Sudan suffers from a neglect that seems to reflect the new shape of global politics

People who fled the Zamzam camp for the internally displaced after it fell under RSF control, rest in a makeshift encampment in an open field near the town of Tawila in war-torn Sudan's western Darfur region on April 13, 2025. Photo / AFP

The superlatives in Sudan remain bleak.

The country is home to the world’s worst hunger crisis, a man-made calamity brought on by more than two years of disastrous civil war and state collapse that has led to more than 150,000 deaths.

It is home to the world’s biggest displacement crisis, with more than 12 million people driven from their houses and neighbourhoods.

And it’s home to the world’s largest education crisis for children, with as many as 17 million children out of school.

The United Nations projects that about 3.2 million children aged under-5 will suffer acute malnutrition in the next year.

A year ago, famine was declared in parts of the country, but that warning from the UN system did little to stem the hunger or focus international efforts on ending the conflict.

At least 63 people, mostly women and children, starved to death in the past week in the besieged city of El Fasher, the last major urban centre in the sprawling Darfur region to not fall to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.

Local officials told reporters that number accounted only for those who made it to medical facilities in an area beset by battles and bombings. Aid has not entered the city for a year.

“Everyone in El Fasher is facing a daily struggle to survive,” Eric Perdison, the World Food Programme’s regional director for Eastern and Southern Africa, said in a statement last week.

“People’s coping mechanisms have been completely exhausted by over two years of war. Without immediate and sustained access, lives will be lost.”

The RSF has renewed its offensive on the city after losing its foothold in Khartoum, the country’s capital, to the rival Sudanese Army.

Its advances have driven tens of thousands from the nearby Zamzam displacement camp - itself the target of attacks and massacres of civilians.

Such atrocities have played out across Sudan’s vast expanse, but most intensely in Darfur, where prosecutors from the International Criminal Court say there’s plenty of evidence of war crimes.

The region, which suffered a genocidal campaign by the RSF’s precursor militia a generation ago, is largely in the group’s control now.

The territory held by the RSF has been indiscriminately bombed by the Sudanese military, while the RSF is accused of carrying out systematic rape and ethnic cleansing of non-ethnic Arabs.

“People are being deprived of water and food. Rape and sexual violence are being weaponised. Abductions for ransom and to bolster the ranks of armed groups have become common practice,” ICC deputy prosecutor Nazhat Shameem Khan told the UN Security Council last month.

“We have reasonable grounds to believe that war crimes and crimes against humanity have been and continue to be committed in Darfur.”

All the while, there’s little hope of the war ending.

Even as United States President Donald Trump casts himself as a global peacemaker, playing third-party presider over a series of truces and deals between various countries, the war in Sudan has barely received a mention from the White House.

In one of its departing acts, the Biden Administration declared that the RSF was committing genocide in its rampages in Darfur.

It also imposed sanctions on both the country’s rival leaders, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, leader of the RSF, and General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of the Sudanese military.

Those largely symbolic acts did little to change the situation on the ground, as the war carried on.

However, Trump’s decision to gut USAid, a crucial element of the international humanitarian system, led to vital clinics in Sudan closing and the drying up of lifesaving assistance to some communities.

The White House’s cost-cutting in Washington may be measured in deaths in Sudan.

A young boy stands next to his bicycle as Palestinians check the devastation following an Israeli strike that hit Gaza City's southern al-Zeitoun neighbourhood. Photo / Bashar Taleb, AFP

A thicket of geopolitical interests shape the conflict, with outside powers ranging from Egypt and Turkey to Russia and the Gulf monarchies all involved in some way.

Last week, Sudan’s military claimed it shot down an Emirati plane carrying dozens of Colombian mercenaries aligned with the RSF.

As they have done repeatedly amid mounting allegations over its links to the RSF, United Arab Emirates officials rejected the charge as “deliberate propaganda”.

The intractable nature of the war and the ubiquity of suffering is an indictment of a faltering international system.

“The end of the liberal world order is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot in conference rooms and university lecture halls in places like Washington and Brussels,” Anne Applebaum wrote in the Atlantic’s latest cover story, reporting from a ramshackle camp for the displaced outside Khartoum.

“But in al-Ahamdda, this theoretical idea has become reality. The liberal world order has already ended in Sudan, and there isn’t anything to replace it.”

Reprising arguments trotted out by Israeli officials, French public intellectual Bernard Henri-Levy journeyed to Sudan to lecture Western leftists.

“Here, the death toll is at least three times that of Gaza,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal this month.

“Yet no one on American campuses, or among the Greta Thunbergs and other ‘progressive’ extreme leftists, cares. There are no protests. Radio silence.”

To be sure, Western powers do not directly sponsor either of Sudan’s warring parties, nor do they shield it from international censure at the UN - as the US does in the case of Israel.

But Sudan suffers from a neglect and indifference that seems to reflect the new shape of global politics.

Applebaum laid the crisis at the feet of US decline.

“We live in a very interesting, many people call it, new world order,” Abdalla Hamdok, a former Sudanese prime minister, told her.

“The world we got to know - the consensus, the Pax Americana, the post-Second World War consensus - is just no more.”

Bruno Macaes, a former Portuguese government minister and an outspoken commentator on global affairs, suggested the opposite.

The war in Sudan, he argued on X, reflects a global order that Trump may happily embrace.

That includes the “complete collusion between foreign policy and the military industrial complex”, a disregard of the entreaties of humanitarian organisations and rights groups, and tolerance of human rights-abusing regimes that claim to be fighting Islamists.

In other words, he wrote, it “shows what the American order looks like in all its main traits”.