‘The Suffering Of The People In Sudan Is A Blight On All Human Beings’

Sudanese refugees who fled from the war in Sudan get off a truck loaded with families arriving at a Transit Centre in Renk, on February 13, 2024. The scale of Sudan’s suffering is staggering; it is currently the world’s greatest humanitarian disaster, but few people know about it and even fewer appear to care, says the writer. Picture: LUIS TATO / AFP

Dr. Mamphela Ramphele

UNLIKE the Holy Land and Ukraine, which hold special status as key pieces in the international geopolitical puzzle – and where people with relatively pale skins live – the double-edged catastrophe of civil war and famine that has Sudan in its grip holds little interest to the power brokers of the global north.

The scale of Sudan’s suffering is staggering; it is currently the world’s greatest humanitarian disaster, but few people know about it and even fewer appear to care.

• According to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine's Sudan Research Group, more than 61 000 people have died in Khartoum State, alone, since the war began in April 2023. About 26 000 of those deaths was directly attributed to violence, with preventable disease and starvation the leading causes of death across the country.

• According to the World Food Programme, more than 25 million people are facing acute hunger, with famine – already confirmed in long-suffering Darfur – threatening another 13 regions. More than eight million people have been displaced since the conflict began approximately 18 months ago, nearly three million of them fleeing to the neighbouring countries of Chad and the Central African Republic.

• According to the United Nations’ Sudan Fact-Finding Mission, Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces, who are fighting the Sudanese Armed Forces, “are responsible for committing sexual violence on a large scale in areas under their control, including gang-rapes and abducting and detaining victims in conditions that amount to sexual slavery”. The Mission also documented sexual violence involving the Sudanese Armed Forces and allied groups.

• The UN Refugee Agency has reported a wave of cholera in Sudan, with up to 60% of the population unable to access health services. The World Health Organisation estimates that 3.4 million children under the age of five are at high risk of epidemic diseases, including measles, malaria, pneumonia, diarrhoeal diseases and cholera.

In common with the wars in Ukraine and Palestine, the only immediate beneficiaries of the tragedies are the suppliers of arms. Amnesty International recently reported that French military hardware was being used in the conflict, mounted on vehicles in Darfur supplied by the United Arab Emirates – in violation of a UN arms embargo.

In 2006, in an opinion piece published in the UK, the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu compared the world’s response to violence in the Holy Land to its response to violence in Sudan. “We Africans conclude that double standards apply to our continent,” he wrote.

The following year, the Archbishop joined protestors around the world, with celebrity film stars, Matt Damon and Cate Blanchett, calling for a ceasefire in Darfur, the deployment of a UN force and an end to the system murder and rape of women in Darfur.

Seventeen years later, there’s little to add, besides that December holds special significance for billions of people around the world who subscribe to the Abrahamic faiths, including most Sudanese, Palestinian and Ukrainian people.

Our plea to the world is to respond to these crises on the basis that all people – including Christians, Muslims, Jews, and every other person on earth – are equal members of one human family, with equal rights to compassion and justice.

The suffering of the people in Sudan is a blight on all human beings.

* Dr. Mamphela Ramphele is the Chairperson of the Archbishop Tutu IP Trust.

** The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of The African.