271 - Getting to Yes, II: The Globe's Most Consuming Humanitarian Crisis

            Gaza and Ukraine, as I wrote on June 17, are intractable conflicts. Getting to a negotiated "yes" to stanch hostilities and halt the slaughter of innocents is - so far - a superhuman endeavor that has eluded would-be peacemakers for all of the reasons that I advanced in post #270. Equally difficult is stopping the world's worst ongoing humanitarian crisis. In Sudan, at least 150,000 mostly civilians have lost their lives in the fourteen-month-old internecine war that has convulsed the giant country. More than 25 million people are starving and in immediate need of humanitarian assistance. In Darfur province alone, 1.7 million people are without food, the U.N. says.  At a refugee camp south of El Fasher, one child today dies every two hours. The consequences of Sudan’s war are rippling across the Spanish-sized region.

            As U.S. UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said three days ago, that 25 million number is "huge." It is more, she said, than the populations of the U.S' ten largest cities. "There’s a war raging now in which there are predictions and reports, that genocide is happening. And yet this does not get the front-page attention of the international press. I think people are forgotten. And when they are forgotten, more people die because we’re not paying attention to what is happening to them."

            The civil war in Sudan, as I have previously written in this Newsletter, is entirely about personal greed and animosities between two warlords. One, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, heads Sudan's national army, a force of about 150,000 officers and troops, almost entirely of Arab descent. The army of Sudan has been a political force determining the fate of the African continent's now third largest physical space ever since it won independence from Britain in 1956.

            From 1989 to 2019, General Omar al-Bashir ruled the nation despotically; he presided over a massive ethnic cleansing of African Sudanese in the country's Darfur Province from 2003 to 2006. Possibly as many as 300,000 lost their lives in what the International Criminal Court (ICC) called a massive genocide. The ICC indicted Bashir in 2010 for war crimes in Darfur.

            Burhan was Bashir's agent and complicit executioner in Darfur during those years.  So was Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemeti), who organized and led an irregular militia on camels called janjaweed. Together, they perpetrated the genocide.

            Subsequently, Hemeti (as he is known) transformed the janjaweed into a private army called the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Now it has about100,000 troops. When Hemeti and Burhan ousted Bashir in 2019 and together ruled Sudan (nominally along with civilians until 2021) into April 2023, they governed as partners.  But, on the side, Hemeti was pursuing private deals with Russia's Wagner Group of mercenaries and with the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The Russians and the UAE wanted shares in Sudan's supplies of mined gold; Russia also wanted access to a naval base along the Red Sea near Port Sudan.

            In April 2023, after Burhan ordered Hemeti's RSF to merge itself into the regular army and take orders from him, their partnership split asunder. The RSF, supported by the Wagnerites and the UAE, attacked the regular army in and around Khartoum, the country's capital on the Nile, and then enlarged its battles to encompass much of southern and western Sudan. Currently, the RSF is attempting to conquer El Fasher, capital of north Darfur, having earlier won control of southern Darfur and much of the lands and people east from Darfur to Khartoum.

            About 15,000 Africans were gunned down by the RSF last October in El Geneina, the hub of south Darfur.  Now Doctors Without Borders has lost control of a hospital in El Fasher to the RSF. There are reliable reports of the RSF razing resettlement camps around El Fasher. In the city of 1.8 million itself, 20,000 buildings have already been destroyed in June.  Outside the city, the RSF incinerated forty villages earlier this month. Rape is common.

            According to eyewitness reports, "thousands of homes have been systematically razed and...tens of thousands of people have been forced to flee. Videos show the demeaning treatment of captives and the presence of a senior Rapid Support Forces commander recently singled out by U.S. sanctions for his role in atrocities against civilians.”

            In bombarding and destroying refugee camps around El Fasher, the RSF is continuing relentless attacks on the Masalit, Zaghawa, and Fur African inhabitants of Darfur. Their killings in recent months in Darfur resemble the genocidal surge of 2003-2006; Africans are in the way of Arabs and are being slaughtered intentionally because of their ethnicity and color -- the definition of violations of the Genocide Convention of 1948.

            And, as Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield and UN humanitarian coordinator Martin Griffiths have reminded the world, no one is paying enough attention.  That is, with Gaza and Ukraine boiling over the Darfuri/Sudanese frog is scalded without anyone doing enough either to stop the massacres or to compel the contending forces to negotiate a peace deal.

            Indeed, if Washington did not need Abu Dhabi to help halt Hamas in Gaza, it might be able to exert leverage on the UAE to cease backing Hemeti.  That is the key element; the RSF cannot continue to fight the regular army and kill civilians in Darfur without UAE cash and resupplies of equipment airlifted into eastern Chad, across from Darfur. The UAE could easily force a negotiated peace. And unlike Gaza and Ukraine, there exists a way to divide influence in Sudan and -- conceivably - to satisfy the ambitions for power and lust for riches on both sides.

            This is not an ethnically determined civil war. It is a battle between Arab forces, mostly, with control over gold and, possibly, control over oil transshipment revenues from South Sudan at its core. But it is also a battle for primacy between two military warlords who don't wish to share and who hardly trust one another.

            The U.S. would bang heads and probably succeed were it not for Gaza and Ukraine. Washington could mobilize Egypt, too, if Cairo were not consumed as well by Gaza.  Yet for most of the last fourteen months Washington, with Saudi help, has tried to persuade Burhan and Hemeti to negotiate meaningfully about the future of Sudan. Both have for the most part refused either to show up, to talk, or to come close to standing down their armies. Even Israel and Hamas have done more.

            It is long past time to relieve the massive suffering of the Sudanese people, 10 millions of whom have been driven out of their urban and rural homes as collateral damage in the senseless civil war and forced to flee for their lives and search forlornly for food. But the distribution of relief supplies, were they readily available, would also be hindered by rifle and artillery fire, and sometimes bombings and strafing from the air. Additionally, Africans in Darfur are being killed for being Africans, about 30,00 of whom have died and 300,000 of whom have fled into neighboring Chad.

            The world is not a happy place.  But unlike the complicated affairs in Ukraine and Gaza, Sudan could be cured by decisive action by the UAE, a supposed U.S. cooperating ally.  It is time to tighten the screws on Abu Dhabi.