The Sudan War has Been Dubbed the ‘Forgotten Crisis’ by the Same Media who Have ‘Forgotten to Report on it’ – Here’s Why

We have no shortage of war in the news, but far away from Gaza and Ukraine, a terrible feud unleashing the world’s worst humanitarian crisis is getting almost no attention.

It’s an East African country with a landmass three times the size of Ukraine and Gaza put together, and a death toll suspected to be up to five times that of the battered Palestinian enclave. 

You may have seen Sudan making headlines this week because a rapper, Macklemore, is boycotting Dubai over the UAE’s involvement in the conflict.

But you probably didn’t see it mentioned because a collapsed dam decimated 20 villages, or because the war reached its 500th day. It’s excellent Macklemore put it on the radar, but equally depressing that he had to.

Sudan has been crowned the world’s “forgotten crisis” by the very media that’s forgotten it. We know the war in Sudan has been “forgotten”. We need to work out why.

The scale of devastation in Sudan can’t be overstated, it can barely be conveyed. Over 25 million people (more than half the population) face acute hunger in a country where weapons circulate freer than grain and people are eating grass to survive.

Since two rival generals unleashed civil war last April, 11 million people have been displaced. That’s two million families made homeless by militia chaos, ethnic massacres, and foreign proxy self-interest.

The death toll is placed between 15,000-150,000, but official counts come from hospital records and with four out of five hospitals forced shut by the conflict, we can only imagine how deficient these are.

It’s also hard to understate how little global attention this has received. UK government press releases from this year include 470 mentions of Ukraine and 60 of Sudan. Over the past 12 months, The New York Times ran almost 10 times as many articles featuring Gaza as those featuring Sudan, and over 13 times as many about Ukraine.

Human suffering should not be weighed and measured – but the unfortunate reality of diplomatic and humanitarian relief is that crises are often left to compete. Those that get no media, get no help.

People could easily assume this war is underreported here because it’s not relevant here (or maybe they assume it’s not relevant because it’s underreported). Unlike in Gaza and Ukraine, where the UK, EU, and USA supply arms to one side, we have not staked one ‘side’ of Sudan’s war.

Yet The Economist describes it as “a geopolitical timebomb”. The UAE (one of the UK’s biggest arms customers), Iran, Egypt, Russia and consequently Ukraine are all arming various sides, while China, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar compete for localised influence.

“Sudan is not a poor country, Sudan is exploited,” said Sudanese activist Ameen Mekki on Media Storm. It is rich in gold to illegally export and weapons to surreptitiously sell.

“Forgotten crisis” implies we need to simply “remember” Sudan, but how can we, when many people in the UK know nothing about it in the first place? This is even stranger given our nations’ shared histories.

British and Egyptian colonisers structured the state of Sudan from 1899-1956 with tactics of extreme centralisation and militarisation “that have been a recurring theme throughout Sudan’s history,” explained Ameen.

Since independence, the margins have been impoverished and suppressed, and the people’s fleeting bids for democracy have been thwarted by its overinflated military.

“People don’t draw the clear connection here, which is the legacy of colonialism.”

Our countries’ shared histories link our present in another way. Gaida Dirar, a Sudanese refugee also joining us on this week’s podcast, stated: “The Sudanese people think the UK is their second homeland.”

What the British press and public do not seem to realise is that the war in Sudan is affecting us, immensely, through migration flows. Sudan now bears the heavy crown of being the world’s largest child displacement crisis.

While it’s important to stress that the vast majority of refugees remain homeless in Sudan or flee to neighbouring countries, a high proportion of asylum seekers coming to the UK (who we read about all the time in the news) are coming from Sudan (which we read about never in the news).

At present, 60% of people in camps in Calais waiting to cross the Channel are Sudanese.

Given how hot a topic immigration is in Western countries, it’s baffling we can’t see the relevance of the war in Sudan at home – baffling, until you remember that clickbait media and power-hungry politicians deliberately paint a one-sided picture of “illegal immigration”, in which migrants are lured to the West by its soft generosity, rather than forced into perilous displacement by dangers back home.

It’s a narrative that justifies deterrence-based immigration policies but serves little justice to reality. Such is the level of cognitive dissonance that the same politicians arguing to cut aid budgets are often the most firmly anti-refugee.

To Gaida, who must suffer their wrathful rhetoric, the people who “use refugees for political gain” are “war criminals” on a level with those suffered by refugees back home.

“You’re dividing your community, you’re ruining democracy in your country, and you play that to your political gain.”

Evidently, the crisis in Sudan is tangibly and tremendously relevant to us. What then, does that say about the reasons it is underreported? “It comes down to implicit biases and racism,” answered Ameen. “People have a hard time believing that Africans deserve to live in peace. People think ‘this is just another normal day in Africa, African countries can’t rule themselves, poverty is normal’ – all things, which again people forget, are legacies of colonialism.”

There is, of course, another question to ask, which is: should we only care about wars that affect us? Even without the threats of terrorist hotbeds or immigration flows or gold shortages or obstructions to the Suez Canal, shouldn’t foreign leaders uphold the international laws their countries wrote and signed up to?

Who else can pressure Sudan’s warring leaders to negotiate for peace with sanctions and lawsuits and diplomatic weight? What Ameen dubs “the international community’s complete abandoning of the Sudanese people” has left war criminals to do exactly as they please. If this is because it “doesn’t affect people” in Western countries, we’re not really clear what it is we think we stand for.

Media Storm’s latest episode, ‘Forgotten crisis’: Why is no one talking about Sudan? Is out now.