In Oxford last Friday, members of Oxford Student Action for Palestine occupied the Radcliffe Camera. The photos and videos of masked students repelling down the sides of the historic library exemplify the deeply-held sense of grievance surrounding the war in Gaza at our university.
This grievance is well-justified. There are cities bombed to rubble, millions displaced, and tens of thousands dead. However, the same is also true of Sudan. And while we protest, we share clips on Instagram, and we donate to online fundraisers on an enormous scale in support of Gazans– do we do the same for the Sudanese people? To make matters worse, there is no ceasefire on the horizon between Sudan’s warring factions, the SAF and the RSF.
Why is there a civil war in Sudan?
A country of more than 50 million people, Sudan is facing its second genocide in two decades. The ongoing civil war that began in April 2023 is another catastrophe for a country that was already on the brink. An estimated 25 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance, and late last year the UN officially declared a state of famine [2].
Nor does the United Kingdom lack culpability. Sudan’s current tragedy stems in part from Britain’s colonial legacy. Following a Sudanese uprising against Egyptian control, the UK helped Egypt to defeat the rebellion. In 1899, the UK established the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, a joint protectorate over Sudan. In practice, the British ruled Sudan like any other colonial possession [3]. They established a puppet government, exploited Sudan’s natural resources, and pitted the country’s ethnic groups against each other, planting the seeds of the current fraught political situation [4].
Sudan is composed of as many as 597 ethnic subgroups, and over 100 languages are spoken in the country. The central tension historically has been between generally nomadic Arab Muslim ethnic groups and the non-Arab ethnic groups such as the Fur, Zaghawa and Masalit. Non-Arab ethnic groups are more concentrated in the south and the west of the country [5]. After Sudan gained independence in 1956, it faced two civil wars between the two groups. The south and Darfur (southwestern) regions felt marginalised by the government in Khartoum. Tensions ultimately culminated in the Darfur genocide, in which the Khartoum-backed Janjaweed militia group (a predecessor of the RSF) carried out mass killings and rapes of the non-Arab population of Darfur from 2003 to 2008, leaving an estimated 300,000 people dead [6].
The south of the country seceded in 2011, forming the Republic of South Sudan. But the ethnically divided Darfur region remained in Sudan. When the dictator of Sudan, Omar al Bashir (who now is to be tried before the ICC), was deposed in 2019, a power-sharing government was implemented, with hopes that the system would peacefully bring together the diverse ethnic groups [1].
However, the transitional power-sharing government was toppled after only two years by a military coup [7]. Now, however, divisions within the military are fuelling the present conflict. The Sudanese Armed Forces (the country’s regular army) are fighting the Rapid Support Forces (successor of Janjaweed paramilitary group). The civil war is further complicated by the involvement of the United Arab Emirates and the Russian mercenary organisation, Wagner Group, on the side of the RSF [8] [9].
Human Rights Abuses
A report on the crisis in September of last year by the UN found evidence that the RSF was responsible for crimes against humanity, including “murder, torture, enslavement, rape, sexual slavery” [10]. Death tolls are difficult to estimate in the current turbulent state, but there is substantial evidence to conclude that in one city alone, the RSF carried out an ethnic cleansing campaign resulting in the deaths of 15,000 members of the Masalit ethnic group [11].
With over 11.5 million people displaced, it is impossible to comprehend the scale of the human suffering in what the Economist deemed “the world’s worst humanitarian conflict” [12]. As the already-fragile health infrastructure crumbles, the situation is growing increasingly dire. According to estimates by Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), 80% of hospitals in the war-torn areas are no longer functional [13]. The MSF itself recently suspended activity in parts of Sudan, citing a “number of violent attacks against MSF” as one of their reasons for the withdrawal while acknowledging that there is a “crisis of human suffering”. [14]
What Needs to Happen
On January 7 of this year, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken slapped sanctions on Hemedti, the leader of the RSF, and formally recognised that “members of the RSF and allied militias have committed genocide in Sudan” [15]. Formal recognition is a good start. Still, however, more sanctions are needed to cripple the UAE backers of the RSF, who are fuelling the conflict to protect their oil interests in the country.
The Trump Administration’s erratic approach to foreign policy means that there is unlikely to be any American-brokered peace negotiations in the near future. The UK and the EU should step up to this role. The scale of the suffering demands that there is no delay.
To Oxford’s student activists, my plea is this: As students, we need to play a more active role in advocating for less well-reported abuses of human rights. It is a sad truth that there are many loci of human suffering around the globe today. They are all important. We must not focus on one at the expense of all of the others simply because it is more widely covered on social media. Talking about what’s going on, pressing the government to provide more humanitarian aid, and protesting in favour of increased sanctions may make an impact.
In honour of Martin Luther King Jr. Day earlier this month, I will end with a quote from King’s famous letter from Birmingham Jail. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”
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