Has the U.S. Given Up on Sudan?
Nicolas Niarchos
Source: newyorker.com
Last week, drones darkened the sky over Sudan, destroying power stations near the capital. In recent days, the Rapid Support Forces, a powerful militia that is vying for control over the broken country, has used Chinese-made suicide drones to bomb Port Sudan, the main entry point for aid into the country. Such drones, and other sophisticated weaponry, have been provided to the R.S.F. by the United Arab Emirates, an ally of the United States. Abu Dhabi, the U.A.E.’s capital, was one of President Trump’s stops during a trip to the Middle East last week, where he reportedly inked two hundred billion dollars’ worth of deals, including for commercial aircraft and an artificial-intelligence data center.
Estimates place the death toll of the war in Sudan at up to a hundred and fifty thousand, but that figure could be low, because resources to count the dead are scarce. According to the U.N. World Food Program, 24.6 million people are suffering from acute hunger in the region, and famine has been declared in ten areas. Rape, torture, and abuse by the R.S.F. and the government’s Army are common. There seem to be few good actors in the conflict; in January, the United States declared that the R.S.F. was committing genocide against civilian populations. Meanwhile, its chief rival, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the top general in the Sudanese Armed Forces, was placed under U.S. sanctions.
Late last year, I visited a camp of displaced Sudanese people in the country’s Nuba Mountains; they had horrific tales, many of which included rape and summary execution of civilians. What’s more, they were hungry: they hadn’t had access to food in months, and they were living off grass and the bitter leaves of Egyptian balsam trees. The Nuba people are non-Arab Black Sudanese, and they have borne the brunt of racism from Arab supremacists, especially those in the R.S.F. In this week’s issue, I tell the story of Wanis and Intisar, two Nuba residents of a Khartoum suburb whose desperate attempts to flee their home and whose privations at the displacement camp illustrate the experiences of millions of Sudanese whose lives have been upended in the civil war.
As I spoke to relief workers, it became clear to me that far too little aid was being delivered to the region. As of this week, only thirteen per cent of the U.N.’s Sudan Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan had been funded for this year. Under President Donald Trump, aid is being reviewed, and the U.S. Agency for International Development has been gutted. The U.S. is Sudan’s largest donor by far, and though there is a carve-out for lifesaving aid, many smaller organizations, such as soup kitchens, have been hit hard by the aid cuts.
In Washington the other day, I spoke to officials who were deeply frustrated by the crisis in Sudan. Even when lifesaving aid gets to the country, they told me, the Sudanese Armed Forces prohibit it from being transported to civilians in areas outside of their control. “The famine figures are terrible right now—we should be giving them a harder time,” one senior official told me. Sudan was being forgotten in Washington, partly as a result of the renewed focus on Realpolitik from Trump and his America First Cabinet. “It’s a fight to the death. I just don’t think there is a political solution,” the official told me. “Frankly, I couldn’t tell you what the U.S. ‘interest’ is in Sudan.”
