Sudan’s civil war has unleashed unspeakable horrors

A turning point has been reached in Sudan’s civil war. On Monday, rebel forces took control of the city of El Fasher, the capital of the state of North Darfur. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of the Sudanese Armed Forces and de facto ruler of Sudan, said he had withdrawn his troops to ‘spare citizens and spare the city from destruction’.

Unfortunately, it appears he has condemned citizens to yet more horrific violence. The retreat of the Sudanese army leaves El Fasher in the hands of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (commonly known as Hemedti). Already, there are reports that the RSF is carrying out more ethnically motivated killings of the city’s African-Sudanese population. By Wednesday evening, it was being reported that more than 2,000 civilians had been killed – mostly women, children and the elderly. The Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab says El Fasher is enduring a ‘systematic and intentional process of ethnic cleansing of… indigenous non-Arab communities through forced displacement and summary execution’.

Such has been the ferocity of the civil war that it is easy to forget how recently the Sudanese army and the RSF were allied. They joined forces to overthrow president Omar al-Bashir in 2019, ruling the country through a joint military council until April 2023, when tensions between them broke out into the merciless hostilities the rest of the world has observed – mainly with silence – ever since.

The violence visited upon the people of Sudan, particularly its non-Arab population, is without parallel in the 21st century. Darfur has been the epicentre of this misery. In the three decades in which Sudan was ruled by al-Bashir, the Sudanese army repeatedly attempted the ethnic cleansing of the state’s non-Arab population. This was done with the help of Arab militias such as the Janjaweed, many of whose fighters now belong to the RSF. The Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups bore the brunt of al-Burhan and Hemedti’s war crimes.

With the fall of El Fasher, the tally of those displaced in Sudan is now approaching 13million. It has been described as the world’s ‘largest humanitarian crisis’ by UNICEF with 25million people – half of Sudan’s population – experiencing malnutrition or famine. As many as 400,000 people have been killed since the start of the civil war.

Massacres of the region’s non-Arab population are sadly nothing new. This violence is rooted in the Arab colonisation of east Africa, beginning with the seventh-century conquests that converted northern Africa to Islam.

The enslavement of the region’s non-Arabs also has a long history. After Arab armies were thwarted in their bid to expand southwards from Egypt by the Christian Nubian kingdom of Makuria, the Baqt treaty of AD 652 allowed Arabs to trade grains and spices in exchange for slaves. The land acquired the Arabic name Bilad as-Sudan, or ‘Land of the Black People’. By the end of the 19th century, Sudan was a critical source of slaves for Egypt and the rest of the Ottoman Empire.

Sudanese independence in 1956 did nothing to change the subjugation of Sudan’s non-Arabic population. A succession of coups ended in 1989 with the ascent of Omar al-Bashir, who continued the Islamisation of Sudan with a vengeance. The south, comprising Christians and followers of east African folk religions, rebelled. South Sudan was established in 2011 after six decades of unimaginable bloodshed and two full-blown civil wars.

The international response to the current Sudanese civil war has been a mixture of complicity, cynicism and indifference. Egypt is backing the Sudanese army under al-Burhan, and actively pushing Sudanese refugees back into the war zone. The United Arab Emirates (UAE), meanwhile, is backing the RSF, which now controls Sudan’s gold mines, allowing the Gulf state to reap the benefits from record gold production.

Western countries cannot escape their share of the blame for Sudan’s bloodshed. Indeed, British military equipment exported to the UAE is being used by the RSF to carry out its brutalities. Russia has been on both sides of the war. It has supplied weapons to the Sudanese army, while the Russian mercenary group, Wagner, has bolstered the RSF. In the meantime, Moscow has gained a strategic foothold in Sudan. Earlier this year, it agreed plans for a naval base on Sudan’s Red Sea coastline.

All this makes it increasingly likely that Sudan will end up divided into territories ruled by the RSF and the Sudanese army. So far, there is no clear winner after more than two years of fighting. The Sudanese army controls Khartoum, which it recaptured from the RSF in March, and controls most of eastern Sudan. The RSF holds most of western Sudan.

The tragedy of Sudan looks set to continue. As does the world’s indifference to the suffering its people have endured. For shame.

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid is a writer based in Pakistan.