Two Years of War in Sudan
Meret Weber
Six years ago, a revolutionary movement toppled the 30-year regime of Omar al-Bashir in Sudan. In the months that followed, a wide range of forces debated how the “new Sudan” should be governed — trade unions, neighborhood resistance committees, and even the military, which had played a role in al-Bashir’s downfall. Two years later, the same military staged a coup against the newly formed transitional government, together with the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). And two years after that, these two forces — the military on one side and the RSF on the other — went to war against each other. Overnight, Khartoum became the central theater of the war, and since then, fighting has spread to almost the entire country.
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This war has been underway for more than two years now, and the people of Sudan are facing the largest refugee, health, and hunger crises in the world. More than 12.5 million people have been displaced, and more than 25 million are at risk of starvation. Attacks on civilians, displaced-person camps, hospitals, and schools are frequent, as are instances of sexual violence as a tactic of war — but the exact extent is difficult to ascertain because almost no aid organizations or human rights missions remain in the country.
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Over the course of the conflict, it has become clear how much can go wrong in the international response to political events in Africa. The media in Germany is stuck in a pattern of erratic and superficial reporting, and political and activist circles have struggled to situate this war in their analysis. Too often, Sudan plays only a minor role in activist dialogues or is used as a token to pit political movements against each other. So how do we move toward a better, more solidarity-based engagement with Sudan?
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Who does the forgetting?
By almost every measure, Sudan is currently experiencing the world’s greatest crisis. And although the war has made headlines in German-speaking countries, the framing seems to be fixed — it’s about hunger, “tribal conflicts,” or “ethnic violence.” The crisis seems to be the result of fate. This is a portrayal of Africa that has long been criticized by scholars and activists, not least twenty years ago by Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina: people and events on the continent are portrayed as pure victims, depoliticized, powerless, decontextualized, and without history.
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In the Süddeutsche Zeitung, an article about Sudan is titled Hungerland, and the cover photo shows an emaciated child gazing into the camera with big brown eyes, serious and sad. The Tagesschau news program begins its report on the war with a sentence that seems to confirm every single point in Wainaina’s satirical How to Write About Africa: “The wind […] whips up desert sand, […] a tiny baby blinks in the glaring sun.”
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But who is actually doing the forgetting? What we know, what we read and hear, determines who or what is being forgotten. So it leaves a bitter taste when the very media outlets that have a concrete influence on what is remembered and what is forgotten choose “forgetting” as a hook for their own lack of coverage.
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Instead of forgetting, the media could choose to explain how the war is really a counterrevolutionary development directed primarily against the Sudanese public, which for months not only protested al-Bashir but also opposed further military involvement in the “new” Sudan. Or they could report on the people who, despite everything, have been carrying on for years: the “emergency response rooms,” which grew out of the neighborhood resistance committees active during the revolution and have been doing the work that the warring parties and international organizations have failed to do since the war began: rationing food donations, organizing shelters, and converting abandoned buildings into improvised hospitals, emergency kitchens, and learning centers. But in German media, the story of a society organizing and caring for itself under war conditions remains untold.
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