The Forgotten Disaster in Sudan

The world’s attention span is limited, especially when it comes to catastrophes in faraway places and especially when those places are seen as peripheral to the interests of the great powers. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Hamas attack on Israel and Israel’s riposte, each of which involves at least one nuclear-armed state, present a far greater risk of spinning out of control, with the potential to produce produce death tolls in the hundreds of thousands. China’s expansionism in the East and South China Seas could turn into a world war, especially if China, seeking to divert attention from its demographic and economic challenges at home, were to invade Taiwan. These are potentially existential threats in a way that the civil war consuming Sudan is not. But to ignore this war, as well as the many violent conflicts afflicting other countries of the Sahel region, may prove to be a fatal mistake.

During the Cold War, African conflicts often served as proxy wars between the United States and the Soviet Union. In one of the most twisted examples, the Angolan civil war saw Cuban armed forces, funded by the USSR, guarding the installations of U.S. oil companies like Chevron against attacks from U.S.-backed rebel groups. The nature of the game, the stakes, and the players have changed over the past several decades, but Africa remains a place where foreign powers and their proxies battle for influence, paying little or no attention to the needs and desires of the inhabitants. They do this, and justify themselves, as decent parties trying to restore order among people who have never been able to govern themselves.

Sudan, a country that has never experienced decent governance and at best has managed to maintain a tense stability, is a case in point. Egypt, since the time of the Pharaohs, and France and Britain, from the late 18th century, had designs on Sudan for various reasons - slaves, gold, land, water - and then, with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, as the linchpin of the British Empire. Ruled by a British-Egyptian condominium from 1899 until it was granted independence in 1956. Sudan inherited a civil war with the South, which started four months before independence and lasted until the new Republic of South Sudan gained independence in 2011 (whereupon civil war between the two largest ethnic groups broke out almost immediately, a conflict fueled by the new country’s abundant oil resources). Sudan itself suffered numerous armed coups, successive military dictatorships, increasing Islamist extremism, and from 1989 until he was overthrown in 2019, the brutal military-Islamist rule of General Omar al-Bashir.