The War in Sudan Is Causing Mass Starvation

By Gaasbeek’s calculations, more aggressive food sharing through soup kitchens and other means could cut the total death toll to a still-appalling one million. But that seems unlikely since even the existing efforts by local mutual-aid groups and international organizations to provide food have come under attack from both sides in the war. Six international experts writing for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights have accused SAF and RSF of “using food as a weapon and starving civilians.” They also found that the “deliberate targeting of humanitarian workers and local volunteers has undermined aid operations, putting millions of people at further risk of starvation.”

We recently got in touch with Hadeel Mohamed, an educator with whom we’d spoken last October after she fled Sudan for Egypt. In a July 16 e-mail to us, she wrote that “the war in Sudan, like many wars, has proved to be more an attack on civilians than on any armed forces.” Still in contact with neighbors who stayed behind in Khartoum, she reports that neither army is protecting civilians. In fact, the two at times appear to be tag-teaming to do them in. When, for instance, RSF forces carry out a raid, her contacts tell her, SAF troops are often “removed from the locations hours before the attacks occur.” Worse yet, for those now trying to flee as she did last year, “Some said that, in their attempts to escape Khartoum, they’ve encountered RSF forces waiting to loot them. All their supplies were stolen once again!”

Alex de Waal of the World Peace Foundation told the BBC that the RSF paramilitary is “essentially a looting machine. They rampage through the countryside and towns, stealing everything there is.” They even bombed and looted the last hospital still functioning in Northern Darfur state. No less horribly, the government’s SAF troops are guilty of trying to starve people in areas now occupied and controlled by the RSF and, according to De Waal, neither side is willing to “relinquish what is a cheap and very effective weapon.”

Echoes from a Thousand Miles Away

Is Sudan’s nightmare starting to sound grimly familiar?

• Families displaced multiple times, with war following hot on their heels.
• Food aid falling desperately short of what’s needed.
• Humanitarian aid intercepted by soldiers and other armed men before it can reach intended recipients.
• Soup kitchens attacked.
• Aid workers targeted for death.
• Hospitals bombarded, invaded, and shut down.
• Crop production capacity sabotaged during a hunger emergency.
• Washington doing little or nothing to stop the horror.

Might we be thinking, perhaps, of a small 25-mile strip of territory a thousand miles directly north of Khartoum, just on the other side of Egypt?

Sadly enough, there are many striking parallels between the wars being waged on the civilian populations of Sudan and Gaza. It would nonetheless be wrong to blame world interest in the nightmare in Gaza for drawing attention away from the civil war in Sudan. Neither of those crimes against humanity, in their scale and ghastliness, should be exploited by anyone to minimize the weight and urgency of the other. Worse yet, simply paying more attention to the nightmare in Sudan and sending its people more food aid won’t address the imbalance. The fact is that neither the Sudanese nor the Gazans have received what they most urgently need right now: an end to their respective conflicts.

Efforts by the United States and other countries to push for ceasefires in both places and an end to each of those wars have proven almost cataclysmically inadequate and ineffective. For Sudan, it’s been especially discouraging. Talks last year between the SAF and RSF brokered by Saudi Arabia and the United States failed to even reduce the fighting there and recent attempts to revive those talks all too expectably broke down. In early June, Egypt hosted supporters of both of Sudan’s warring parties in Cairo for negotiations. The only outcome: the creation of a supremely bureaucratic subcommittee to draft a meaningless communique.

Collective Courage

Last October, Hadeel Mohamed wrote that there was then only one modest hope in Sudan. For the millions of Sudanese living through their latest national nightmare, she told us, “You really come back to more community-based aid. With our limited resources, with our limited abilities, we still find people rising up to take care of each other.” And they’re still doing it. It’s just not enough to prevent a disastrous famine, as long as the sectarian fighting continues.

With weak support from the outside world, civilians in Sudan have little choice but to rely on long traditions of social cohesion and mutual aid as they work to survive and somehow bring the war in their country to an end. In that, there’s yet another parallel with the war on Gaza’s civilians: The coordinated service, heroism, and sacrifice personified by Palestinian journalists, taxi drivers, first responders, healthcare professionals, and countless other people is now legendary.

Civilians in many such situations are too often portrayed in the world media as nearly helpless victims. The Sudanese and Palestinian people are showing that image to be fallacious by acting with the kind of collective courage, endurance, and solidarity that’s all too rare in the comfortably situated societies that are leaving them to starve. They’re being cruelly victimized, yet they’re refusing to play the victim.

The wartime food-sharing movement in Sudan that operates soup kitchens is a good example. It’s led by grassroots neighborhood groups called “resistance committees” that started forming more than a decade ago in the wake of the Arab Spring, with the mission of providing social protection and provisioning in their home communities. They have since proliferated throughout Sudan, operating locally and independently but together forming a remarkably well-integrated national network.

The resistance committees took a leading role in grassroots protests against the October 2021 military coup that cut short a national transition to democratic rule then underway in Sudan. Eighteen months later, the current war erupted when the two generals who had led that coup turned on each other, with one leading the armed forces and the other the Rapid Support Forces. Throughout the ensuing war, at great risk to their own safety, resistance committee members have played essential lifesaving roles. While working to fend off hunger in their communities, they have also prioritized the maintenance of human rights, continuation of social services, and defense of direct democracy, while urging fervent opposition to the SAF, the RSF, and more generally the incessant militarization of their country. Some are also mobilizing their communities for self-defense.

Sudan expert Santiago Stocker suggested recently that the resistance committees, “because of their support among youth and local legitimacy in Sudan, are a voice the international community should support and elevate.” The committees are one part of a broader grassroots civilian movement that participated in those ill-fated Cairo talks. That movement, Stocker argues, could sooner or later help break the deadlock in Sudan by pressing other nations to move decisively to help end the war. They could urge, for example, that “the international community…increase punitive measures, including sanctions, against RSF and SAF leadership and key members of the SAF’s governing coalition, including businesses and hardline religious groups.”

While it’s important indeed that Gaza remains a focus of our attention as long as the nightmarish Israeli campaign there continues, it’s no less important that those of us in the Global North focus on the less visible war in Sudan and push our governments to impose punitive measures on that country’s generals and other elites, while pulling out all the stops (and ample cash) to get food to the millions who desperately need it.

Sudan should simply no longer be callously ignored.