Sudan is the Worst Crisis in the World That Receives The Least Amount of Attention

"It is neglected by the White House and in the State Department."

New arrivals fleeing the conflict in Sudan gather at the Joda border crossing in South Sudan, awaiting onward transportation to the transit site in Renk ©UNHCR/Ala Kheir.

As we enter 2024, the conflict in Sudan is shaping up to be one of the worst crises in the world. Nearly 7 million people have been displaced and hunger is widespread. A hallmark of this civil war is ethnic cleansing that may have crossed the threshold to genocide.

Despite being a calamitous catastrophe, Sudan has not received much media attention, nor sustained high level engagement by policy makers, particularly in the West. "It is neglected by the White House and in the State Department," longtime Sudan analyst Kholood Khair tells me in this week’s Global Dispatches podcast episode. She is the founder and managing director of Confluence Advisory, a “think and do tank” formerly based in Khartoum.

We kick off with her analysis of why conflict broke out in April between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in the first place. We then discuss how this conflict evolved to the point where the genocidal Rapid Support Forces appear to very much have the upper hand — and why international diplomacy has thus far failed to end this civil war.

You can find the full episode of the Global Dispatches podcast for free on your favorite podcast listening app, here. It is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Here’s an excerpt:

Transcript edited for clarity

Mark Leon Goldberg To kick off, I'm interested in your explanation for why armed conflict broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces back in April. Why did this civil war start in the first place?

Kholood Khair One thing we have to remember is that before all of this started, the RSF's General Hemmati and the head of the Sudanese Armed Forces, General Burhan, were very closely allied to each other. They've always had different interests, but they've had a very much mutual interest as well. And at a certain point the mutual interest was superseded by their competing interests and that's why the war started. 

These guys fought together, and they were very instrumental in the genocide against African groups in Darfur in 2003 to 2005. They've had long careers together. They deposed the 30 year dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir together, at the behest of the 2018 revolution. They became part of the civilian-military hybrid government during the transitional period under Dr. Abdullah Hamdok. And then they led a coup against that same hybrid government, effectively consolidating more power than they already had within the hybrid governmental system.

And then competing or diverging interests started to supersede their mutual interests. 

Mark Leon Goldberg After having worked together to depose al-Bashir and then the civilian led transitional government, what was it that sparked their irreconcilable difference that led them to fight each other? 

Kholood Khair They had three mutual interests: trying to avoid any kind of transitional justice requirements as dictated by the new democratizing Sudanese political landscape;  to maintain their troops as much as possible — not to downsize their troops, not to integrate their troops; and then to maintain their moneys, some of them ill-gotten and oftentimes captured from the state coffers. So those were their mutual interests.

But then we started to see that the after the coup that they led together in October of 2021, they had very different ideas about how they wanted to consolidate that coup. For General Burhan of the Sudanese Armed Forces, or SAF, he wanted to bring about the sort of Egypt scenario -- quickie elections in which the military consolidates not just political power, but also economic power. With General Hemmeti, his sense of how he wanted to construct the Sudanese state was very much trying to do away with some of the old guard, and to effectively re-create a Sudanese state that would embrace him and the people that he had seen as marginalized by the Sudanese state since independence. Now, to be fair and to be clear, he says that he wants to bring about civilian democracy in Sudan, or at least some form of democracy in Sudan. But everything that he has done indicates that he doesn't want to do away with the militarized nature of Sudanese politics, but rather he wants to capture it. And so that's where the irreconcilable comes in. Both men want to create a Sudan to their liking. And the two of them can't get that same thing. 

Mark Leon Goldberg So these irreconcilable differences led to outright war on April 15th. How has the conflict evolved since the outbreak of war, which began in Khartoum but spread elsewhere rather quickly? 

Also discussed:

• The role of the UAE in supporting the Rapid Support Forces; and Egypt’s support for the Sudanese Armed Forces

• The implications of the genocidal RSF winning this civil war

• Why international diplomacy has thus far failed in Sudan

• How this conflict may evolve in 2024