Sudan and us

Erudite Partner has attempted something nearly impossible in her latest article for the aggregation site, TomDispatch: she's tried to alert us to the ongoing agony of the civil war in Sudan where massacre and atrocity are the seemingly unending reality. 

This horror is not in front of us every day. Our media have pretty much given up on making it salient. This conflict is complicated; the warring parties include both local combatants and meddling foreign powers. There's a racial element, Arabs fighting Black Africans. For once, our own country is not the most significant international interloper. Yet as a result of Elon Musk's chainsaw to USAID, Donald Trump killed off our country's contributions to relief efforts. Millions of Sudanese are displaced; millions are without homes or livelihood. Millions are starving and hundred of thousands of women and children are dying in refugee camps.

And the trajectory in Sudan (and Algeria and Egypt) where militaries with their own agendas fight it out to the detriment of the civilian society should point to a warning to us all. This is what happens when a social order breaks down and the men with guns take what they can grab.

Displaced people take rest on the road from Darfur to Chad, where hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees have fled since the onset of the war. | 2025 © Jérôme Tubiana/MSF

When I looked for photos of Sudanese refugees to illustrate a post about the E.P.'s article, Surprising Lessons for the U.S. Resistance to Trump In Sudan’s Recent History, I looked for pictures from international aid agencies. Those are the westerners who are there alongside the Sudanese; the agencies want us to see what the world is ignoring. Seeing the pictures left me weepy -- but not because the horrors were so awful or novel. I've seen all too many pictures of maimed and starving children. But because images from Sudan, images of Sudanese women and children, seem so terribly beautiful. I've included one here.

The rich world has turned away from all this suffering. Does our willing ignorance bode well for the endurance of all our own societies? Modernity means we can see if we choose; how numb have we become?