The Biden-Harris administration is scrambling to look useful in Sudan, where conditions deteriorated so much in the past week that Doctors Without Borders had to abandon a disease-riddled and famine-ravaged refugee camp because it could no longer operate safely.
Some humanitarian groups complained the administration ignored Sudan until the headlines became too embarrassing in the final weeks of the presidential campaign.
The brutal Sudanese civil war would seem hard to miss, having created one of the worst humanitarian calamities on the planet and displacing over seven million people since it began in April 2023.
More than almost any other conflict currently raging, both sides of the Sudanese civil war have deliberately inflicted starvation and homelessness on huge numbers of civilians. The people of Sudan are not just collateral damage – their suffering is deliberate strategy.
There is little hope of a ceasefire, as the two feuding leaders – former coup partners Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Mohamed Hamdan Daglo – have vowed to keep fighting until the other is dead.
Burhan is the general in command of the Sudanese army, while Daglo leads the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The two sides have fought to a virtual stalemate. Civilian casualties keep piling up – Burhan’s forces killed 23 civilians by bombing an RSF-held marketplace in the capital of Khartoum on Sunday – but the battle lines do not move much.
On Friday, Doctors Without Borders, better known by its French acronym MSF, announced it would suspend work in the Zamzam refugee camp of North Darfur because the Sudanese army is blockading supplies to the camp, while the RSF has been laying siege to the area for months.
The camp is located near the city of al-Fashir, the last stronghold of Burhan’s Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) in Darfur. About 800,000 civilians are caught in the crossfire, including both area residents and refugees.
“We endured over 45 days of attack and never-ending shelling. They shelled our neighborhood. They shelled areas around our neighborhood. It became a life of misery… It is very easy to die in El-Fasher city,” one resident told ABC News last week.
MSF said it was “heartbreaking” to end its support for the Zamzam camp, whose sick and starving residents include five thousand malnourished children.
The medical charity said it was having trouble at many of its other facilities in Sudan, as staffers have been “insulted, harassed, and assaulted as they worked.” MSF facilities have been “looted, occupied, and shelled on multiple occasions.”
“We are really concerned that thousands of children are going to be left to die if nothing is done. There is a need for a massive, urgent scale-up right now. The people in Sudan can simply not wait,” said MSF spokeswoman Claire San Filippo.
“We’re not talking about an emergency anymore. We’re talking about a nightmare,” she said.
Fox News on Monday reported some grumbling from the humanitarian community about the Biden-Harris administration suddenly getting involved in Sudan – a “classic case of too little, too late,” as Fox put it.
“The Administration is making an 11th hour attempt to put the situation on a better footing, not least because the humanitarian situation is so desperate,” said Cameron Hudson, former director for African affairs at the National Security Council and current senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
“There could be two million Sudanese dead from famine by the time he leaves office,” Hudson said of President Joe Biden.
“Biden’s promises to Africa about elevating its importance on the global stage will ring even more hollow if he does not quickly take meaningful action to address this calamitous situation before he departs office,” Hudson added.
The Biden-Harris administration has been fighting a losing struggle for influence in Africa with China and Russia, which are both offering investments and military protection to developing nations without the moralistic strings attached to U.S. and European aid.
Biden made a great production of demonstrating how much Africa matters to U.S. foreign policy with a splashy Africa summit in 2022, but, as Hudson pointed out, his promises rang hollow compared to the concrete investments China and Russia have made on the continent. Biden also sabotaged some of the goodwill he earned by making some unfortunate comments to the visiting African leaders.
Biden attempted to deal with the Sudan horror by simply telling both sides to “stop blocking aid to the Sudanese people” during his final speech to the U.S. General Assembly last month. Unsurprisingly, that did not work.
“That plea came more than 15 months after the last time he referenced the conflict publicly, hardly a demonstration of consistent engagement with the world’s largest conflict,” Hudson noted.
“The administration would be wise to focus its efforts on increasing humanitarian access and saving as many lives as possible before it leaves office, rather than devoting its precious little attention to talks that are not likely to amount to genuine change on the ground,” he suggested.
The UK Guardian offered a dour postmortem on American diplomacy in “Sudan’s forgotten war” on Friday, pointing out that Sudan’s warring junta lords have not shown much interest in passionate pleas to stop fighting, do not appear to care about international sanctions, and their extraordinarily vicious campaign against civilians makes it difficult to address the crisis by throwing piles of money and humanitarian aid at it.
Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins felt there was no path to resolving the Sudan horror through military intervention and there would doubtless be little appetite for such a solution in either Washington or the capitals of Europe, any more than civilized nations are lining up to intervene in the much closer barbarism of Haiti’s civil war.
The problem is that such humanitarian intervention is the only real advantage the West can offer to the people of Africa, the area where the West clearly excels over the callous tyrannies of Moscow and Beijing. Burhan and Dagalo seem hell-bent on fighting until the last Sudanese child starves to death, partly because the leadership of each warring faction has a pretty good idea of what the other side will do to them if they lose.
