Famine in Sudan : Alex de Waal / London Review of Books

Alex de Waal is the Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He is known as one of the foremost foreign scholars on issues of Sudan, Ethiopia, and the Horn of Africa.

Click here for the article in the London Review of Books

Excerpts

" The last time the people of Sudan faced a famine on today’s scale was in 1984. People knew a lot about the hunger that would follow after the rains failed for two years running.

"The famine of 1984-85, which killed about 240,000 people across Sudan, most of them children, eventually became known as ‘Reagan’, after the US dispatch of food relief.

"....the Bedouin chief Hilal Mohamed Abdallah saw that the changing climate signalled an end to the nomadic lifestyle of his people. Formerly the lords of the desert, the Arab camel herders became impoverished squatters on the leftover lands of farming villages.

"Twenty years later the old chief’s son, Musa Hilal, gained international notoriety as the leader of the Janjaweed militia, killing, burning and raping their way across the land. Another twenty years on, the Janjaweed are no longer an auxiliary rabble but a transnational mercenary enterprise known opaquely as the ‘Rapid Support Forces’. Their leader, Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo, known as ‘Hemedti’, defeated Hilal in a battle for Sudan’s most lucrative artisanal gold mine, at Jebel Amir in Darfur in 2017, becoming the region’s most powerful warlord. Were he to win the current war, it’s unlikely that Hemedti would appoint himself president. More likely, as the last in a line of Nile Valley freebooters who became kings or kingmakers, he would set up a puppet government, pocketing the Sudanese state as a wholly-owned subsidiary of his flourishing conglomerate.

"By recognising al-Burhan as the de facto Sudanese head of state, the UN dealt him a crucial card: it now requires his consent to deliver humanitarian aid. The SAF has no forces within three hundred miles of the Sudan-Chad border, but as the acknowledged government of Sudan, it has the legal authority to close the frontier and obstruct humanitarian aid not only by sea but overland into Darfur. The RSF’s arms smugglers take no notice, but the UN’s lawyers advise that aid convoys cannot move.

"Barracks lore among the officer corps is that the Khartoum government blundered in 1989 when it allowed the UN’s Operation Lifeline Sudan to transport aid to rebel-held parts of the south. In their view, that allowed the Sudan People’s Liberation Army to supply itself, while foreign aid workers became champions of the rebel cause. Humanitarian aid was insidious: the nose of the camel entered the tent and in due course its body followed – the independent Republic of South Sudan. For an army struggling to make progress on the battlefield, starvation is a cheap and effective weapon, and the SAF intends to use it to the full.

"Because the UN now recognises al-Burhan’s government in Port Sudan – in effect appointing the accused to the bench – some UN officials want to defer to him by ensuring that a famine is not declared.

"To judge from recent form, the UN will tweak its office procedures in order to avoid using the f-word, or at least procrastinate, explaining that it doesn’t want to endanger its programmes and staff in Sudan.

"Meanwhile they are agreed on a minimum agenda: no ceasefire, no aid across the front line. At some point, mass starvation looks likely to call time on this political parlour game, along with the ambitions of the SAF generals and Hemedti, as the Sudanese discover that the epoch has changed."