Sudan marked three years since a bloody civil war began between its national army and the powerful Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group. The RSF revolted against the Sudanese Armed Forces after a 2021 military coup left it with diminished political power. The coup itself upended the civilian-led democratic revolution that ousted Sudan’s longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019. Both the RSF and SAF have been accused of major war crimes since the conflict began, reportedly carrying out ethnic cleansing, systemic sexual violence and starvation tactics on the country’s civilian population.

“This war is not just fought on the bodies of civilians by happenstance. It’s not incidental to the fighting. It is precisely the point. This war is a war of succession between the SAF and the RSF, who want to inherit the military security state,” says Sudanese political analyst Kholood Khair, “and they’re doing so in large part not just by fighting each other, but also by diminishing as much as possible the revolutionary fervor and the calls for civilian democratic rule in Sudan.” Khair adds that the burgeoning U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, separated from Sudan by the Arabian Peninsula and Red Sea, threatens to deepen the humanitarian crisis in Sudan, as supply chain disruptions make agricultural production even harder and opportunities for resource exploitation incentivize other countries to turn the conflict into even more of a “proxy war.”

Transcript

NERMEEN SHAIKH: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Nermeen Shaikh, with Amy Goodman.

The ongoing civil war in Sudan enters its fourth year today, creating what the United Nations calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. The country has been engulfed in civil war since April 2023, when fighting erupted between the Sudanese Armed Forces, SAF, and the paramilitary Raspid Support Forces, or RSF. The war quickly drew in local militias, as well as foreign powers. The United Arab Emirates, in particular, has been accused of aiding the RSF. The U.S. government and a U.N. fact-finding mission have accused RSF and allied fighters of committing genocide.

AMY GOODMAN: The death toll from three years of war remains unclear. The National Health Ministry says 11,000 civilians have been killed, but some estimates are as high as 400,000. Nearly 34 million people in the country need humanitarian assistance, according to the United Nations. A new report from the Norwegian Refugee Council says in the two areas hit hardest by the conflict, North Darfur and South Kordofan, millions of people get only one meal a day, if any.

On Thursday, international leaders meeting in Berlin pledged one-and-a-half billion dollars for humanitarian aid in Sudan. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said, quote, “This nightmare must end,” and called for an immediate end to hostilities. The French foreign minister spoke at the meeting.

JEAN-NOËL BARROT: [translated] Today, I want to speak to the people of Sudan. To the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, I say this once again: There is an alternative to war. You must publicly commit to the path of negotiation and peace, starting by agreeing to the ceasefire proposed by the Quad. Together with its partners, France stands ready to contribute to a monitoring and verification mechanism to ensure its implementation.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot.

The international Sudan conference in Berlin was supposed to help revive faltering negotiations to end the fighting, but the two sides fighting the war were excluded. The Sudanese foreign minister criticized Western leaders for not coordinating with Khartoum, describing the conference as a, quote, “colonial tutelage approach.”

For more on Sudan, we’re joined now by Kholood Khair, a Sudanese political analyst and head of Confluence Advisory, a think tank founded in Khartoum. She joins us today from Nairobi.

Welcome back to the show, Kholood. If you could just share your reflections on these three years of war in Sudan and also your response to this Berlin conference that’s ongoing?

KHOLOOD KHAIR: So, you know, the war in Sudan has really plunged the country — and more importantly, its civilians — into just the depths of hell. We have seen that it’s not just the world’s — become the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, as the U.N. points out, but also the world’s largest hunger crisis, the world’s largest displacement crisis and the world’s largest sexual violence crisis.

But this war is, you know, not just fought on the bodies of civilians by happenstance. It’s not incidental to the fighting. It is precisely the point. This war is a war of succession between the SAF and the RSF, who want to inherit the military security state of former dictator Omar al-Bashir, and they’re doing so in large part not just by fighting each other, but also by diminishing as much as possible the revolutionary fervor and the calls for civilian democratic rule in Sudan. They’re doing this by, effectively, fighting a war against civilians, ensuring that, as a U.N. report today said, that 71% of the country is below the poverty line, that you have Sudan — Sudan’s production capacity dwindling by 90% in just three years. And things seem set to get worse, particularly as the agricultural season, which many will rely on to stave off the food insecurity and famine, is likely to fail as a result of growing fuel and fertilizer prices, owing to the war in the Gulf.

When it comes to the Berlin conference, you know, it very much set out to really focus attention on what is happening to civilians. So, there was a component about the humanitarian impact of this war. Alongside pledging, a pledging conference for humanitarian aid, which, as you said, raised $1.5 billion, there was a ministerial conference also to recommit from the international community some level of, you know, commitment towards a ceasefire.

And most importantly for me, there was an element of it that was about getting different civilians from different walks of life, from different political backgrounds together. And this is really the thing that both the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces object to. They don’t just object to not being invited. They object to the fact that civilians are being centered rather than they themselves, when they themselves have had multiple platforms in which they can get global attention. What they’re really afraid of here is that Sudanese civilians will come together precisely as a result of this war and create a lot of international pressure for the war to end. And so, what they have been doing on the ground in real time is militarizing society in Sudan, militarizing the economy, and basically ensuring that a lot of people who want access to resources, who want access to services and who want access to livelihoods and money, pick up a gun to do so, that what they’re hoping to do is by militarizing the context in Sudan, that any calls for civilian democratic rule are pushed to the wayside.

AMY GOODMAN: Kholood Khair, the United Nations World Food Programme reports that close to 25 million people are suffering from acute hunger, 2 million face famine or risk of famine. How has the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and the disruption of the Strait of Hormuz exacerbated food insecurity in the Gulf? And also talk about the role of the UAE, the United Arab Emirates, in supporting the RSF, the Rapid Support Forces, the Rapid Sudan Forces.

KHOLOOD KHAIR: So, what we have right now is that it’s April. Next month, in May, is generally the planting season. Then you have the rainy season from late June to late September. Thereafter, you have the harvest. And so, what is needed right now, in April, is fuel for any kind of mechanical equipment required for farming, as well as agricultural inputs like fertilizer, seeds and others. Right now because of the issues around the Strait of Hormuz, but also the hit to natural gas production, which produces a lot of the byproducts, including fertilizer, what you have is, in Sudan, an inability to get access to those agricultural inputs.

Just in the past few weeks, as the impact of the fuel shortages has hit, we have seen vast queues in Sudan for petrol, as well as for diesel and other fuels. What we also have in Sudan is that the exchange rate for the U.S. dollar is — on the black market, is pegged to the price of oil. And so, as the price of oil skyrockets, so, too, does the value of the dollar against the pound. This means that inflation is going through the roof. And so, whatever food is already available has become out of reach for very many people.

And because we don’t see any end in sight for the tensions around the Strait of Hormuz, and, actually, conversely, we see perhaps a spreading of the tensions to the Red Sea, which Sudan is a literal state of, there could also be serious issues around Sudan getting access to whatever fuel is available through the Red Sea into Port Sudan. What this means is that Sudan is effectively being choked by two different straits, and at this very critical point in the agricultural season.

We also have a political fallout from the war in the Middle East. What we saw recently was that the United States government has designated the Muslim Brotherhood of Sudan as a foreign terror organization. And this FTO designation makes it — makes a very clear link in its wording to the relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood to Iran and the IRGC in Iran. Now, the timing of this suggests that it falls very much into the broader scope of conflict that is taking place in the Gulf and that Sudan may now be sucked much more into the conflict that’s going on in the Gulf, that is not just merely between Iran, on the one side, and the UAE and Israel, on the other side, but also that what we have here is that, you know, the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces are effectively being placed into these two camps. So, the Sudanese Armed Forces is being placed into the camp of Iran, while the Rapid Support Forces is being placed, of course, into the camp of Israel via the UAE. And what this means is that this war in Sudan, which is very much a domestic national issue around, as I said, a war of succession for the security and military state, is around the resources in Sudan, could increasingly become much more a proxy war. This means that any resolution to the war can also be taken out of Sudanese hands. And this means that Sudan is going to be plunged further into a conflict that has so far, we see, no sort of signs of abating.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Kholood, before we conclude, could you just say something also about the region, Sudan’s neighbors? You’ve said that there’s not a single one of Sudan’s neighbors that are not in some way involved or invested in the war.

KHOLOOD KHAIR: Sudan has seven neighbors, all of which it shares very porous borders with. And what we have seen is that the western neighbors of Sudan, whether that’s Libya, Chad, the Central African Republic, all three have been implicated in reporting of supply lines coming through those countries into Darfur for the RSF, originating from the UAE, according to reporting out there. What we’ve also seen is that recently Reuters reporting on Ethiopia having some of its bases being used by the RSF, as well as parts of South Sudan being used as a staging ground for some of the RSF attacks in the southeasterly region of Blue Nile. At the same time, we have Eritrea to the east of Sudan, which has been reportedly training militias close to an ally to the Sudanese Armed Forces, and Egypt similarly also hosting some military assets close to the Sudanese border, and at the same time bombing some of these weapons supply lines in southeastern Libya. There are also some reports that the Egyptians have used American-made F-16s also in some of the campaigns in, for example, the capital, Khartoum. And so, in some way or other, all of these countries are involved in either allowing space for weapons transfers or actively engaged in training or military operations.

You also have the fact that a lot of Sudanese are displaced to some of these countries, and there are serious security concerns about the status of Sudanese in these countries, most notably in Egypt, where we have seen many Sudanese refugees, even those carrying UNHCR refugee cards, being detained by the Egyptian authorities, and some of whom have died in detention — this, of course, without a peep from the Sudanese Armed Forces allied to them in Sudan. So, what you have is, you know, Sudan’s people being displaced to these countries, these countries being actively engaged, to some lesser or greater degree, in the war.

And at the same time, we have Sudan’s resources coming out of Sudan, almost always illegally being smuggled into these countries, whether it’s Egypt or Chad or South Sudan, with a lot of Sudanese products, for example, like gum arabic, very essential to the food and pharmaceutical industry, being labeled as products of those countries. Gold, of course, has been also smuggled through some of these countries, adding a lot of economic buffers to those countries themselves, and then being exported elsewhere, and really none of that money reaching Sudanese people, who, as I’ve said earlier, are under very, very dire economic constraints as a result of the war.

What this means is that, really, none of Sudan’s neighbors can be counted upon to be arbiters of this conflict or, indeed, champions for peace, if they are profiting from it in more ways than one.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Kholood Khair, thank you so much for joining us, Sudanese political analyst and head of Confluence Advisory, a think tank founded in Khartoum.

Coming up, Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower’s Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID. Back in a minute.

[break]

NERMEEN SHAIKH: “Come Down Here and Say That” by Deerhoof.