An aid agency issued a"crisis alert" Tuesday over war-torn Sudan, calling out the international community for its failure to address the civil war that has raged there for over a year.
The International Rescue Committee warned that a risk of famine is looming and said the lack of any political solution has left Sudan on the brink of a “catastrophe of historic scale.”
“The world is not watching us, we are heading for famine, massive loss of life, and a failed state,” the IRC’s country director for Sudan, Eatizaz Yousif, told CBS News.
I mean, there’s no clear solution in Sudan.
Both sides have interfered with food shipments. I haven’t been reading up on this particular one, but in conflicts I’ve read about in the past in Africa, I know that seizing food has been a strategy in conflict – everyone needs food, so control of food in a region short of it is power and wealth. Black Hawk Down’s opening scene shows exactly that happening:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wYeNRzZtAA
kagis
Yeah:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/29/sudan-slips-into-famine-as-warring-sides-starve-civilians
So you’ve got limited options.
One possibility is that the factions are gonna decide that this isn’t a great strategy, like, preserving the value of the civilian populace is important enough not to dick with food. But I assume that they aren’t unaware, and they’ve decided to go ahead with this. Sounds like the conflict’s got an ethnic aspect too, and if factions would rather kill off the other ethnic group rather than just making them submit, you’re probably gonna have a hard time convincing them not to do this.
This isn’t gonna be a peacekeeping mission. Those don’t deal with situations where one is in active opposition to one of the factions, but where both sides want there to not be conflict and just need a neutral party to act as enforcer of a peace agreement or something.
I don’t think that you’re going to have countries willing to enter into the civil war, force both sides to stop disrupting food.
I guess some people could flee the country, but it looks like only a small portion have so far – I’d guess that neighboring counties aren’t too happy about taking them. Looks like Egypt has the most, and it’s less than 1% of the country’s population, with Chad also being close. Sudan is super-poor; WP has them at 185 out of 194 GDP per capita, poorer than North Korea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugees_of_Sudan
Or one side could win and the war end, but as far as I know, that’s not expected to be imminent, and you can’t just wait years for food.
kagis
https://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/the-world-today/2024-02/sudan-collapsing-heres-how-stop-it
That article was from a couple months ago.