After a year of war between the army and RSF militias, nothing works in Sudan anymore. There is the threat of famine and an expansion of fighting.

Fleeing violence and misery: Darfur refugees wait to be registered in Adré, Chad Photo: Imago / David Allignon

SEDAN taz | Piles of charred ashes are lined up one after another, smoke still rising from some of them. “The field is finally destroyed,” the accompanying text says. Video recording from Darfur, which was distributed on Saturday. Nothing was saved from the fire, even water fountains were destroyed.

“There are fires in Sarfaya and neighboring villages,” another source reports on the latest fighting not far from the town of El Fasher. The US government and the UN warned over the weekend of the “devastating” consequences of the fighting for the capital of North Darfur province, “an area already affected by famine,” as they warned on Saturday night. the Secretary General of the UN, António Guterres.

This latest escalation is just one of countless such incidents in Sudan, a year after the outbreak of war. On April 15, 2023, then-Vice President Hamdan Daglo Hametti and his RSF paramilitary militia launched an uprising against the head of state and army Abdelfattah al-Burhan to prevent the integration of his militia into the armed forces and, therefore, the loss of his command. .

Overnight, Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, became a battlefield. Disregarding the civilian population, both sides fired on each other and the entire city with heavy artillery. Hundreds of thousands fled, foreigners were evacuated and the government retreated to the Red Sea port city of Port Sudan.

First Khartoum burned, now the whole country burned

A year later, not only Khartoum but the entire country is burning. Beginning in June 2023, the war initially spread westwards to Darfur, where RSF leader Hametti is based. The army only retained control in El Fasher; the other four provincial capitals fell to the RSF in November. Tens of thousands of people are said to have died in RSF massacres.

Starting in December, the RSF expanded its attacks into southern and eastern Sudan. Wad Madani, a city filled with refugees from Khartoum and capital of Sudan's Gezira breadbasket, fell in mid-December 2023. Meanwhile, Gedaref state, bordering Ethiopia, also became a war zone. In all conflict zones, local militias now act on their own, because none of the main parties to the conflict care about the well-being of the population.

The UN calls Sudan the largest refugee crisis in the world. Before the war began, 2.5 million Sudanese were fleeing within the country and today there are 10.7 million. 3.5 million people have left the Khartoum metropolitan area, more than half the population.

Both the army and the RSF describe the war as a war between the state power and the rebels. The army leadership defines the RSF as terrorists who must be crushed with all severity. The RSF poses as freedom fighters and seeks allies among Sudan's former democratic movement.

In reality, both warring parties are part of the ruthless Sudanese military apparatus, which has been trying to save the generals' sinecures since the 2019 popular uprising and the overthrow of military dictator Omar Hassan al-Bashir. The RSF army and paramilitaries, which emerged from the pro-regime Janjaweed militia responsible for the genocide of non-Arab ethnic groups in Darfur twenty years ago, have access to the banks and the state apparatus, while the rest of the population is bled dry. .

“This is not a civil war, it is a war against citizens,” says women's rights activist Rabab Baldo.

Agriculture is practically inactive

According to Sudanese estimates, Sudan's economy shrank by 50 percent last year and household incomes by 40 percent. State salaries, the most important regular source of income for the population, are only paid late, in part or not at all. Two-thirds of all businesses have closed. The agriculture on which the majority of the population in Sudan lives is practically fallow, and this threatens widespread famine.

Already in 2023, the grain harvest fell by 46 percent compared to the previous year due to the war, and in the especially disputed regions of Kordofan and Darfur by up to 80 percent. Fighting in the Gezira granary in Sudan since December took place in the midst of new sowing. According to the state agricultural bank, Sudan's cultivated area this year is now 60 percent smaller than usual. What this means for the 2024 harvest is obvious.

“In addition to the army's indiscriminate airstrikes, which destroyed much of the food processing plants in Khartoum, according to reports from Gezira farmers, irrigation systems were destroyed, warehouses full of seeds and tools were looted, and farmers “They were attacked during the harvest,” reports Sudan expert Anette Hoffmann, from the Dutch Clingendael Institute, who first raised the alarm in early February with the warning of widespread famine in Sudan. Today the United Nations also warns it and Sudanese observers affirm that famine has existed for a long time.

Food available today is much more expensive than before, with price increases of up to 118 percent compared to pre-war times. The fuel that the army and the RSF need for themselves can only be obtained on the black market at four times the normal price; This makes trade and imports unaffordable.

Not only agriculture, but also the health system has collapsed: food and medical supplies are the preferred loot, especially for the RSF, which is no longer supplied by the State and now lives off the population it controls. The poorer this population becomes, the more previously peaceful areas it will have to attack to continue. More than 70 percent of all health facilities in Sudan have been destroyed.

the worst is yet to come

The result is reflected by the poor statistics of UN aid agencies. Sudan has around 41 million inhabitants, half of whom are children. 24.7 million people, including 14 million children, depend on humanitarian aid because they can no longer support themselves. So far this year, only 2.3 million have been reached.

According to the International Hunger Early Warning System (IPC), at the end of 2023, 17.7 million people were already living in phase 3 of the five-stage CPI scale, that is, “acute hunger”. They were already ten million more than the previous year.

And the worst is yet to come. Starting in May, when the rainy season begins, when the next crop is supposed to grow, experts fear mass extinctions. Three-quarters of the total population will have less than half of their daily needs, and one-third are likely to fall into PCI phase 5, i.e. “famine,” according to Clingendael. This corresponds to the fears about Gaza, but twenty times greater.

At the end of March, the humanitarian organization Save the Children warned, based on UN data, that 222,000 children and 7,000 mothers of young children would die of hunger in Sudan in the coming months. “The crisis has not yet reached its peak,” analyzes Do

Minic MacSorley of the humanitarian organization Concern describes the situation in the Darfur refugee camps: “Families only eat once a day. “Women eat less and are last.”

And Fatima Ahmed of the women's rights organization “Zenab Women for Development” says: “There is nothing for pregnant women, the elderly and the disabled. “They just sit on the floor and wait.”