A peaceful twenty-first century, enshrining the rule of law and respect for human rights, was almost within the world’s grasp. Then Osama bin Laden and jihadist Saudis hijacked aircraft and destroyed the World Trade Towers; President George W. Bush invaded Iraq and occupied Afghanistan; Putin assaulted Georgia, helped Syria bomb its own people, and appropriated Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014 before attempting to finish the job by sending his apparatchiks into the rest of Ukraine in 2022 and bombarding its cities mercilessly in 2023.
I wrote about the state of the Ukrainian-Russian confrontation on Monday. There is much more to be said about it, and considerably more to be observed as the Ukrainian counteroffensive slowly builds up momentum in southern Ukraine, and perhaps also in its east. But today and next time I want to comment on the many other equally disruptive wars that are plaguing world order and killing and displacing citizens across a globe that is as full of wanton decimation and displacement as at any moment since World War II. The Cold War was a dangerous time, but the realities of mutually assured destruction helped to keep the peace beyond the locus of big power rivalries. Now the killing fields spread relentlessly across the planet, with personal rivalries, ambition, avarice, naked rent-seeking, and other linked motives driving immorality and a preference for deadly zero-sum outcomes.
The Sudan
Just take the example of two commanders of regular and irregular armed contingents in Sudan. General Adel Fattah al-Burhan heads the official Sudanese army, with about 200,000 officers and soldiers as well as a tiny navy and a small air force. His sometime colleague and now sworn enemy is Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (known as Hemeti), who heads the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a collection of Arab-speaking horsemen and mercenaries who number about 75,000. Both Burhan and Hemeti achieved infamy in 2003 – 2008, when they separately oversaw the killing and exiling of African agriculturalists in western Darfur. That systematic genocide cost the lives of about 300,000 Africans and the exodus into cross-border refugee camps of 400,000 African Sudanese.
Now, after ruling together over Sudan since a coup in 2019, the two genocidal perpetrators in chief each wants sole control over their country of 46 million so as to gain unilateral political power, to be able to give orders and, mostly in order to appropriate the vast wealth that emanates from recently exploited gold deposits. (Sudan once was an oil exporter, but South Sudan was carved out of Sudan in 2011 and the oil fields are now wholly within South Sudan, albeit transported by pipeline north to Port Sudan on the Red Sea.) Russia’s Wagner Group now exploits abundant supplies of gold and other minerals in eastern Sudan and near the Red Sea – largely in cahoots with Hemeti and the RSF.
About 800 civilians have lost their lives in the swirling Army-RSF battles that have engulfed Khartoum, the national capital; its neighboring cities and suburbs; and several provincial capitals like El Obeid in Kordofan. Equally badly hit has been Darfur, especially El Geneina, the provincial capital, and outlying rural agricultural areas. At least 60,000 have fled across the nearby border into Chad, clustering once again in rough camps. Overall, about 2 million Sudanese have been displaced across the vast country.
Hospitals and schools in Khartoum are largely occupied by RSF fighters or under attack from the army. That big city of 6.3 million is uninhabitable, short of food and medicine, and without sanctuaries from frequent shelling and battles between the army and the RSF. Six or seven cease fires have been breached, and the decimation continues almost daily despite U. S. and Saudi attempts to broker a sustainable peace.
Instead, both contending sides are determined to extirpate their opponents. Burhan wants uncontested domination, and access to gold. So does Hemeti. So far Burhan has refrained from bombing or strafing Hemeti’s forces from the air. But that could occur. Neither wants again to share power, or to divide the spoils of hegemonic mastery.
How this African tragedy will be resolved is very unclear. Meanwhile no one wins and unspeakable misery has been inflicted not only on civilians seeking daily normality and the ability to go about their daily lives unimpeded. And all for what? For satisfactions of personal power and the ability to appropriate and plunder the national wealth that such power will convey.
If Putin can go to war for personal aggrandizement, Burhan and Hemeti may each think, what’s to stop them from ousting their rival and gaining uncontested rule, and riches?
Next time: the wars in Myanmar, Ethiopia, Somalia, Mali, Cameroon, Central Africa, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.