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Let me just express my embarrassment that, while I certainly noticed when war broke out in Sudan in April, I simply forgot about it thereafter. You might wonder how I could do that, but it's all too true. I quite literally let it drop out of my brain. How, I'm not sure, since I do read fairly widely in the news. Yet, in these last couple of months, little or nothing caught my eye about Sudan to remind me that it had, in fact, become an almost unimaginable horror.
And the mainstream media places that I normally look to, even as they highlighted the ongoing catastrophe in Ukraine, were essentially no help, not when it came to obvious headline stories anyway. It was as if the ongoing nightmare in Sudan didn't exist in a moment when (yes!) thousands were dying there and (catch this!) at least 3.1 million human beings were being displaced a truly polite word for such a nightmare thanks to an internal conflict between two Sudanese generals and their forces. So, all I can say is, thank heavens for TomDispatch regulars Priti Gulati and Stan Cox, some of whose relatives were, horrifyingly enough, swept up in that still ongoing nightmare.
Let them explain what I, in my ignorance, couldn't and remind us that, while this planet of ours is now officially broiling in a climate made in hell (or rather in the hellish worlds of the big fossil-fuel companies), we humans still have a remarkable ability to ignore so much that truly should matter on this planet of ours. Tom
That Other War
Struggle and Suffering in Sudan
By Priti Gulati Cox and Stan Cox
It's been devastating, even if no one's paying attention.
Three months of fighting in Sudan between the army and a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Force (RSF) has left at least 3,000 people dead and wounded at least 6,000 more. Over two million people have been displaced within the country, while another 700,000 have fled to neighboring nations. According to the World Health Organization, two-thirds of the health facilities in Khartoum, the capital, and other combat zones are now out of service, so the numbers of dead and injured are believed to be far higher than recorded, and bodies have been rotting for days in the streets of the capital, as well as in the towns and villages of the Darfur region.
Almost all foreign nationals, including diplomats and embassy staff, are long gone and so, according to Al Jazeera, hundreds or thousands of Sudanese who had visa applications pending have instead found themselves marooned in the crossfire with their passports locked away inside now-abandoned embassies. In the Darfur region, according to non-Arab tribal leaders, the RSF and local Arab militias have been carrying out mass killings, raping women and girls, and looting and burning homes and hospitals. Earlier this month, United Nations humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths told the Associated Press, "If I were Sudanese, I'd find it hard to imagine that this isn't a civil war" of the most brutal kind."
According to the United Nations, half the country's population, a record 25 million people, is now in need of humanitarian aid. And worse yet, half of those are children, many of whom were in dire need even before this war broke out. Tragically, global warming will only compound their misery. Among 185 nations ranked by the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative, Sudan is considered the sixth most susceptible to harm from climate change.
Heat waves, drought, and flooding are projected to become ever more frequent and intense as the atmosphere above Sudan warms further. This summer war and weather have been converging in strikingly deadly ways. With cloudless skies, water and electricity services largely knocked out, and daily temperature highs in the capital recently ranging from 109 degrees to 111 degrees Fahrenheit, the misery is only intensifying. Meanwhile, in the Darfur region and across the border in eastern Chad, the season of torrential rains is about to begin. The country director for Concern Worldwide in Chad says that many of the quarter-million Sudanese refugees there "are living in makeshift tents made from sticks and any material they can find, which means they are not protected from the heavy rains. The situation is catastrophic."
This Conflict Will Not Be Televised
Among the refugees from this war are some of our own relatives and in-laws, part of an extended Indian-Sudanese family who have lived in Khartoum all their lives. In May, they fled the escalating violence, some via a perilous, hair-raising 500-mile road trip across the Nubian Desert to Port Sudan. There, they caught a ship across the Red Sea to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Their goal, as they informed us in June through voice messages, was Egypt so far, the most common destination for Sudanese refugees over the past three months. And mind you, desperate as they may be, our relatives are in a far less perilous situation than people fleeing the Darfur region for Chad. Still, they are leaving behind a life built up over decades, without knowing if they will ever be able to return to Khartoum.
And here for us is a disturbing reality. We've had to do a lot of searching to find significant information in the U.S. major media about the struggle in Sudan, no less the plight of its refugees though recently there were finally substantive reports at NPR and in the Washington Post. Still, the contrast with 16 months of breathless, daily, top-of-the-hour reporting on the Ukraine war and the millions of people it's displaced has been striking indeed.
There's a major difference as well between Washington's responses to each of those wars. Before the fighting broke out in Sudan, the country had about 30% fewer people living in need of humanitarian assistance than Ukraine. Now, it has almost 50% more than Ukraine. Given those relative needs, U.S. humanitarian aid to Sudan in Fiscal Year 2023 ($536 million) was not all that skimpy compared with the humanitarian aid going to Ukraine ($605 million). not, at least, until you add in the $49 billion in military aid Washington has been sending to Kyiv 80 times the civilian aid, to which has only recently been added fundamentally anti-humanitarian cluster bombs. In the past year, in other words, Ukraine got 13% more humanitarian aid than Sudan but 93 times more total aid when you count war assistance.
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