260 - Thwarting Another Genocide: The Miseries of our Time

Sudan's Civil War

            No, not Gaza, although the situation there is equally dire. I write, and not for the first time in this space, about the determination by an Arab irregular militia to exterminate Africans in Sudan's far western Darfur Province.  El Fasher, the major city of about 2 million inhabitants, is this week about to be gutted by Sudan's Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Moreover, much of the world is not paying attention, focusing more fully on the massive losses of life in Gaza and Ukraine. But fully 18 million Sudanese, predominantly children, are at death's door from possible starvation. Another 7 million or so are suffering from acute hunger. Measles and cholera are killing untold numbers. Life, in short, is brutish, and endangered and disrupted as never before. Amid, the many African humanitarian crises, Sudan's is foremost -- and ignored or neglected.

            In a civil war that has already lasted a full year, devastating Africa's geographically third largest country, 10 million Sudanese have lost their homes and been forced to flee; 3 million have become refugees in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Egypt, and South Sudan; and at least 14,000 civilians have been killed by the RSF or after being caught in battles between the RSF and the regular army of Sudan.

            According to the World Food Program, the International Rescue Committee (IRC), Mercy Corps, Save the Children, and Oxfam, as well as the U.S. State Department,  a year's worth of constant fighting throughout the major cities of central Sudan (Khartoum, Omdurman, and others) has deprived masses of the huddled peoples of Sudan of access to food; imports cannot arrive and what might have been grown in far off rural areas dare not be transported to the cities.  Moreover, as in Gaza and Port-au-Prince, feeding stations and hospitals are unable to open and operate amid constant strife, with bullets flying and bombs dropping. Schooling has largely ended.

            According to the IRC, "Expansion of the conflict into Sudan’s “breadbasket", Al Jazirah state, has displaced more than 500,000 people and has exacerbated the country’s food crisis. Meanwhile, the looting of businesses, markets and humanitarian aid warehouses [has] further contribut[ed] to food shortages."

         A further 500,000 Sudanese Africans are in displaced persons' camps just outside El Fasher. The RSF will kill many of those internal refugees as they attack that city.

            The civil war in Sudan is underway because two equally thuggish leaders decided that each wanted supreme power for himself, not a half share. Together General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan of the regular army and Lt. General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemeti) joined forces to oust and imprison President Omar al-Bashir in 2019.  He had controlled Sudan with a tight fist since a coup against an elected government in 1989.  The International Criminal Court (ICC) indicted him in 2010 for initiating a campaign of genocide in Darfur from 2003 to 2006 that killed about 300,000 Africans living mostly in southern Darfur. The Africans decimated included persons from the Margalit, Fur, and Zaghawa ethnic groups.  Thousands fled into Chad, often with no more than the clothes on their back.  

            Bashir's operatives in Darfur at the time, his supervisors of the Arab ethnic cleansing attacks against Africans, were Burhan, a commander of the regular army in Darfur, and Hemeti, then an ill-reputed organizer of an irregular, locally recruited, camel-mounted corps of Arabs known as the janjaweed. The janjaweed's genocidal "successes" enabled Hemeti to transform his followers into an irregular militia and to gain official funding and arms from the national coffers when Bashir was still in power as dictator.

            After the coup in 2019, Burhan, higher ranking, and Hemeti, tried to rule the country in tandem. Together they bullied and sidelined the civilians with whom they were meant to be running Sudan.  Early last year, they had a falling out, largely because Burhan wanted to merge the RSF into the regular army -- under his command -- and to curtail Hemeti's increasingly ambitious accretions of personal power.

            By last year, Hemeti had sent some of his men to fight with the UAE in Yemen, cementing ties to the rulers of the Gulf state.  He had also joined forces with Russia's Wagner Group (now the Africa Corps) and gave it access to lucrative gold mining opportunities both in eastern Sudan and in Darfur. He seems to have been responsible, too, for granting Putin's admiralty permission to open a naval base on the Red Sea.  (It is still pending.)

            The RSF is trying at this moment to gain full control of all of Darfur from the regular army. Gang rapes and random massacres are daily dangers to the province's African population. The RSF already controls the southern half of the province, having forced upwards of 600,000 Africans to flee yet again into Chad. There they remain hungry and prey to Chadian hostility. According to the Guardian, "Global leadership, long conspicuous by its absence, has drained to nothing. Taken as a whole, the response raises questions over the viability of the international humanitarian system."

            The current battle between the regular army and the RSF is for El Fasher, and thus for all of northern Darfur.  If Hemeti's forces also force the regular army out of the city, he and the RSF will be able to set up a separate administration in that province and extend their menacing rule to about one-third of the entire country. In central Sudan, they have already pushed the army out of Khartoum, are trying to hold on to Omdurman across the Nile River, and effectively are dominant south of Khartoum to the border with South Sudan. 

            Burhan's army controls eastern Sudan, the critical oil pumping depots in Port Sudan, and most of the Red Sea coast.  North of Omdurman, toward Egypt, the regular army still seems in power.  Its air force strafes and bombs the RSF, and did so last week in El Fasher.  But because the RSF is receiving regular rearmaments from the UAE, and cash, and because Burhan does not seem to have persuaded dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to send military help from Egypt, the RSF appears steadily to hold the upper hand in this bitter internecine war -- really a contest between thugs for mafia-like hegemony.

            American and Saudi negotiators have been trying for months to persuade the two antagonists to agree to a cease fire.  But neither wants to give way.  Neither wants to forfeit gold or petroleum pipeline revenues. Neither want to see the other emerge victorious, with the loser ending up imprisoned or beheaded.

            Efforts by the African Union and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) - the Horn of Africa multi-government agency -- have equally failed to slow Sudan's war.  Nor has any African entity managed to shake Chad away from its unholy alliance with the UAE and the RSF.

            In 2005-2006, the U. S. mobilized important African nations to create a potential intervention force.  That caused Bashir to pause ethnic cleansing endeavors in Darfur and to return the province to a sense of order, sparing additional lives.  President Biden could do the same now.

            The people of the Sudan for the most part have no dog in this fight. They want their normal lives back, their economic pursuits restored, and the freedoms reinstated. In the far west, Africans do not want to be massacred by Arabs. 

            The UAE and Chad could cease backing Hemeti. So could Putin. Either retreat would greatly lessen Hemeti's ability to keep attacking the regular army and killing civilians. Saudi Arabia could presumably lean hard on the UAE, and so could Washington. Exactly why they have not been successful is no clearer than the reasons why the UAE is using Hemeti to achieve exactly what?

            If the Responsibility to Protect norm that the UN adopted in 2005 were really operable, or were Washington and Egypt not distracted by the dreadful situation in Gaza, world order might be able to impose an end to what, after all, is a purposeless combat and a tragic humanitarian outrage.  But, almost beyond the world's notice, the killing fields of Sudan will remain a stain -- as the Guardian and others say -- on the globe's ability to protect its weakest and most deprived inhabitants.