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Let me offer you a little summary of NBC Nightly News on October 4th. The top story that evening, you won't be surprised to learn, was who would be the next House speaker. (Kevin McCarthy's tumble off the cliff had, of course, just happened.) Story two was the Kaiser Permanente health-care strike in five states and Washington, D.C. Story three was a mass shooting no one was killed at Morgan State, a historically Black university; story four, the possibility of severe storms hitting both the South and an edge of the Northeast (Maine). Story five (and how NBC does love airplane disasters!) featured a small plane falling through the roof of a home in Oregon, killing two passengers; story six, the beginning of the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and former head of FTX; story seven focused on the appearance in court of a suspect in the killing, 26 years ago, of rapper Tupac Shakur; the eighth was a background story on the lasting impact of slavery in our moment; and, finally, ninth, the U.S. women's gymnastic team winning its seventh straight world championship.
Note that, in NBC's version of the day's news, the world was and this is all too typical missing in action. The only mentions of anything not involving the United States were a passing reference to President Biden's worry about aid for Ukraine in the story on the House leadership disaster and that "world" in the gymnastic championship (Brazil's team took silver and France, bronze). In truth, that was all too typical. (I watch the show every night.) Yes, sometimes NBC has reporters in Ukraine covering that war and, on rare occasions, the China bogeyman comes up, but generally, unless something like the recent Hamas strikes in Israel and the response to them is sweeping the news, the rest of the world isn't there.
And in that, NBC is anything but out of the ordinary. Admittedly, if you read the New York Times or watch PBS Newshour, you'll see something more of global events, but in this country generally, so much of our planet, especially the Global South, is a news nonentity. I mean, when was the last time you heard or read or saw anything about the devastating war still ongoing in Sudan? Fortunately, TomDispatch regulars Priti Gulati Cox and Stan Cox, who have covered that nightmare at this site before, return to it today, as well they should (as well, in fact, as should we all). Tom
Suffering in the Shadows
Humanitarian Calamities That Aren't on the World's Agenda
By Priti Gulati Cox and Stan Cox
Various versions of the aphorism "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography" have been making the rounds ever since the rise of U.S. imperialism in the late 1800s. The quip (which, despite legend, appears not to be attributable to Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, or any other famous person) has proven all too accurate when the war in question directly involves American troops. When, however, non-U.S. combatants and civilians suffer and die from conflicts relatively unrelated to Washington's "strategic interests," our media outlets tend to avert their eyes, aid agencies get stingy, and Americans learn no geography whatsoever. Oh, and given this country's power and position on this planet, millions suffer the consequences of that neglect.
Terror Days in Khartoum
Let's start with Sudan. A civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Force (RSF) is now dragging into its seventh month with no end in sight. Since the conflict erupted, Washington has issued only a few token calls for the fighting there to end, while providing insufficient aid to desperate millions of Sudanese. The assistance that did go out has proven microscopic compared to the vast quantities of humanitarian, economic, and military aid our government has poured into similarly war-torn Ukraine.
In the first five months of brutal fighting in Sudan, 5,000 civilian deaths and injuries to at least 12,000 more were reported and those were both considered significant underestimates. Meanwhile, more than a million people have fled that country, while a staggering 7.1 million have been displaced in their own land. According to the International Office of Migration, that represents "the highest [number] of any internally displaced population in the world, including Syria, Ukraine, and the Democratic Republic of Congo." Human Rights Watch reports that "over 20 million people, 42% of Sudan's population, face acute food insecurity and 6 million are just a step away from famine."
Try to take that in for a moment and wonder, while you're at it, why you've heard so desperately little (or nothing at all!) about such an immense human tragedy. Worse yet, the Sudanese people are hardly the only ones being treated shabbily by Uncle Sam and other governments of the rich North while suffering deadly deprivation. Sudan is, in fact, at the center of a region stretching from the Middle East deep into Africa in which countries suffering some of the world's worst humanitarian emergencies are largely being ignored by the Global North.
Given the near vacuum of news on the Sudan conflict in our media, we contacted Hadeel Mohamed, an educator we know who fled Sudan for neighboring Egypt, but is still in frequent contact with her neighbors who stayed behind in the capital city, Khartoum. We asked her for an update on what people still living there were telling her they were enduring after six months of unending civil war.
Every house in their neighborhood, she's heard, has been looted by combatants. In the process, her friends and neighbors say that they've experienced "terror days when their houses were being invaded or even re-invaded to see if there's anything left."
"When it starts to get dark outside," she told us, "that's scariest, because you never know who's going to come in and attack." If female household members are there, what grim fates are they likely to suffer? And she adds, "If you have males in the house, are they going to be abducted and what's going to happen to them?"
We asked whether atrocities were being committed by both the Sudanese Army and the RSF? "Yeah, both sides," she responded. "Listen, I'm not validating any side, but when you're in war, you really don't know who's coming at you or who's a threat to you. So, everyone is seen as a threat." And that, she adds, leads the combatants to act violently toward the civilians who've stayed behind.
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