Far from Ukraine and Gaza, another terrible war, less familiar to many Westerners, is raging in Sudan, an East African country more than three times the size of France with a strategic location on the Red Sea, a major world trade route. The opening of ceasefire talks in Geneva on Wednesday, August 14, puts the spotlight back on the civil war that has pitted the army, led by General Abdel Fattah Burhan, against the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of his former deputy, General Mohammed Hamdan Daglo, nicknamed "Hemedti," who rose from the Janjaweed militias that took part in the Darfur genocide in the 2000s, since April 2023. In 2021, the two generals jointly overthrew the transitional democratic government in a coup d'état, wiping out the gains of the popular uprising that toppled the Islamist dictatorship of Omar Al-Bashir in 2019.
The outcome of the Geneva talks, held under the aegis of the United States, is uncertain, as Burhan's army refuses to take part. The aim of the talks is to find the conditions for a truce in a conflict that, according to an American estimate, has already claimed 150,000 lives, forced 11 million people from their homes and forced 2.3 million others to flee to neighboring countries. With the belligerents blocking access to food aid, 25 million people in Sudan – more than half the population – are suffering from severe hunger.
Famine has even spread to the Zamzam displacement camp in North Darfur. Hundreds of women and girls have been raped by combatants, reported UNICEF, and the children born of this violence have been abandoned. War, hunger and atrocities have been compounded by torrential rains to create, according to the UN, "one of the worst humanitarian crises in recent memory."
If this conflict with cataclysmic consequences continues, it's because the protagonists are aided by third-party countries. While Egypt and Saudi Arabia support the official army, the RSF receives backing from the United Arab Emirates and Russia. This proxy war is dragging in its wake numerous armed groups and, willingly or unwillingly, tens of thousands of civilians. It has metastasized into multiple local conflicts, rekindling age-old ethnic tensions between Arab and black populations, in a climate where weapons proliferate and circulate better than staple foods.
As an Amnesty International report has shown, weapons manufactured in China, Russia, Serbia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen are being delivered to Sudan, particularly in Darfur, despite the UN embargo that has applied to this western region of the country since 2004. But the conflict in Sudan has no military outcome, as neither of the two warlords can rule the country alone, having lost all legitimacy in the eyes of civilians caught in the crossfire.
The essential ceasefire requires an end to third-party interference and must lead to political negotiations that include representatives of the Sudanese civil society that brought down the dictatorship in 2019. Only strong international pressure can bring about such a change. Exercising it effectively requires bringing the atrocious war in Sudan out of the deadly silence that surrounds it.