On April 15th 2023, I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was a Saturday, the beginning of a long weekend in the US. I’d been looking forward to the break. But that morning, as I had coffee and, as usual, checked the news, my sense of calm and ease was instantly shattered. On Twitter, accounts of violence breaking out in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, my city of birth. The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces were attacking army positions in the city and its surroundings. The sinking feeling in my stomach intensified. I scrolled and scrolled, looking for more information. Still, I tried not to panic: surely these were skirmishes that would die down. Surely the militias and the army wouldn’t risk war in the capital.
I was wrong. Within hours, the capital became a battlefield. People were trapped in the airport, where fierce fighting broke out between the two factions. They were trapped in their homes as gun battles raged in the streets. They were trapped during their commutes, unable to cross the bridges that connected the city to the neighboring towns of Omdurman and Khartoum North over the Nile. I was worried sick for my family. My father lived in one part of Khartoum with his sister. They were both elderly: my aunt in her 70s, my father in his 80s, and in frail health. The rest of the extended family lived across the river in Omdurman. When I called, I couldn’t get through.
I understood immediately that something momentous and horrific was happening. For the first time in recent history, the wars that had been taking place at the margins of the country—in South Sudan before its secession in 2011, in Darfur in the west, in the Nuba Mountains on the border between north and South Sudan—had erupted in the center, in the seat of power, the capital. The combatants were two generals—Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, an army general, and Mohamed Hamdan ‘Hemedti’ Dagalo, leader of the RSF—both close allies of the former dictator Omar al-Bashir, whose 30 year reign was ended by the massive civil protests of the 2018-2019 revolution. Bashir was removed from power in 2019, partly with the help of Burhan and Hemedti. But his poisonous legacy remained in the shape of these two generals who, in the aftermath of the revolution, allied to block the transition of power from the armed forces to civilians. Then the generals became rivals, ripping the country apart in a fight for ascendency.
No one in this country of 50 million is unaeffected by this war
What has unfolded in Sudan since that day more than a year ago when I awoke to the news has far exceeded my worst nightmares. The violence is apocalyptic in scale. No one in Sudan—a country of 50 million—is unaffected by this war. The figures are staggering: 25 million on the brink of hunger, 10 million people displaced. Credible estimates now give a death toll of up to 150,000, but the numbers could be even greater. In one massacre in one town in Darfur in June 2023, it’s estimated that the RSF killed up to 15,000 people over the course of just a few days. In addition to the violence, including systematic sexual violence, the major threat is starvation. People are unable to feed themselves because the agricultural infrastructure has been destroyed. Both sides—the militias and the army—have restricted or entirely blocked humanitarian aid from reaching large swathes of the country. In one refugee camp in Darfur, a child dies every two hours from malnutrition. If humanitarian aid doesn’t enter the country immediately, it’s estimated that up to two million people could die by the end of this year alone.
My own family’s life has been forever changed. Within the first two weeks of the war, my father and most of my extended family had to flee the country to Egypt. It was a long, arduous and risky journey. During that time especially, I could hardly sleep, eat, teach, think. I was constantly checking the news. I kept calling my aunt and my father, but rarely got through. When they were on the road to Egypt, I was terrified that they’d be attacked and assaulted by militias or army soldiers, that they would come to terrible harm, as was happening to countless people trying to get out. Family houses in Sudan—including my grandfather’s house, have been looted and squatted by militias. Tens of thousands of houses in Khartoum and surrounding towns have been invaded by the Rapid Support Forces, who burst in with guns and make themselves at home.
The violence, lawlessness, looting and destruction is so widespread that even if the war ends tomorrow, it will take decades to recover from the devastation. I doubt that my father will ever see Sudan again in his lifetime. It’s the second time he’s been displaced: we were first forced to leave Sudan in 1990, after my father was imprisoned by the Bashir dictatorship because of his opposition to the regime. After his release from prison, he remained in exile for over a decade, but eventually decided to return to spend his last years in Sudan. I never imagined that in his old age, he’d again have to escape to safety.
Still, my family has been lucky. They made it to Egypt, along with almost half a million other Sudanese who have sought haven in that country since the war began. But they are now living precariously as unwelcome guests in Cairo, where anti-refugee sentiment is rising, and where Egyptian authorities have been making it increasingly difficult for Sudanese refugees to enter or to remain.
Over this past year, my emotions have swung between fury and despair. Mostly I feel a bottomless anger. I’m infuriated that tens of millions of people are subject to this unnecessary suffering, to this mass killing, to this displacement, to this starvation. I’m furious at these two generals. But I’m also angry at an international community—including the EU—which tacitly legitimized these known war criminals in the transition to democracy. Sudanese civil society warned from the beginning of the post-Bashir transition that neither Hemedti nor Burhan could be trusted or included in ruling. “No negotiation, no partnership, no legitimation” was the motto of civil society groups. But Hemedti and Burhan remained in place largely because the US, Britain, the EU and Middle Eastern powers validated them in the transition to democratic rule, a transition that the generals then proceeded to sabotage and destroy. We are in this mess at least in part because of the geopolitical influence of outside states that interfered to enable the generals, and to derail the will of the Sudanese people.
Between Ukraine and Gaza, Sudan is hardly in the news. The few media depictions of the war paint a picture of yet another bleak African conflict, yet another hopeless story of starving Africans, of in-fighting, of mass death. But it’s important to emphasize that this war is not a civil war. As many Sudanese activists insist, it’s a counter-revolutionary war, instigated by two criminal generals against each other and against a defenseless civilian population. Outside powers like the UAE, Egypt, Iran, Russia, have been instrumental in keeping it going in pursuit of their own interests. The generals—Hemedti and his militias especially, who are largely armed and supported by the UAE—would not be able to keep going without that external support. States like the US, which could put pressure on regional powers like the UAE to stop supporting the militias, have been reluctant to do so, mainly because countries like the UAE are important allies in the region.
With the help of EU funds, refugees are being dumped in the desert to die of thirst
I’m also incensed at Ursula von der Leyen and an EU leadership that is sending billions of Euros to autocratic regimes in North Africa and the Middle East—to Egypt, Tunisia and Libya—to crack down on desperate refugees fleeing war before they reach Europe. With the help of EU funds, refugees are being dumped in the desert to die of thirst and starvation. People are dying in Sudan and dying trying to get out.
The events of the last year have made it crystal clear to me that the lives of people from certain parts of the globe—not only from Sudan, but also from Gaza, Congo and so many other conflict zones of the Global South—are deemed entirely disposable. That the world will look back to Rwanda and say, ‘how could we let it happen?’ and yet stand by as it happens again, and again, and again.
I’m grateful that for now my father is safe. But so many are not. It’s especially the children that get to me. The children dying of starvation, dying in the desert, dying from the guns and bombs. How can it be that we can ignore them so blithely? What kind of a world do we live in that allows for this kind of suffering to go on? Why is it that global institutions and legal frameworks are so useless in the face of these mass atrocities? I keep thinking of the words of the writer James Baldwin: “The children are always ours, all over the globe, every one of them, and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.” It seems we’re incapable of morality. Or humanity.
Here you can read the German version of this article.
