306 - World's Worst Humanitarian Crisis Worsens

Sudan

            Sudan’s civil war between two armies and two generals/warlords who once worked together hotted up over the weekend, with repeated bombings, massacres, lootings, and raping rampages in the country’s southeastern agricultural breadbasket, and in the west, where a renewed genocide is unfolding. Although the UN has decried the senseless slaughter and an American negotiator has been trying for months to broker a ceasefire, neither of the contending generals is ready for peace. Hence the world’s worst humanitarian crisis daily worsens.

Ever since the two military commanders and their armies started pummeling each other in April, 2023, as many as 150,000 Sudanese civilians have died, 25 million Sudanese are experiencing hunger, 2.5 million are starving, 10 million Sudanese have lost their homes and occupations, and 3 million have fled into nearby countries. Food and potable water are scarce. Millions have become impoverished.

Despite repeated U.S. attempts to construct a ceasefire, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) continue to bomb Khartoum, which for a century served as the country’s capital, attempting to oust the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), an irregular militia that now holds the city. Farther south, along the Blue Nile River in Sennar and Gezira provinces, the RSF this weekend responded to a defection by one of its commanders by shooting up villages and villagers, unleashing a renewed wave of terror, and making a desperate food shortage even more acute.  Raping and pillaging accompanied the military cascade.

Meanwhile, in the beleaguered country’s far west provinces of North and South Darfur, the RSF has laid siege to El Fasher, a regional capital. Possibly 1 million or more black potential refugees are surrounded there in displaced persons camps, with the RSF attacking often.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is backing the RSF by providing cash and arms smuggled from a new air base established across Sudan’s western border with Chad. In recent weeks, the UAE has both supplied drones to the RSF and used its own drones to monitor positions and fighting.

Earlier, Putin’s Wagner Group, a mercenary outfit of Russians (now renamed the Africa Corps), worked with the RSF and fought alongside its Arab legions. But Putin seems to have since switched sides to obtain the SAF’s support for a Russian naval base near Port Sudan on the Red Sea. On Saturday, the RSF claims that it shot down a Russian-piloted cargo plane near El Fasher.

The SAF controls most of northern Sudan and the country’s entire Red Sea littoral, plus Port Sudan, which is being used as the de facto capital. That city is the terminus of a lengthy pipeline from South Sudan, which has major petroleum reserves and pays pumping fees. The RSF controls nearly all of southern and western Sudan (where the battle for Darfur continues), and much of Sennar and Gezira.

Sudan’s internecine conflict began when the SAF’s General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the RSF’s Lieutenant-General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (referred to as Hemeti), fell out. Together they had deposed the Sudan’s long-time dictator, President Omar al-Bashir, in 2019. Bashir had removed an elected government in 1989,  governing thereafter as an authoritarian.

Ruling Sudan together along with a powerless civilian prime minister for two years, Burhan and Hemeti then jointly ruled for two more years until the former demanded that the latter merge the RSF into the SAF and take orders from him. That was too much for Hemeti, who proceeded to launch attacks on the SAF stronghold of Khartoum, quickly capturing it as well as numerous other provincial towns where the SAF was previously presumed to be strong. Secret assistance from both the Wagner Group and the UAE was critical to those victories.

But now, because the Russians have switched sides, the SAF is gaining back territory from the RSF. The civil war is more fully joined, but that makes the humanitarian calamity far more severe, in no ways better.

Earlier, the tactics of the 100,000-strong RSF proved more effective. It pushed the 150,000-strong SAF out of big parts of Africa’s third-largest country. The RSF looted, pillaged, maimed, raped and killed civilians as it captured Khartoum and major provincial cities. In those places and now in and around El Fasher, the Arab-composed RSF targeted black Africans of Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnicity, just as its camel-riding predecessor, the Janjaweed, attacked black Africans during the 2003 to 2005 genocide in Darfur. In those dreadful earlier years, Hemeti, the leader in the Janjaweed, and Burhan, then a regional SAF commander, orchestrated   ethnic cleansing horrors that killed 300,000 Africans and forced 3 million to flee into Chad. Bashir, who had authorized the genocidal attacks, was indicted by the International Criminal Court in 2010. Now, another genocide is unfolding in the same place, led by Hemeti and facilitated by the UAE.

Sudan’s civil war would sputter to a halt if Washington could persuade Abu Dhabi to cease supplying the RSF and Moscow to withdraw its Africa Corps. The RSF would become much more pressed for cash, bullets, bombs and missiles. But Burhan and Hemeti went to war to gain personal power and to grasp the golden riches of Sudan’s mines in Darfur. Neither wants the other to win.

Aid agencies, as in the Gaza Strip, are hindered by constant warfare from helping the needy throughout Sudan. Only a true ceasefire can save lives and relieve Sudan’s mass suffering. Continued deaths from starvation and war are the fault of the UAE, our reputed ally and Gazan interlocutor. Cutting UAE meddling on the side of the RSF and Hemeti is thus critical to ending the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

Washington’s negotiators now need to speak firmly to the UAE. That is the key to peace, and to the end of the immense human suffering and widespread starvation in Sudan.