nations and the African Union — backed by the US and Europe — sent another 20,000 peacekeepers to protect civilians.
Sudan was not just host to about a third of the world’s peacekeepers, it was a regular agenda item for the UN Security Council, which in just three years — 2004 to 2006 — passed 17 resolutions. As well as the US and European countries, China and Russia had special envoys for Sudan, and the African Union set up a panel of three former presidents to lead its efforts.
All this effort and money stopped Sudan from falling into the abyss — but only for a while.
Above all, one big obstacle was unresolved: the military ruler, Omar al-Bashir, and his cabal of Islamist security men were still in power in Khartoum. To escape the grip of sanctions, they entangled themselves ever deeper into illicit trade, turning the army into a kleptocratic machine.
To repress their discontented citizenry, they upgraded the Janjaweed into a well-oiled paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Force (RSF).
In 2019, as hyperinflation and food shortages gripped the capital, Sudanese people lost their fear of the secret police and came onto the streets in an astonishing display of non-violent civic protest. The civilians’ symbol was a loaf of bread — no longer available in the city’s bakeries — and their chant was “Bashir, just go!”
Soldiers refused to fire on the unarmed crowds, not least because their own wives and daughters were among them.
Army chiefs, among them General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the head of the RSF, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as “Hemedti”, announced they were siding with the people, and deposed Bashir.
A civilian government emerged at first. A technocrat and economics professor, Abdalla Hamdok, took the reins. But he faced a bankrupt economy, widespread hunger and a military run by ruthless generals plotting to undermine him and take back power.
Arab states — especially Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — bankrolled the military men and their ambitions. Western governments’ rhetoric of supporting democracy proved hollow. Few were surprised when al-Burhan and Hemedti removed the hapless Hamdok and took power for themselves.
For this brazen putsch, the generals received a slap on the wrist and a low-energy diplomatic effort to bring civilian faces back into the cabinet. The real power struggle was between the two generals themselves.
As long feared, in May last year, they fell out, having failed to agree on the terms of a deal integrating the two armies under al-Burhan.
As the deadline of a potential agreement approached, the SAF had other ideas. Rolling into the capital on tanks, Hemedti’s forces attempted a coup. The takeover bid failed but fighting in the capital quickly escalated into a civil war that soon spread to most of the country.
Sudan was already in the throes of its biggest hunger crisis to date. Millions were still living in relief camps from the previous wars, relying on aid rations.
Village farmers had been neglected for decades in favour of large prairie-style farms that created local dustbowls. The urban poor had been promised family support payments that rarely came. On top of that, climate change accentuated droughts in the savannas and floods along the Nile.
Al-Burhan and Hemedti well knew that a war would plunge Sudan’s people into famine. Starvation was used as a weapon nonetheless.
Al-Burhan deliberately restricted aid to areas held by Hemedti’s RSF in order to encourage dissent and even rebellion among starving tribal groups.
The RSF militiamen, atop Toyota Landcruisers, are mobile and ruthless. They rampaged through Khartoum’s residential neighbourhoods, stripping them of everything that could be stolen, and vandalising much of what remained.
They lived down to their notorious reputation for rape, pillage and murder. In western Darfur, the RSF and its tribal allies stand accused of genocidal slaughter of the local Masalit people. The survivors of a firestorm of massacres are living as refugees in Chad.
Further east, the once prosperous breadbasket regions along the Blue Nile, the site of vast irrigated farms, have been pillaged and face hunger.
The Sudan Armed Forces, led by al-Burhan, which had become accustomed to outsourcing fighting to tribal militia, was on the defensive. Immobile and demoralised, it resorted to bombing key infrastructure and choking off supplies to the RSF-controlled countryside. UN lawyers advised the World Food Programme and other aid-givers that, because the UN recognised the SAF as the legitimate government and al-Burhan as chairman of Sudan’s sovereignty council — the de facto head of state — they needed his permission to operate.
So even though there is not a single SAF soldier within a hundred miles of the Chad border, and arms smugglers cross it daily, UN trucks carrying food aid could not enter there. Al-Burhan has the starvation card to play, and he plays it.
Four weeks after UN-accredited food security experts determined that famine had returned to Sudan, the SAF finally agreed to let the UN cross the border. And that aid is just a trickle. Millions are likely to starve.
Yet, compared to past emergencies in Darfur or South Sudan, the world is indifferent. The UN is all-but absent. The US special envoy, Tom Perriello, was energetic as he convened peace talks in Geneva last month but the problem, for Perriello and Sudan, is that President Biden has shown no interest.
Therefore, while the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, makes the occasional phone call, the Sudanese generals and their Arab backers — especially the UAE, which arms and funds the RSF — know no sticks are being wielded and no carrots offered from on high.Meanwhile, Russia plays both sides. Its Wagner mercenaries assist Hemedti in the west of the country, while its representatives also mull a deal with al-Burhan to increase influence in the Red Sea via Port Sudan.
The UN secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, has appointed the capable Algerian diplomat Ramtane Lamamra as his envoy, but Lamamra has a skeleton staff and little chance of getting a tough resolution through the Security Council.
Ironically, the announcement last week by the American rapper Macklemore that he is cancelling a forthcoming concert in Dubai over the UAE’s role “in the ongoing genocide and humanitarian crisis” in Sudan promises to have more impact than the combined efforts of US, British and UN diplomats. Emirati rulers care deeply about their reputation.
As millions of Sudanese pour across international borders and the human toll and economic burden of the calamity rise relentlessly, it is painfully clear that the time and money spent in the past was well worth it.
We need to resurrect that kind of co-operative effort, starting with funding aid operations at scale. The alternative unfolding today is calamitous for the Sudanese and bad for the rest of the world.Alex de Waal is the executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University in Massachusetts