Sudan Is Still In Crisis, And They Need More Help Than Ever
This conflict is being completely overshadowed by Ukraine and Gaza
The world’s eyes are locked on Ukraine and Gaza, which is understandable.
The war in Ukraine has serious political and defensive implications for the entire world, and many major governments are involved. There are lots of moving parts, and battle lines are constantly being drawn and re-drawn — it makes sense that everyone would be watching it like a hawk.
As for Gaza and the West Bank, there’s no confusion there either. The genocide is very blatant, very brutal, and deserves more attention than it’s getting. People are being murdered in a campaign of ethnic cleansing and displacement, funding and weapons are being provided to the murderers, and people are right to demand that it end.
I’m not knocking the press for focusing on these two conflicts; they’re important. We need eyes on the ground to keep us updated and aware.
But there is a side effect to that focus which causes it’s own problems, because they aren’t the only serious conflicts raging in the world.
In fact, one of the world’s largest humanitarian disasters is barely making news at all.
I’ve written a little bit about the crisis in Sudan before, and I’ve mentioned it several times since, but there aren’t many other people discussing it. My dear friend
published a fantastic podcast episode about the history of the conflict months ago, and it’s well worth listening to.He kindly asked me to record my thoughts on the crisis as well, so I make a brief guest appearance discussing the human cost of the war and what sort of help is needed.
The crisis in Sudan and neighbouring South Sudan has been described as the worst in the world, but due to a combination of factors it just isn’t getting the eyes it needs.
And unfortunately, attention from the average person is what’s desperately needed.
Thanks to the Trump administration, the usual sources of help are gone. Without our help, these people have nobody.
The people of Sudan are learning the old adage — “Everything that can go wrong will go wrong” — the hard way.
War has been bleeding the country dry for years. Decades, even.
Famine has been hollowing people out, leaving children starved and emaciated and bodies abandoned along the roads. Natural disasters — like the recent landslide that killed around a thousand people — are a constant. Disease poses a severe threat.
There’s almost no safe drinking water, there is a constant flood of refugees as people flee violence and unsafe conditions, education is at a complete standstill, and there is no safe place to go.
With the gutting of USAID by the Trump administration, they no longer receive the funding or logistical assistance required to get them through it. In February, the BBC reported that around 80% of soup kitchens in Sudan that were supported by USAID have closed.
The statistics are not improving.
To make matters worse, the little press that Sudan and South Sudan have been getting here in North America has not been tied to the crisis at all — it’s been tied to Trump’s outrageous mass kidnapping campaign.
These people he sent there are not from South Sudan, they have no connections to South Sudan, they will not be given any help or succor in South Sudan.
And now they’re in a warzone where they might not even speak the local dialects, much less know any places of safety to retreat to.
He sent them there without due process, too, because he doesn’t give two shits about the basic human rights that ought to be accorded to everyone. Whether human beings live or die is not an issue on Trump’s radar, so long as the people he hates are out of sight, they are firmly out of mind.
This callous attitude and lack of forethought or care is one of the many reasons the man is not fit to be a world leader.
As I said, the people of Sudan and South Sudan need help. Badly.
Fortunately, there are a few organizations on the ground doing their best to render aid to those people in the most dire situations. If you have the ability to give monetary donations to help their missions — I gave what I could, as poor as I am — then these three below are good options:
I gave to UNICEF, myself. Kids are extremely vulnerable in warzones, especially when famine strikes.
If you can’t give money in support, don’t worry; this is the kind of crisis that needs every available form of help imaginable. The best and most effective way to help is to get more eyes on the problem and make it topical.
Pressuring your local representatives, writing to the news or calling in, posting on social media about it, telling your friends — whatever you can do to make this a topic of conversation is worth its weight in gold.
If you’ve got a platform, no matter how big or small, use it. Get this out there.
Find news articles about it, link them everywhere, make art about it, make videos, write about it on Substack, or Ghost, or Medium, whatever — if we can get Sudan to trend, we can encourage more people to give or volunteer.
Make this household news. Make it impossible to ignore.
The media might be letting this nightmare go unseen and unremarked upon, but that doesn’t mean we need to follow suit.
Solidarity wins.
This is a very underserved humanitarian crisis that few seem to car about anymore. I see articles in Al Jazeera constantly but very few outside of that, other than in the local African news media.
As far as we in the west are concerned, Trump is making sure that all spotlights are on him these days, and that eats up most of the internet bandwidth. I admit everything that's going on here in the U.S. is also making me focus on things closer to home as well.
I'm afraid things aren't going to get any better for the Americans because we have an authoritarian wannabe, who is probably pitching a fit right now as all of his peers are getting very chummy in Tianjin, China right now and he wasn't invited. And we have news shows like Morning Joe on MSNBC, talking about how the U.S. is no longer the biggest, baddest bully on the world's playground, and how we need to fix that. It's sickening to watch.
Meanwhile, Sudan and south Sudan are dying because Trump decided their fates by shutting down USAID. And he condemned Hilary Clinton for calling poor republican Americans deplorables.
It is a horrific crisis. I also give to UNICEF and Mercy Corp. They need our help desperately.