750,000 people could die of starvation in Sudan in the next few months, according to a New York Times headline. And that’s a lowball estimate: a report from Clingendael warns of “an estimated excess mortality of about 2.5 million people by the end of September 2024.”
Starvation may be the least violent way to die in Sudan. The genocidal war that tore the country apart in the early 2000s has resumed. The Sudanese military and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) combined to put down pro-democracy demonstrations in 2019. Their power-sharing agreement fell apart in 2023, leaving the country again at war.
The RSF is a successor to the Janjaweed militia. The Janjaweed, in close collaboration with the Sudanese government and military, were responsible for widespread ethnic cleansing—genocide—in the 2000s:
“The government and its Janjaweed allies have killed thousands of Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa– often in cold blood, raped women, and destroyed villages, food stocks and other supplies essential to the civilian population. They have driven more than one million civilians, mostly farmers, into camps and settlements in Darfur where they live on the very edge of survival, hostage to Janjaweed abuses.More than 110,000 others have fled to neighbouring Chad but the vast majority of war victims remain trapped in Darfur.”
Now the RSF attacks the same targets: the Masalit people and other non-Arab Sudanese, especially in the Darfur province. A May 2024 Human Rights Watch report details the devastation of the past year, including massacres by the RSF, war crimes, rape and murder of children and other civilians, attacks on refugee convoys, razing towns in Darfur, and the flight of more than half a million refugees to neighboring Chad.
The war extends beyond Darfur, including Sudan’s capital, Khartoum.
Dena Ibrahim, a Sudanese refugee now living in London, writes eloquently of the story of her country and family:
“I fled my home in Sudan one year ago. Millions of people are still there, trapped between an incompetent army and the genocidal militia it created. For them, it has been a year of summary executions, encroaching famine and city after city ravaged by the militia.
“The R.S.F. encircled El Fasher in North Darfur a little over a month ago. The city, already threatened by famine, waits on the edge of a likely massacre. And yet the international community still stands by. Attention is rarely paid to Sudan, and much of what I read reduces the conflict to a power struggle between two generals or a migration problem for Europe.”
Mary Turck
News Day 