What the people of Sudan need from us

The writer is president of Soas, University of London

At a vigil in London this week to mark one year of the war in Sudan, a speaker said that her elderly parents no longer understand what it means to be Sudanese. Uprooted in their seventies to Egypt, they are watching in bewilderment as their homeland is obliterated. They fear they will never see it again.

The horror wreaked on the people of Sudan in the futile, annihilating conflict between the military SAF (Sudan Armed Forces) and paramilitary RSF (Rapid Support Forces) has reached dizzying dimensions.

This is now the world’s biggest internal displacement crisis — more than 13,000 people are known to have been killed and 8.6mn have been forced to flee their homes. Meanwhile, 25mn are in desperate need of humanitarian aid, with nearly 5mn already on the brink of famine. All this in a country where many people were already devastatingly poor and vulnerable.

The first anniversary of this forgotten conflict coincided with an international donors conference in Paris, in which more than €2bn was promised in emergency aid. This is half of what is needed. But if the pledges are made good, it will represent a remarkable improvement on the meagre slivers of humanitarian assistance that have been given thus far.

It is hard to know when the war will end. The fighting has reached an ugly stalemate, with neither side able to claim an outright victory or to back down. As work by the International Crisis Group indicates, many Sudanese see both belligerents as deeply discredited.

The SAF present the war as an existential threat to the nation. In their view, they fight for the unity of Sudan against a group of ill-disciplined paramilitary soldiers and mercenaries who loot, shoot, and rape their way across the country in an effort to control its resources. Western governments and human rights organisations, while attributing atrocities to both sides, also apportion greater blame to the RSF. The long-beleaguered people of Darfur, where the majority of provinces are in the hands of the RSF, have borne a particularly brutal burden. Reports of ethnic cleansing are grimly credible.

On the other hand, the SAF is seen by critics as a vehicle for key players from the former military leader and Islamist Omar al-Bashir’s regime to regain their power, privileges and wealth, rendering the magnificent people’s revolution of 2019 null and void. It is difficult to negotiate peace when the two parties at war are not ready for a solution and outside players fuel the conflict.

Yet, even if it is not easy, we cannot ignore Sudan. There was a failure in international diplomacy after Bashir’s fall, when western governments did not act urgently to lift crippling sanctions and concede to Sudan the access it needed to IMF development loans and debt relief. Swifter action five years ago may have avoided this conflict, for which scarcity and economic deprivation have been a vital precondition.

We now need money, commitment, pressure and creativity to find a way out of the nightmare and restore Sudan on the path to a civilian-led, stable future, charted by the Sudanese themselves. The recent appointment of a US special envoy there, Tom Perriello, will hopefully add new impetus. Securing a ceasefire to distribute humanitarian assistance is a critical first step, but this must be pursued in tandem with finding a permanent end to the war. Fractured and uncoordinated attempts at diplomacy must be better aligned and cohesive, as French President Emmanuel Macron urged at the end of the donors’ gathering in Paris.  

Until this happens, the war will continue to have an increasingly destabilising impact across Africa. It has already created nearly 2mn new refugees. Worst of all, it is killing Sudan’s people and wrecking their beloved homeland. I heard echoes of a revolutionary chant from 2019 in a rallying cry at the Trafalgar Square vigil: “It is not the bullets that the people of Sudan fear, it is the silence of the world”. Let us not let the Sudanese down again.