The Hidden War We Don’t Care About

 

The Hidden War We Don’t Care About

Where starvation, sexual violence and mass slaughter rule

It looks like Gaza, maybe even a bit like Haiti or even much of Ukraine, but it rages out of control with little or no notice. Most recently, violence exploded to a new horrific level. You can search for it on social media, newspapers and mainstream media; it is there. But it is a secondary story, buried in the back pages, of an extreme example of polarization. What happens when two warlords (opposing generals) decide to duke it out with absolutely no concern for civilians. The battleground is urban and rural. It is everywhere. Desertification already has made growing crops exceptionally difficult; this internal war has made growing anything but hatred and fear nearly impossible.

The country is the Sudan, and this civil war has been raging for a year and a half… but it recently escalated as this report from the August 17th Reuters describes: “Fighters from Sudan's paramilitary group rampaged through a central village, looting and burning and killing at least 85 people, including women and children, authorities and residents said Saturday, the latest atrocity in the country’s 18-month devastating conflict.

“The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces began attacking [the town of] Galgani in the central province of Sennar late in July and last week [2nd week in August] RSF fighters ‘indiscriminately opened fire on the village’s unarmed residents’ after they resisted attempts to abduct and sexually assault women and girls, Sudan's Foreign Ministry said in a statement. More than 150 villagers were wounded, it said.

“The RSF has been repeatedly accused of massacres, rapes and other gross violations across the country since the war started in April last year, when simmering tensions between the military and the group exploded into open fighting in the capital Khartoum and elsewhere.” It’s an anything-goes struggle that no one with power really cares to end. Atrocities are the new normal from both sides, but the death toll is staggering. Writing for the August 15th The Morning newsfeed from the New York Times, Declan Walsh describes this country in ruins:

“Only five years ago, Sudan was the source of euphoric hopes, when crowds of young people gathered to oust President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the country’s dictator of three decades. For once, it seemed that a popular revolution in an Arab country might succeed… Artists flourished. Politics opened up. Western governments offered to cancel billions of dollars in debt. Al-Bashir went to jail, convicted on corruption charges… Those dreams were dashed after just two years, in 2021, when Sudan’s military and a powerful paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces, unwilling to cede power to civilians, united to overthrow the government in a coup.

“But the alliance was short-lived. The coup leaders — the army chief, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the R.S.F. commander, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan — fell out over how to merge their forces. Then they went to war…. When the first shots rang out on the streets of the capital, Khartoum, in April 2023, many residents figured it wouldn’t last long. Sudan had experienced dozens of coups, more than any country in Africa, since it won independence in 1956. Most were short-lived and bloodless.

“But the military found that the R.S.F., a force it had once helped to create, was now a formidable adversary with fighters more battle-hardened than its own forces. By December, the R.S.F. had seized most of Khartoum and the country’s breadbasket region, Jazeera State, as well as much of Darfur, the western region that suffered a genocide two decades earlier.

“General Hamdan, the R.S.F. leader, claims to be fighting for Sudan’s marginalized and has sought to distance his force from its roots in the Janjaweed militias that terrorized Darfur in the 2000s. But his lofty speeches are at odds with the massacres, rape and ethnic violence that human rights groups say his fighters commit… The Sudanese military is also guilty of war crimes, U.S. officials say, including indiscriminate bombing and the use of starvation as a weapon of war…

“[The] toll in Sudan is heartbreaking: thousands killed, millions scattered and cities besieged or destroyed across a vast nation three times as large as France. Much of the capital lies in rubble. This month [August], international officials declared that part of Sudan was in a famine. At least 100 people die of hunger every day… And there are signs it could soon get much worse… Despite all that, the conflict has received scant attention from world leaders or money for humanitarian aid. But its soaring human cost is making it ever harder to ignore. U.N. experts warn that Sudan is again spiraling into genocidal violence, as it did in the early 2000s. Samantha Power, the head of USAID, says it is ‘the single largest humanitarian crisis on the planet.’

“One faint glimmer of hope lies in tentative peace talks, mediated by the United States, that started in Switzerland yesterday [8/14]… Sudan’s military didn’t even send a team of negotiators. But officials alarmed by the spiraling hunger crisis say there is little choice but to try. Millions of lives could be on the line.”

Those civilians who are strong enough to flee have crossed into neighboring nations, most of which are ill-equipped to handle the tens of thousands of refugees seeking safety, shelter and whatever food they can scrounge. But back in Sudan, raw power is battling raw power for control of this historically violent nation. Life is not held in high regard there; but military force is.

Civil wars are generally driven by anger, bigotry and egotistical “I’m right and only I can fix it” leaders. Those who oppose each of these “choose sides” demanding factions, are simply dehumanized and dismissed as vermin. Death and sexual violence are thus justified. Sudan’s struggle is mostly lost on the West (even as the US attempts to mediate), consumed with the Palestinian/Israel War (and all the battling Iranian surrogates), the Putin attack on Ukraine and the spate of recent and pending left vs rightwing elections all over the world. Who cares if a distant land, seemingly devoid of commercial value to the West and one with one of the worst track records on internal strike on earth, is off killing its own dark-skinned citizens? Is ignoring this slaughter just one more form of racism? Without foreign intervention, can this ignominious slaughter end?

I’m Peter Dekom, and not only are there lessons in this conflict for Americans as well, but are we also being reminded that looking the other way and letting genocide triumph lessens all of us?