Mick Hartley

The Times this morning has the first of a three-part series by Anthony Loyd – Inside Sudan’s forgotten war: 150,000 dead, 11 million displaced:

Torture and sickness are unremarkable ways to die in Sudan, where bullet and shellfire, enforced starvation, looting and rape are all part of the arsenal of war. Thousands of dead — the corpses of the slain, the sick and the hungry — have been buried in the cemeteries across the country since the war began in April 2023. A multitude more have died of malnutrition in the desert unrecorded, their fate unseen.

Yet for all the scale and gravity of the conflict, which threatens the lives of millions and could transform Africa’s third largest country into a failed state, Sudan’s war has remained at the periphery of international attention, relegated to the shadows of conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Among Sudanese medical staff struggling to save lives, anger often accompanies a sense of abandonment.

“I don’t think the international community cares,” said Doctor Jamal Eltayeb Mohamed, the director the Al-Naw hospital in Omdurman, one of the few medical facilities to remain operational in the war-ravaged city, as he stood in a ward of wounded people.

“I think they just don’t know what is happening here. They don’t know about the impact of this war on the poor and the vulnerable, who lose their livelihoods, their jobs, their means of survival. Everything around us is being destroyed.”

Between 60 and 70 per cent of Sudan’s medical facilities have been destroyed in the war, along with most of the country’s main pharmaceutical production plants. The strain on the remaining facilities is intense. Al-Naw hospital currently receives between 500 and 600 patients a day — many patients were being treated as they lay on the floor.

A graph showing who's responsible for the violence makes it clear that it's overwhelmingly down to the Rapid Support Forces [RSF], with 77% of all violent incidents against civilians. Loyd talks about their campaign of ethnic cleansing, but never spells it out. The RSF is primarily composed of the notorious Janjaweed militias which previously fought on behalf of the Sudanese government, killing and raping its way across Darfur. Its actions were deemed crimes against humanity by Human Rights Watch. They are largely Arab, and their targets, the victims of their ethnic cleansing, were and still are black Africans.

As I noted back in May, after a Times report from Jane Flanagan (My dark skin is a death sentence in Darfur), whoever's doing the PR for the Arabs is doing one hell of a job. In Sudan Arab groups slaughter black Africans and have "slave hunts", with women and girls being rounded up…it doesn't make the news apart from the odd largely ignored report on the back pages, and no one cares. In Gaza, though, the Arabs are the biggest victims ever as the Israelis take strong action to counter the Hamas Islamic jihad against Jews, and the world explodes in protest.