For years, Sudan has existed in the global imagination as a peripheral crisis – periodically erupting into violence, then fading back into obscurity. The civil war that started in April 2023 has now lasted more than 1,000 days. Sudan is now the site of the world’s largest displacement crisis, one of its most severe hunger emergencies and a conflict marked by brutality so extreme that seasoned humanitarian observers struggle for language to describe it.
I had a view of the violence in 2007, when I opted for an international posting as a United Nations Head of Field Office in the remote Sudanese town of Mukjar in West Darfur, bordering Chad and the Central African Republic.
My office sat amidst four sites where genocides are alleged to have been committed on Darfuri communities by Janjaweed, the militia controlled by Omar al-Bashir, the country’s longtime president.
Large swathes of land and villages had been burnt. When the wind blew, cinders would fly up from the shells of charred hut shells. We would routinely find skulls and bones.
Genocide to a fragile peace
The roots of Sudan’s catastrophe stretch back decades. Shortly after it became independent from the British in 1956, a war broke out between the Muslim-dominated north and the Christian- and...
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