Sudan, a year later: the forgotten war

Translated by Angela Tagliafierro

In some wars, the violence and the destructiveness do not go at the same pace as the media coverage and the international attention. Wars becoming outline elements, becoming “other wars” and not making news. This is the case of the war in Sudan, not “making news”. The country is living one of the “biggest crisis of evacuees in the world”, as the High Commissioner of the European Union Josep Borell affirmed. As a matter of fact, for a year the country has been lacerated by a civil war bringing destruction, civil victims and a high number of internal evacuees.

In order to get back at the discussion about the war in Sudan, last April 15^th an international conference was held in Paris, collecting two thousand euros. Unfortunately, they were not enough to provide an effective response to the current crisis.

The fight for the power

On April 15^th, 2023, in Khartoum, the army led by the general Abdel Fattah al Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of the General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, started to fight.

The weak coalition that had linked al Burhan and Hemedti up to that moment, both responsible for the coup d’état that stopped the path to democracy. It started the day after the downfall of Omar al Bashir’s regime in 2021, failed when they started to talk about the future of the country and then of the army.

In December 2022, some representatives of the civil and military society, pressured by the international community, had signed an agreement to regulate the handover of power to a new civil government, also addressing the issue of justice and security sector reform.

This is where the power struggle comes in. General Hemedti and the Rsf, direct descendants of the Arab militias used by al Bashir's regime during the civil war in Darfur that started in 2003, the notorious Janjaweed, were faced with the possibility of joining the regular army. However, this would have meant the loss of relevance of Hemedti, which has never hidden its political ambitions.

This is the point that fuelled the clash and rendered attempts at mediation useless. Such as that of the Trilateral Mechanism, composed of the UN Secretary's Special Representative for Sudan, the representatives of the African Union and Igad, the intergovernmental organisation composed of the countries of the Horn of Africa. To try to resolve the crisis, they had convened a meeting on 15 April, not knowing that the war would start that very day.

Biblical famine

The seriousness of the situation is made clear by the provisional death toll of over 15,000, which, however, does not consider the indirect victims of the conflict, i.e. those caused by famine and disease.

Jan Egeland, head of the Norwegian Refugee Council spoke of the risk of a 'biblical famine', which is already partly becoming a reality. One third of the population, according to the United Nations, is in fact facing catastrophic levels of hunger.

The number of internally and externally displaced people is also very high: around 6 million people have remained within the country while 1.4 million have arrived in neighbouring states, including South Sudan, Chad, Egypt, and Ethiopia.

The water and electricity infrastructures were also damaged, making it difficult for the population to obtain drinking water. Everything in Sudan has stopped working, from schools to health centres, and the little aid destined for the country is often blocked, as Doctors Without Borders (MSF) also denounces, particularly in the areas controlled by the Rapid Support Forces.

One year into the conflict, it is still not at all clear who will emerge victorious from this conflict, but there are already several losers. First and foremost, the civilian population, left to face a violent war in which ethnic tensions that never subsided, as in Darfur, resurface, and where Sudanese women and girls suffer rape. But the democratic dream born in the aftermath of 2019, after the fall of the al Bashir regime, when it seemed that Sudan could begin its transition to democracy, also seems to have been defeated.

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