Sudan’s calamity and ‘the end of the liberal world order’

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

Excerpt: The superlatives in Sudan remain bleak. The country is home to he 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 neighborhoods. And it’s home to the world’s largest education crisis for children, with as many as 17 million children out of school. The U.N. projects that about 3.2 million children 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 U.N. 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 center 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 Program’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 nonethnic Arabs.