It has been a year since Sudan descended into a devastating war, which has left over 15,000 people dead, thousands injured, and driven some 8.5 million people away from their homes. The country now faces one of the worst hunger crises the world has ever witnessed. The UN has warned of a famine. And like in any war, children have been the worst affected. Around 3.8 million children are malnourished and, according to the MSF (an international medical humanitarian organisation), one child dies every two hours in relief camps.
The civil war that broke out between two rival factions of the military government of Sudan — the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) under Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) under Hemedti — on April 15, 2023, is still raging with no signs of relenting.
Reports suggest that the UN’s humanitarian campaign “needs $2.7 billion this year to get food, healthcare and other supplies to 24 million people in Sudan — nearly half its population of 51 million.” Donors pledging more than €2 billion for the war-ravaged nation at a conference in Paris on Monday is a step in the right direction, but more needs to be done on this front.
The glaring aspect is that the world has viewed with indifference this bloody war in one of the world’s poorest nations. While the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Palestine conflicts, along with the escalating Middle-East situation, have attracted the attention of the global powers, Sudan’s crisis has been largely ignored. That the cataclysmic situation in Africa’s third largest country has not brought about necessary diplomatic interventions from the major powers is a sad reality.
International media coverage too has been found lacking. Perhaps, the extremely hostile conditions that journalists find themselves in while trying to report the incidents unfurling in the country have served as a deterrent to active ground reporting from the north-east African nation.