For a full year, the bodies have piled up in Sudan – and still the world looks away

Illustration: Matt Kenyon/The Guardian

One year ago today, Sudan descended into war. The toll so far is catastrophic. Thousands are dead, and millions are displaced, with hunger and disease ravaging all in the absence of aid. The UN has called the situation “one of the worst humanitarian disasters in recent history”, afflicting about 25 million people. The Sudanese people are suffering what has become the largest displacement crisis in the world.

The war was both sudden and a long time coming. The short history is that of a country where, following a promising 2019 revolution that overthrew the dictator Omar al-Bashir, the army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a powerful militia, ejected civilians from a power-sharing agreement between the three parties and then could not come to an agreement themselves. Their partnership broke down in April last year, and the RSF moved quickly, taking over the capital city, Khartoum, in an unprecedented moment in the country’s history. It then spread through the rest of the country, looting, assaulting and murdering civilians.

The army – and here is the long history – which established the RSF in the first place from remnants of the infamous Janjaweed troops it partnered with in Darfur to help it savagely suppress rebellion in the region – has so far been unable to prevail against its own creation. The result is a fluid situation, with gains and losses for both parties, no discernible frontline, and millions of Sudanese people caught in the middle.

It’s not so much a civil war as it is a war against civilians, whose homes, livelihoods and very lives have been the collateral damage so far. It is two tragedies overlaid. The first is of a country that until last year, although beset with conflict and dictatorship, had managed to maintain its integrity – and with it a sense that there was a way through its troubles, after which it could achieve its potential.

The war, despite all that led up to it, was not inevitable, was not the foreseeable fate of a country where ethnic differences necessitated conflict. It was the result of an economic model of centralisation where dominant parties in the centre preyed on, and extracted from, the periphery. One of the largest countries in Africa, with a sparkling coast along the Red Sea, fertile land across the Nile River, and the sort of cultural and ethnic diversity that could be harnessed into a powerhouse of Arab and African convergence, Sudan was always held back by an entitled few who wouldn’t share.

Added to the loss of what could have been are all the personal losses spread now throughout the country. The war unfolded and spread so rapidly that a mass dispossession took place, and with it an odyssey of displacement. Everyone I know in the country of my birth is scattered to different degrees, either within Sudan – sheltering, sometimes for the third or fourth time, with friends or relatives as the war reaches them – or outside of it. All, including my family, have left their homes, sometimes grabbing what they could before the RSF stormed in and took over their properties.

Even though it has been a year, there is still a sense of whiplash, of disbelief that it has actually happened, is actually happening. Every development expands the theatre of war and makes a return to peace more remote. Writing these words is a halting, painful process, like stepping on shards of broken glass. Something similar plays out on an almost daily basis, where one tries, and fails, to trace and keep track of all the individual and national tolls.

And more jarring is that the world has gazed with indifference upon this crucible of war. The “forgotten war” is what it’s called now, when it’s referenced in the international media. Little is offered by way of explanation for why it is forgotten, despite the sharpness of the humanitarian situation, the security risk of the war spreading, and the fact that it has drawn in self-interested mischievous players such as the United Arab Emirates, which is supporting the RSF, and therefore extending the duration of the war.

One of the reasons for this is Gaza and the escalating Middle East conflict, and how they have monopolised global attention and diplomatic bandwidth for the past six months. And another is that for those reporting within Sudan and the few who manage to get in, doing so is difficult and fraught with danger, limiting the output of images and details that can be broadcast consistently to galvanise attention. But the rest, I suspect, is down to what to most will seem unremarkable: this is just another African country succumbing to intractable conflict.

This is a different war from the one waged in Darfur, which drew in celebrities, politicians and even the international criminal court in previous years. And it is different from the war between the north and south, which also attracted so much advocacy and political pressure that a peace agreement and secession was secured. It is not, as in the past, a conflict resonantly framed as Muslims against Christians, or Arabs against Africans, stirring sympathy and outrage. It is the challenge of a new configuration of political and economic entrepreneurs who wish to displace the old military cluster of ruling parties – but with no experience and even less interest in actually running parts of the state captured in the meantime.

On a political level Sudan falls, and has always done, low on the list of priorities for power brokers in the west, who have few interests in the country. They either crudely isolated it through sanctions or, after the revolution, naively and hastily tried to marshal the two armed parties to agreement and a de-facto return to a militarised, centralised status quo.

This is the point where I would usually suggest some potential way through it all. But one year on there is nothing but mourning. There is comfort though, as infrastructure has collapsed, in how the Sudanese people have pooled their few resources and opened up their homes to each other, in how volunteers have set up community kitchens, and how resistance committees, local civil disobedience units that were set up before and thrived during the 2019 revolution have been repurposed to provide medical aid, food and shelter. In these acts, there is still a reminder that a country is not a place but a spirit. Not only is that very much alive, but it has proved to be, in even the most extreme circumstances, impossible to extinguish.

Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist