Sudan: the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, and no end in sight

Sudan’s latest civil war, which has torn the country apart for the last 17 months, is often depicted as a squabble between rival generals.  But it is much more than that, and is of a piece with Sudan’s long history of internal conflict. For Sudan’s modern history is a history of domination of the periphery by the centre.

A legacy of civil war

Since its independence in 1956, Sudan has rarely experienced a period without civil war. Best known, perhaps, was the north/south conflict, which lasted for decades, and ultimately led to the secession of South Sudan in 2011. Many will also remember the Darfur conflict of twenty years ago, which never really ended, and at its height lead the International Criminal Court (ICC) to issue warrants for the arrest of Sudanese leaders for crimes including genocide against non-Arab peoples in Darfur. Other, lesser, conflicts in the northeast, Nuba Mountains, and elsewhere, scarcely register international attention.

What all these conflicts have in common is the phenomenon of distant, marginalised provinces, neglected at best, exploited at worst, rising against the central government and being met with severe repression, which escalates into outright war. One should avoid the pitfall of over-simplification. Life in Khartoum was never opulent, except in the halls of a tiny kleptocracy, but the capital did monopolise power and wealth at the expense of the rest of the country.

Apart from its extent and scale, what makes the current war unique is the fact that Khartoum, which had been spared earlier conflicts, has now been largely destroyed. The current war also erases hopes for democracy and stability, which had emerged from the genuinely popular revolution of 2019, when Omar al-Bashir, who had ruled the country since 1989, was overthrown after mass protests. The ensuing civilian government of Abdalla Hamdok lasted only two years, before itself being overthrown by the two current belligerents, namely General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), who is now the nominal president, and General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti, a former Darfur genocidaire, who heads the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), successor to the notorious “Janjaweed.” It was the breakdown in April 2023 of the uneasy partnership between these two former cronies which touched off the civil war which is now tearing Sudan apart.

The human cost

And the scale is staggering. It is a commonplace that Sudan is now the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. That crisis is taking place in a vast country, about three times the size of Ukraine in area, and with a population about a fifth larger. Half that population – some 25 million people – are now facing serious food shortages because of the war, which has destroyed crops and disrupted distribution; millions among them are at risk of starvation, especially in northern Darfur. Over ten million have been displaced internally, and two million driven into neighbouring countries. Even if peace were suddenly to prevail, and humanitarian access improve, it would be difficult to avoid catastrophic consequences. As long as the war continues, they are inevitable.

Since the outbreak of hostilities last April, Hemedti’s RSF have followed their same old playbook: widespread atrocities, rapes, massacres, even looting of the national museum and selling its antiquities abroad. For its part, the behaviour of Burhan’s SAF deserves no praise; far from protecting civilians from the depredations of the RSF, the army engages in its own, and since it enjoys air superiority does not shrink from aerial bombardments of civilians in RSF-controlled zones.

While the war is much more than just a fight between two generals, it is nonetheless also a fight between two generals. There is a bitter enmity between Hemedti and Burhan, and it is hard to discern any war aims beyond destruction of the other. Their lack of vision or project beyond self-aggrandisement makes their quarrel truly zero-sum, with little fabric for compromise. Some speculate that Burhan might write off wide regions of the country, and settle for control of “useful Sudan,” including the fertile confluence of the Niles south of Khartoum. But Hemedti’s forces now hold the upper hand in much of that area, and most of Khartoum itself, with the nominal government having decamped to Port Sudan. In addition to foreign mercenaries, the RSF is composed largely of Darfuri Arab tribes, whom sophisticated Khartoum urbanites despise as barbarians, and who are exacting their revenge on the historic locus of power and privilege. The prospect of further partition, or utter state collapse, now looms over Sudan.

The international dimension

This matters because of the terrible human cost, but also because of the wider implications, especially for regional stability. Refugee flows into the likes of Chad and South Sudan place a burden on some of the least developed countries in the world, and refugees will not stop there, but move further afield in search of sanctuary. South Sudan exports nearly all its oil, which accounts in turn for nearly all its national income, through pipelines traversing Sudanese territory. Fighting in Sudan has repeatedly interrupted the flow of South Sudan’s crude to the Red Sea, but not yet cut it off; should that happen, South Sudan could itself implode. And even the most casual student of history is aware of Egypt’s dependence on the Nile.

Sudan has significant mineral deposits, especially gold, but none are strategically critical. Wagner Group mercenaries, along with Emirati agents, are widely thought to be active in the gold trade, and many foreign and regional actors are lining up to support one side or the other. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Egypt, often at odds in other places, favour the SAF, while Russia is playing both sides, providing material support to the RSF even as it courts the SAF in pursuit of a naval base on the Red Sea. But the most significant foreign player is perhaps the UAE, which is channelling arms and other assistance to Hemedti. It does not follow, however, that Hemedti is a UAE proxy. Apart from Egypt, none of the foreign players have vital interests at stake in Sudan, merely ambitions.

International attention has ebbed and flowed. The UN Security Council has demanded that the RSF lift its siege of El Fasher (despite a Russian abstention.) The African Union, Arab League, and the Horn of Africa’s regional body IGAD, have all appointed special envoys. The United States and Saudi Arabia have hosted talks in Jeddah and Geneva, but Burhan boycotted the Geneva meeting last month on the grounds that he was invited in his capacity as a belligerent, not as legitimate president.

Rather than seeking peace through traditional negotiations between belligerents, for the moment, greater emphasis is needed on funding for humanitarian relief, which is badly undersubscribed, on security access for that relief, and on supporting those parts of Sudanese society who are outside the conflict, including other parties, civil society, and women. They are the ones who brought about Sudan’s short-lived attempt at democracy. And foreign actors responsible for fuelling the conflict merit firmer rebuke. The question is what priority global chancelleries accord Sudan and its long-suffering people amid a welter of international crises. A UN Fact-Finding Mission recently recommended the establishment of a peace-keeping force, but in the current context, finding a consensus in the Security Council is nearly inconceivable, and in any case the last UN operation was invited to leave Sudan just last year. No international force is going to fight its way in. The Fact-Finding Mission’s other recommendation, namely a generalised arms embargo, is more germane.