Sudan’s brutal civil war has now entered its second miserable year, with no end in sight for one of the world’s most catastrophic humanitarian disasters. The crisis has been largely eclipsed by other conflicts, including Israel’s war in Gaza, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the anarchy in Haiti. But conflict exhaustion and compassion fatigue should not give way to apathy. Sustained, high-level diplomacy, led by the United States, is urgently needed, or else the Sudanese people will face another year of needless suffering, including an unfolding genocide in Darfur.
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Sudan’s second year of war brings little hope. The world should keep trying anyway.
It won’t be easy, and there’s no quick fix. Diplomatic efforts so far to bring this crisis to an end have failed, mostly as outside actors supporting opposite sides have pursued their own narrow interests. That has to end. A new round of peace talks is scheduled to resume soon in Jeddah, led by the United States and Saudi Arabia. The talks must include all the main players: Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, the Central African Republic, the African Union, and the countries from East Africa and the Horn. They all need to coordinate, finally, and pressure Sudan’s two warring parties to attend.
The fighting erupted on April 15 last year between two Sudanese generals locked in a power struggle: Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, commander of the Sudanese Armed Forces, and Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, who commands the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, or RSF.
Generals Burhan and Hemedti were once allies, after jointly staging a 2021 coup that interrupted Sudan’s fragile transition to democratic rule. But the two fell out over the implementation of an internationally backed Framework Agreement that would have seen the RSF folded into the regular army. Both men saw the agreement — backed by the United States and the West — as weakening their power, and they launched devastating tit-for-tat artillery attacks across the capital, Khartoum. The fighting quickly spread across the vast country and now, after a series of early RSF gains, seems to have reached a stalemate. The Sudanese armed forces reportedly benefited from Iranian-made drones.
More than 8 million people have fled their homes, making Sudan the world’s largest current crisis of internally displaced persons. At least 15,000 have been reported killed, although international aid agencies and others call that a vast undercount. There were reports in some towns of bodies left uncollected in the streets. The United Nations reports that some 18 million people are in dire need of food assistance, with millions on the brink of famine.
Fears of a repeat genocide in the Darfur region have become a grim reality. A detailed new report by the Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights presents a chilling accounting of how the RSF — the modern offshoot of the Janjaweed Arab tribal militia of the early 2000s — has committed systemic ethnic cleansing against the Black Masalit people and other non-Arab tribes in Darfur.
The report describes how, between April 24 and June 17, 2023, RSF militiamen laid siege to the city of El Geneina, attacked and burned Masalit displaced persons camps, and rounded up Masalit men and boys for summary execution. Masalit women were subjected to rape, sexual slavery and other forms of gender-based violence. Some Masalit women tried to save their male children by dressing them in female clothes.
The report names several state actors complicit in the genocide. Most blame falls on the UAE, which, the report said, finances the RSF through a series of front companies while supplying weapons, drones and ammunition on near-daily cargo flights via Chad. “The UAE’s complicity is further underscored by its efforts to cover for RSF atrocities by signaling a commitment to a peace process, while covertly fueling the violence,” it said. Also named as complicit are Chad, Libya, the Central African Republic and Russia through its control of the Wagner Group mercenary outfit.
The world, which promised to “never again” allow ethnic-based mass slaughter to occur unimpeded, has a collective duty under the Genocide Convention to bring the violence in Sudan to an end and hold the perpetrators to account. Their state sponsors need to be forcefully reminded that they, too, can be held responsible unless they show a new willingness to end their support and bring their clients to the peace table.
Ultimately, Sudan needs a pathway to return to democratic civilian rule. That was the promise of the 2019 revolution that led to the ouster of 30-year dictator Omar Hassan al-Bashir. That seems a long way off now, in the face of the ongoing destruction and misery. But there can be no lasting solution without it.