Famine ravages Sudan.
The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) – which claims to be the government of Sudan – took a small step toward alleviating the famine earlier this week by allowing 15 trucks of UN aid across the border into Chad to bring food to the starving population.
Aid agencies hope this will open the door to a large-scale relief effort that could save millions of lives.
But they fear it is only a symbolic concession: too little, too late.
Four weeks ago, the UN-accredited Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) system reported that famine was raging in parts of Darfur, Sudan’s westernmost region.
That was no surprise.
The humanitarian catastrophe in Sudan has been the world’s worst for months, with more than half of Sudan’s 45 million people in urgent need of emergency aid.
More than 12 million people have been displaced, including nearly two million refugees in neighboring Chad, Egypt and South Sudan.
Some food safety experts fear that as many as 2.5 million people could die of hunger by the end of this year.
Hunger as a weapon
The famine in Sudan is the result of decades of economic mismanagement, the consequences of devastating wars and droughts exacerbated by the climate crisis. The current famine is caused by the use of starvation as a weapon.
In April last year, a war broke out between the SAF, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo, better known as “Hemedti”.
The war quickly devastated Sudanese communities.
Like a swarm of human locusts, RSF militias ransacked the capital, Khartoum, stripping it of everything that could be looted and resold. The troops also destroyed vital infrastructure such as hospitals and schools.
The same story was repeated wherever the RSF advanced.
The breadbasket areas of Gezira and Sennar along the Blue Nile, an area of huge irrigated farms, have been devastated.
For the first time in generations, people there are going hungry.
The famine is worst in Darfur, especially in El-Fasher, the only town in the region still under the control of the army and its local allies.
Surrounded by the RSF, the city is dependent on precarious supply routes that cut across the battle lines. It was in the Zamzam camp for displaced people near el-Fasher that the aid agency Doctors Without Borders (MSF) first reported famine and malnutrition.
The army, in turn, has fallen back on its tried-and-true strategy of cutting off rebel-held areas. The logic is that if it can block external supplies, local RSF supporters will become disaffected and some units will defect.
The tactic worked well when the country fought a long war in South Sudan from 1983 to 2005. The generals regret allowing the UN to send aid, which they say sustained the insurgency long enough for southerners to claim independence.
The SAF controls Port Sudan, the country’s only port and the main route for imports. More importantly, the United Nations recognizes the SAF as the sovereign government.
Although there are no SAF troops within 100 miles of the Chadian border (which arms dealers cross freely), UN lawyers insist that World Food Programme trucks must have official government permission to travel the few miles from the Chadian border town of Adré over dirt roads into Darfur.
And the SAF has played the sovereignty card to the fullest.
A drop of help
In June, Sudan’s ambassador to the United Nations, Al-Harith Idriss al-Harith Mohamed, condemned the famine rumors as a conspiracy by the country’s enemies to justify intervention.
He threatened a ‘Biblical Armageddon’ if the UN declared a famine.
The IPC experts reviewed the data, saw his bluff and declared famine.
The Sudanese forces gave in and opened the Adré border crossing, but only for three months.
And they allowed only 15 of the 131 trucks of UN aid waiting at the border to cross, before insisting that negotiations begin on an inspections regime.
Veterans in the relief effort expect the generals to use every bureaucratic trick possible to slow down the approval process.
And Darfur needs thousands of trucks of food every week, not just one convoy.
It takes weeks for food to be transported from the nearest ports on the West African coast to Chad.
To feed the hungry, all routes must be opened – from Port Sudan, from South Sudan, and across the desert from Libya and Egypt.
The local aid committees in Sudan are also in urgent need of money.
A large-scale relief operation will require the warring parties to agree to a ceasefire and end looting and extortion.
But there are no signs that they are willing to do so.
Lenders vie for regional influence
Peace talks in Geneva, hosted by Switzerland and co-convened by the US and Saudi Arabia, ended on Friday without substantial progress.
US Special Envoy Tom Perriello planned the meeting with high expectations. He wanted the two warring generals to meet in person and sign a ceasefire.
But SAF leader General al-Burhan refused to go or even send a high-level delegation.
He argued that the RSF should first evacuate its troops from civilian areas. In fact, he demanded their withdrawal from the areas they had captured. This was a precondition for talks.
Mr Perriello tempered his expectations and decided to hold talks and phone calls, including with US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, in the hope of opening avenues for humanitarian purposes.
He reached just enough to say that all was not lost and that talks would resume at an unspecified future date.
Diplomats know, however, that no progress is likely until the two sides’ main backers — the United Arab Emirates for RSF and Saudi Arabia and Egypt for SAF — reach an agreement.
Until now, the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and the UAE over who should lead the region has hampered peace efforts.
Although the country denies this, evidence suggests that the UAE supports the RSF with money and weapons, while Saudi Arabia sides more with the SAF.
The UAE did not want to attend the negotiations in its former site of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, believing any breakthrough would be credited to its Saudi rivals.
The Saudis, meanwhile, did not want the UAE to determine who would form Sudan’s next government.
Representatives of the two Arab states sat in as observers at the Geneva talks. But until top-level Arab decision-makers meet, that is merely a diplomatic courtesy.
Meanwhile, the fighting continues and hunger increases.
The Sudanese still hope that this civil war, unlike previous wars that lasted for years if not decades, can be ended quickly and peacefully.
But the signs are not encouraging.
Alex de Waal is director of the World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in the US.
More BBC stories about Sudan:
Go to BBCAfrica.com for more news from the African continent.
Follow us on Twitter @BBCAfricaon Facebook on BBC Africa or on Instagram at bbcafrica
BBC Africa Podcasts
