Today marks a terrible anniversary of the war in Sudan, the world’s most catastrophic humanitarian crisis.
It has now been three years since the brutal conflict began. Three years too long. It is a war, in the words of the British-Sudanese writer Nesrine Malik, that is not so much forgotten as it is “tolerated”.
Why is this? It is not just underreported – it is structurally ignored. It has been overshadowed, first by Ukraine, then Gaza and now Iran. I cannot remember the last time I saw a news programme in the West on Sudan, or a front-page story. As far as I know, there is no Bella Hadid, no Mark Ruffalo, no Javier Bardem – all of whom have shown real courage in speaking out on Gaza – doing the same for Sudan.
Funding has been drastically reduced, and the response remains critically under-resourced. According to the UN Refugee Agency, the UNHCR, humanitarian partners in the country have received just 16 per cent of the $2.8 billion required this year.
Part of the reason for the global media blackout is how deliberately difficult access has become. Visas to Khartoum and military permission to travel freely are difficult to obtain. Instead, I travelled to the far north of South Sudan, to the border, to speak to refugees who had just crossed. Their stories were of violence – rape, torture, persecution.
The country has been destroyed. More than a quarter of the population has been displaced. Although the figures remain fluid, nearly 14 million people have fled their homes – about nine million within Sudan, the rest scattered across neighbouring countries and beyond.
I spent time with some of them, including courageous survivors of gender-based sexual violence. Despite deep cultural taboos, they sat down and trusted me with their stories. Some described being raped as they fled.
Hunger is rampant. Refugees I met who had come from El Fasher – which fell to the Rapid Support Forces last year, killing an untold number of civilians – spoke of surviving on groundnuts for weeks. The latest besieged city is Dilling in South Kordofan state, now a frontline that many warn could be attacked at any moment. Mothers told me they risked everything to cross into South Sudan only after going nearly a week without feeding their children.
The UN estimates that nearly 21 million Sudanese face acute food insecurity, including 6.3 million in the most extreme conditions. This is especially severe in conflict-affected regions such as Darfur and Kordofan. The UN reports that about 90 per cent of hospitals are no longer functional. In Darfur, a courageous doctor, Mustafa Ibrahim, from El Fasher desperately tried to assist pregnant women in labour as bombs fell around them.
Now look at diplomacy. There is, effectively, none.
There are no meaningful peace talks under way. There have been attempts – by the “Quad” (the US, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt), and by Sudanese civilian coalitions – but efforts have repeatedly collapsed or gone nowhere. Attempts to negotiate humanitarian pauses or ceasefires have also failed.
Neither are there peacekeeping missions. The UN and the African Union withdrew their joint peacekeeping mission from Darfur in 2020 under pressure from the Sudanese government, despite ongoing cycles of violence at the time. Three years later, when war erupted in Khartoum, peacekeeping was a bygone response; today, the UN Security Council remains deadlocked on resolutions that so much as suggest it.
The US’s attempt to end the war pales in comparison to its role in the early 2000s, when the administration of then-president George W Bush – despite its catastrophic wars elsewhere – helped broker the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005. That agreement ended decades of war between Khartoum and the South and ultimately paved the way for South Sudan’s independence in 2011.
In 2004, the Bush administration, led by then-secretary of state Colin Powell, declared atrocities in Darfur a genocide, pushing for sanctions, international attention and humanitarian aid. It was also the era of sustained global advocacy from the likes of American film stars such as George Clooney, Angelina Jolie and Mia Farrow, alongside senior political figures like former US senator John Kerry.
Diplomats such as Jan Eliasson, the former Swedish foreign minister, played a central role. Appointed in 2007 as the UN-African Union joint special envoy for Darfur, he worked alongside former UN General Assembly president Salim Ahmed Salim to lead high-level peace negotiations.
Sudan is a tragedy – and it is, in part, of the international community’s own making. There is little sustained political pressure, no coherent diplomatic track and minimal media presence.
At times, it feels as though no one is watching. And in that silence, a terrible war is allowed to continue.
