Sudan’s humanitarian tragedy amid global disinterest in deadly civil war

Sudanese general Yasser al-Atta has good reason to lament, as he did to reporter Paola Totaro in Khartoum, the global disinterest in the civil war in his country that has claimed an estimated 150,000 lives and displaced 12 million people. At its heart is ethnic cleansing, targeting Sudan’s black African, non-Arab population. Even the biased, anti-Israel UN concedes the largest humanitarian crisis the world faces is not in Gaza but in the vast, strategically important African nation of Sudan. Totaro’s reporting, including Thursday’s account of devastation of priceless artefacts in the Sudan National Museum, sanctum of the country’s history and ancient culture, confirms that. Museum archaeologist Rihab Khider says units of the rogue paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, reportedly backed by the United Arab Emirates in a battle against Sudan’s standing army, “even shot the mummies” when they rampaged through the museum in April 2023 seeking to destroy symbols of Sudan’s past. The full extent of the destruction has become apparent only recently following the RSF’s expulsion from central Khartoum.

“The RSF do not just want to kill the Sudanese people, they want to erase our culture too,” Khalid Ismail Ahmed Ali El-Aisir, Information and Culture Minister in the transitional government in Khartoum led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, told Totaro. “This is the definition of genocide.”

The RSF was formed in 2013. Its origins are in the Janjaweed Arab militia that fought rebels in Sudan’s Darfur region in 2003 and was accused of genocide and ethnic cleansing against the black African, non-Arab population. Since then the RSF – allegedly with UAE backing, including drone strikes launched against Sudan – has emerged as a powerful force, taking control of territory along the border with Libya and Egypt, including Darfur. Last month, in one of its most spectacular successes, it seized El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, after a six-month siege. An estimated 32,000 people were killed. If the death toll is correct, the massacre was even worse than the four-year siege of Aleppo, Syria, when 30,000 people reportedly were slaughtered.

Yet there seems little interest in the fate of Sudan, a nation of 50 million that in 2021 became an early signatory to the Abraham Accords and remains pledged, as General Burhan writes on Thursday, to “peace and co-operation (as) the only path to a stable Middle East and Horn of Africa”.

In talking with Totaro, General Atta accused world leaders of “staying silent” in the face of genocide. He says UAE military and financial backing of the militia forces stems from its desire to rid Sudan of its African tribes and entrench domination of the 70 per cent of the population that is Arab. The UAE denies any such involvement. Whatever the truth, it is time for the world to take notice of the catastrophe unfolding.

As human rights lawyer Arsen Ostrovsky says, it can “literally be seen from space: satellite images show burned villages, scorched farmland and vast camps of displaced families … haunting aerial portrait of human suffering”.