Sudan’s protracted war

Airstrikes destroying primary schools with bombs. Hundreds of thousands of people displaced from one city to another, only to have their lives uprooted yet again weeks later. Walking over 100 kilometres through arid lands with only the clothes on their back. Emergency food supplies halted at the border leaving families starving through another night. Arriving at a rough-shod medical station under a tarp shelter where doctors can’t treat severe illness for lack of equipment. Waiting, watching, anticipating the next evacuation without any sense of agency. This has been the reality for millions of people in Sudan since the civil war erupted in the spring of last year. Now, as the rainy season descends threatening weeks of devastating flooding, the world is largely looking on passively as the country collapses into chaos and despair.

On April 15, 2023, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) launched into a civil war when the RSF, previously under SAF command, rebelled against the state military. This division has created deeper ruptures along ethnic lines, unstable alliances, and in-fighting between ethnic militias across Sudan. The ensuing conflict is widely seen as inimical to the democratic goals of the 2019 coup against long-reigning dictator Omar al-Bashir. After the SAF toppled al-Bashir, it quickly adopted an indefinite war economy under de facto ruler Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and made apparent that there is no intention to transfer power to civilian rule. Since the uprising that bloomed in 2018, the interests of the Sudanese popular resistance have been co-opted by Western state interests in a regional strategy against Iran that has sought to monopolize resources like gold and oil in Sudan, and trade routes through the Horn of Africa.

For the first time in Sudan’s history since the country achieved independence from Britain in 1956, a war ravaged the capital city of Khartoum. The international airport was quickly paralyzed when it was occupied by the RSF. Planes and buildings in nearby residential areas were set ablaze. Evacuation programs for foreign nationals were carried out by military forces at the Wadi Seidna airfield north of the capital.

Three cities were quickly decimated by airstrikes, drone warfare and artillery fire. Since the war began, critical infrastructure across the country has been systematically destroyed. Sudan has been plunged into a communications blackout, with people relying on smuggling satellite dishes for internet and receiving donations for local humanitarian aid programs. The crippling of the country’s agricultural heartland of Gezerah State has sent the country spiralling toward a horrific famine.

The toll the conflict has taken on the Sudanese people is staggering. Over the past year, some 15,000 people have been killed. The UN estimates that nearly 25 million people lack humanitarian assistance—almost half the entire country—with over eight million people displaced. It has been difficult to establish accurate numbers. Some have fallen ill wandering from one city to another, unable to reach medical assistance. Many people are considered lost—family members, friends, old neighbours—amid reports of widespread abductions and rape. The displacement crisis has swelled as over a million refugees from neighbouring countries like Ethiopia and Chad—making up the second-highest population of refugees in all of Africa—have also been displaced by the conflict.

Through June 2024, fighting in North Darfur’s capital city El Fasher has hit hospitals, including the city’s only paediatric hospital, with shelling that has killed civilians and medical workers. Over 140 people who were being treated in critical condition lost their lives because medical workers were unable to provide aid amid the bombing. In just a single village in Gezira, Wad al Noura, 35 children were murdered and 20 injured in an attack on June 6 that has bolstered the international appeal for an end to conflict and accountability for war crimes.

Canada’s response has been underwhelming. Under the mandate of Minister Marc Miller, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) opened a humanitarian pathway on February 27, 2024, granting sponsorship-based visas to refugees with family already living in Canada. The program is intended to accept up to 3,250 applications.

The family-based sponsorship pathway has temporarily paused intake of new applications, however, IRCC states that “if the number of applications accepted into process is below the cap, we will reopen the intake portal.” Since the program was announced on February 27, 2024, IRCC confirmed that a total of 2,195 applications for 5,037 persons (excluding non-accompanying dependents) are currently being processed. Yet as applications remain closed, as of May 18, there are no approved applications or arrivals according to IRCC.

In a letter published on February 21, the Montréal-based Canada Council for Refugees (CCR) called the immigration measures “inadequate to the need” created by mass displacement.

The CCR called for a greater refugee and humanitarian response from Canada and the rest of the world that is “commensurate with the scale of the humanitarian crisis unfolding on the ground.”

CCR’s co-Executive Director Gauri Sreenivasan responded to the systemic inequities in Canada’s immigration system in response to different global conflicts. “Canada has demonstrated it has the capacity, through the measures adopted in response to the situations in Ukraine and Afghanistan,” she told Canadian Dimension.

The CCR letter also expressed concern with how the family-based pathway “excludes people who do not have family links to Canada, a situation exacerbated by Canada’s narrow definition of ‘family’, which reveals how Canadian policy is still functionally rooted in classist and patriarchal norms.

Sreenivasan highlighted differences in the approach to Sudanese and Ukrainian refugees. In the case of the former “financial responsibility is placed wholly on the shoulders of families in Canada—they must be able to pay for the basic needs of their family members for one year after they become permanent residents,” she said. “This contrasts with the response to Ukrainians, where there was no requirement for financial responsibility—and Canada provided a one-time non-taxable financial payment for Ukrainians arriving under CUAET.”

In addition, Canada did not impose a cap on temporary visas and permanent residence for refugees from Ukraine.

In response to this exceptional immigration pathway for Sudanese nationals, CRR called for humanitarian resettlement to proceed primarily through the Government Assisted Refugee Program, as Canada did for Afghan refugees fleeing the Taliban takeover in 2021.

Referring to statements by Immigration Minister Marc Miller at the March 20 meeting of the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration (CIMM), Sreenivasan said that “it is disappointing, but not surprising, to hear the Minister say that he doesn’t expect people in the new family-based program to arrive in Canada until late 2024 or early 2025.”

Members of the CIMM pointed to the ineffectiveness of IRCC’s measures for Sudan and Gaza, in that no Sudanese or Gazan applicants have yet been accepted through Canada’s formal resettlement programs.

As for how Canada came up with 3,250 cap for family-sponsored refugees from Sudan, this was “a bit of an art and a bit of a science,” to quote Miller. “We came to that number of 3,000-plus on the theory that it would translate to about 5,000 actual people,” he told Liberal MP Arielle Kayaboga.

Bloc Québécois MP Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe noted the lack of an emergency division in IRCC to respond to major international crises, which was proposed in response to the exodus from Afghanistan. Deputy Minister of Immigration Harpreet S. Kochhar told MPs that a crisis response framework should be prepared by this fall.

IRCC did not respond to Canadian Dimension’s questions on why there was no rapid response visa program for Sudanese refugees as there was for other regions experiencing conflict. Matthew Krupovich, spokesperson for IRCC, instead stated that “Canada tailors each response to meet the unique needs of those who require our support.”

Krupovich instead referred to the ministry’s anti-racism strategy, which acknowledges “potential bias in the identification of special measures for refugees and displaced people.”

IRCC’s redevelopment of the immigration system has been criticized for an undemocratic lack of consultation. Sreenivasan explained that the CCR is “not sure whether the framework under development will effectively address the issue of inequity.” The CCR itself supports the creation of a policy framework for immigration responses to crises around the world “with objective criteria focused on the need for the protection of displaced peoples.”

Sreenivasan sees the response to the Sudanese conflict as consistent with Canada’s treatment of other humanitarian crises in Africa. When the Tigray conflict erupted in Ethiopia in 2020, engaging the Eritrean military and decimating infrastructure including 90 percent of the state’s health facilities, Canada did not introduce any resettlement measures for Ethiopian refugees—over 60,000 of whom fled war to Sudan.

The UNHCR chartered a flight to relocate 300 Eritrean refugees experiencing displacement from the Tigray conflict, but there has been no other meaningful response. Instead of responding with a pathway for people to find refuge and rebuild their lives in safety, Canada’s Global Affairs department threw a $3 million bandage on the humanitarian crisis. As both Sudanese nationals and refugees from regional conflicts are once again displaced by war, it is clear that, by itself, humanitarian aid funding is not enough.

Sreenivasan added, “the tepid response to the Sudan crisis is typical of Canada’s response to refugees and immigrants out of Africa, which is reflective of systemic racism.”

Systemic barriers for asylum-seekers

Ahmed El Bashir Ismail is the chairperson of the Sudanese Canadian League of Hamilton and a representative with the Sudanese Canadian Community Association.

Bashir Ismail explained that it was understandable that there were no resettlement programs introduced when the war had just erupted, but that asylum-seekers routinely face systemic and structural racism in Canada.

“Even accommodation was so hard for them to find,” he explained. Bashir Ismail described how, in the months following the start of Sudan’s civil war, refugees from Sudan, as well as refugees from Kenya, Uganda and Congo were sleeping on the streets in Toronto. “African people here in Canada were so disappointed about the difference between what is announced and what is practised.”

“It took a long time. It took Canada 10 months to come up with a program,” he added. Canada’s swift creation of programs for refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Colombia shows that it is possible to accept a large number of asylum-seekers and introduce inclusive immigration programs.

Bashir Ismail noted that the response is not commensurate with what is happening on the ground in Sudan, which has created an urgent need to address the crisis of internal displacement. “The people who need this are not the people who are able to go to Egypt, for example, or to Chad.”

The family-based sponsorship program is also exclusive to Sudanese nationals and thus neglects non-Sudanese nationals who are also affected by the crisis.

Having lived in Canada for 23 years, Bashir Ismail sees Canada’s current response to Sudan’s humanitarian crisis as consistent over the past decades, recalling the world’s delayed response to the Darfur crisis in 2003.

“It took the West one year to talk about it,” he said.

Despite rallies and community efforts to bring attention to the humanitarian crisis, Bashir Ismail described Sudan as “forgotten.”

“There are politics behind highlighting or ignoring a conflict somewhere in the world,” he said, referring to how imperialist aims regarding Sudan’s resources and neoliberal interests in securing political power in the region have shaped what conflicts in the world are covered and how they are portrayed in Western media.

Bashir Ismail sees systemic racism embedded in the political rhetoric surrounding the victims of war, recalling examples of racist and Orientalist coverage of conflicts by mainstream media that has perpetuated harmful prejudices of war being normal in Africa and the Middle East, and skewing policies to favour humanitarian programs for European conflicts to the detriment of aiding racialized people fleeing war to Western countries.

Khaldah Salih, a coordinator of the Toronto-based Sudan Solidarity Collective (SSC), shares the view that Canada’s family-based program is insufficient to address the horrific scale of the war. “The response isn’t actually about the displacement crisis,” she said. “It’s not trying to alleviate the burden that other countries might face due to the displacement crisis.”

Founded in 2023, the SSC is a community group based on mutual aid that grew out of an initiative at the University of Toronto to advocate for a more inclusive immigration policy in Canada. In order to rebuild their shattered careers, refugees to Canada may need assistance programs for professional accreditation in a country that often does not recognize accreditations and professional experience from countries in the Global South. Children who have been out of school for over a year amid the worst education crisis in the world may need support. Security assessments and financial and documentation requirements introduce immense bureaucratic barriers for refugees at the border, failing to consider the realities of fleeing war.

Canada temporarily waived fees for people fleeing the Sudanese war last spring. But according to the CCR, worsening conflict through 2024 is “making it inconsistent as well as inhumane not to provide a fee exemption as part of the new pathway.”

In Québec, inconsistent immigration policies reflect classist favouritism in place of compassionate humanitarian values. In February 2024, when Québec was seeking a $1 billion reimbursement from the federal government for social services that Québec provided in the last three years to support to refugees, Québec Immigration Minister Christine Fréchette told the CBC that the province was reaching a “breaking point” in terms of the province’s ability to provide services. “We cannot sustain the level of arrivals because of our lack of capacity,” she said. Noting that Québec had received 65,000 asylum seekers in 2023, she said the influx was putting a lot of pressure on education services, health services, as well as housing. She also said that Québec receives 55 per cent of asylum seekers in Canada and that there should be a fairer distribution of asylum seekers throughout the country.

Québec also opted out of the federal family reunification program that was launched in November 2024, with a plan to accept 11,000 people from Colombia, Haiti and Venezuela. Most recently, the CAQ decided to slash the number of family reunification applications the province will process over the next two years, reducing it by half to no more than 13,000 applications, in order to stay within the limits of Québec’s immigration cap.

Québec currently accounts for up to 46 percent of refugee claimants in all of Canada, though the closure of Roxham Road last spring has shifted many toward Ontario. In January, the federal government pledged over $362 million toward the Interim Housing Assistance Program for refugees, with $100 million earmarked for Québec.

A meeting between Québec Premier François Legault and French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal in mid-April, however, emphasized the creation of expedited immigration policies for French nationals immigrating to Québec—a form of preferential treatment that underscores the class-and-race-biased immigration policies in Québec and Canada. Just days later, Québec Premier François Legault threatened to hold a “referendum” on temporary immigrants including foreign workers, international students and refugee claimants.

The media has contributed to the lack of compassionate response and policy regarding Africans experiencing displacement caused by war, as SSC coordinator Salih observes.

“There’s something so incredibly impersonal and disturbing about the coverage,” she said. In December 2023, thousands of people exiled from Khartoum had to again flee Wad Madani, the capital of Gezereh state and once home to nearly half a million people. When the city fell to the RSF, Salih explained, there was barely any media coverage. “It’s like everyone has given up. It’s like there was no surprise about there being a war,” she said. “Like it was regular and normal.”

Salih called for “a response that recognizes peoples’ humanity, and the fact that they need safety and security” as people flee the atrocities of war. “People are less sympathetic to Africans. This is just a fact. And that has been the case with the response, and the media coverage of the war.”

The CCR’s Sreenivasan likewise urged that Canadian refugee and humanitarian responses “not be guided by the level of media coverage or whether there is organized political pressure.”

A spiralling humanitarian crisis

Through May, the UN has repeatedly warned of a growing risk of genocide in West Darfur, where, according to Alice Wairimu Nderitu, Under-Secretary-General and Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on the Prevention of Genocide, the atrocities being committed already bear “all the marks of risk of genocide, with strong allegations that this crime has already been committed.”

In the absence of adequate international humanitarian assistance, grassroots efforts are left to fill the void. Currently operating in Khartoum, Darfur, and Kassala, emergency response rooms (ERRs) are providing medical assistance and organizing food kitchens through neighbourhood groups that are run by volunteers.

Salih has called for aid organizations to recognize and work with ERRs that are currently dependent on a patchwork of grants through the ICRC and UNICEF, as well as diaspora fundraising.

“They want to be seen as the legitimate groups that are supporting the people on the ground who are fending for themselves. The ERRs emerged because there was nothing else,” she said. Some are members of the grassroots Resistance Committees that have led the country’s pro-democracy movement since 2019.

Both UN relief efforts to mitigate the humanitarian crisis are severely underfunded. The $2.7 billion Humanitarian Response Plan for Sudan is only six percent funded, and the $1.4 billion Regional Refugee Response Plan is at only seven percent.

At the International Humanitarian Conference for Sudan on April 15, Minister of International Development Ahmed Hussen announced $100.7 million in humanitarian assistance funding for those who have fled Sudan. Canada dedicated an additional $31.5 million in development assistance funding, primarily for projects focused on sexual and reproductive health, destined for Sudan and the neighbouring countries of the Central African Republic, Chad, Ethiopia and South Sudan.

Last year, Canada dedicated over $170 million in humanitarian assistance to partners in Sudan, as well as neighbouring countries, through the UN, Red Cross and NGOs including the Sudan Humanitarian Fund (SHF).

James Emmanuel Wanki, spokesperson for Global Affairs Canada (GAC), told Canadian Dimension that the SHF has allocated funding to ERRs and that the humanitarian funding is “largely flexible.”

For months, the World Food Programme (WFP) warned that humanitarian assistance for Sudanese refugees in Chad was running out. Citing “acute” food insecurity, the WFP expected aid to end by December 2023. By March 2024, the WFP confirmed cuts to operations and suspension of food aid for Sudanese refugees in Chad.

As conflict has escalated around El Fasher in North Darfur through early May, conflict hotspots are tipping toward “catastrophic hunger.” The WFP described the looming famine as the “world’s largest food crisis,” expected to affect 18 million people, with nearly 5 million people experiencing emergency levels of hunger.

Salih explained that aid is often blocked at borders by both warring parties. A crucial humanitarian corridor between Darfur and Chad shut down earlier in May due to escalating violence, with aid convoys being held up at the Tine border crossing. Humanitarian assistance is reportedly not crossing the border from Chad, as “restrictions from the authorities in Port Sudan are preventing WFP from transporting assistance via Adre, the only other viable cross-border corridor from Chad.”

Amid a de facto blockade on humanitarian corridors and corruption in aid organizations, how effective can a financial aid package be?

In May of last year, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) suspended aid deliveries to Tigray while investigating internal allegations by aid workers of the theft and diversion of food meant for at least 100,000 people. A few months later, EU states in turn suspended funding to the WFP’s Somalian programme amid allegations of theft of humanitarian aid by both authorities and humanitarian workers.

Urging unimpeded passage of humanitarian relief in Sudan, GAC did not otherwise comment on the impact of the lack of humanitarian aid corridors on aid distribution amid Canada’s announcement.

In a move that Salih called “symbolic,” Sudan has been virtually emptied of personnel for foreign humanitarian organizations like UNHCR and UNICEF. Although the humanitarian aid organizations supported evacuations for foreign workers in Sudan, Salih explained that there was no equivalent evacuation of employees who are Sudanese nationals.

Volunteers at ERRs have reportedly been targeted by both the RSF and SAS, but are choosing to stay in Sudan. Every day, they live with the risk of being arrested, detained at military checkpoints, kidnapped or killed. Some have had the opportunity to leave, but as Salih explained, “They are choosing to stay back and support because they think it’s their duty and responsibility.”

“There is something so institutionally wrong with the way that humanitarian work functions in Africa,” she added. “Some institutions build whole empires around the idea of humanitarian aid, and some folks are on the ground actually doing it.”

Mere days after the civil war erupted last spring, former Sudanese Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok warned that the conflict could become worse than Syria, Yemen and Libya, calling potential escalation “a nightmare for the world.”

A little over a year later, that nightmare has become a reality.

The SAF and RSF are backed by private and state interests staking out control over Sudanese gold and oil, and invested in the protracted war. The interests are complex: the SAF is backed by Egypt and Saudi Arabia, while the RSF is supported by the United Arab Emirates and Russia’s Wagner group, receiving African support from Mali, sometimes Chad and a faction of Libyan power.

Canada announced targeted sanctions in April against four companies with ties to the SAF and RSF, and two individuals : RSF leader Abdelrahim Hamdan Dagalo, and former State Minister Ali Karti who has been credited with organizing Janjaweed militia, who form the roots of the RSF, responsible for the atrocities committed in Darfur in 2003. The sanctions implement the UN Security Council sanctions regime that includes an arms embargo—first imposed in 2004 in response to the conflict in the Darfur region, Wanki noted.

Canada’s sanctions were announced after the EU introduced similar sanctions in January against six companies connected with both the SAF and RSF that have been accused of undermining stability in Sudan.

GAC spokesperson Marilyne Guevremont told CBC in April that Canada is “exploring all options to ensure those responsible for human rights violations are held to account.” This was confirmed by GAC spokesperson James Emmanuel Wanki in a communication with Canadian Dimension, who referred to the International Fact-Finding Mission established in October 2023 to investigate alleged human rights violations and abuses and violations of international humanitarian law in Sudan, and the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) investigation of alleged war crimes by both warring parties.

Aside from the futile indictment of former President Omar al-Bashir for genocide, there has been no substantial justice or reparations for the atrocities in Darfur. Despite two arrest warrants and demand for extradition by the ICC for prosecution at The Hague, al-Bashir is out of Sudanese prison and was last allegedly held at a military hospital, evading accountability for the past two decades. As Human Rights Watch stated in 2005, the US intervened by blocking a Security Council action and proposed splitting one resolution into three, “none of which would authorize a tribunal to prosecute crimes against humanity in Darfur.” Sudan’s corrupt leaders have not only remained cloaked in impunity for nearly two decades, but are repeating the brutal cycle of history today, the sanctioned Ali Karti being a case in point.

Even as Sudan careens into a deepening crisis, there have been no clear initiatives to mediate a ceasefire in the country. Criticism levelled during a Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire during Ramadan emphasized how the Sudanese conflict needs to be resolved internally without foreign interference. The UN integrated transition assistance mission in Sudan and its Permanent Ceasefire Committee, established in 2021, were dissolved on February 29, 2024. GAC did not comment on the closure of UN peace initiatives in Sudan.

“No one is going to win this war. Nobody is going to be victorious in it, because it is fuelled by others,” said Bashir Ismail, referring to the competing interests backing the SAF and RSF for political and economic power in the region, and invested in the protracted war. The RSF has been supported by the United Arab Emirates and Russia’s private military company Wagner Group, receiving African support from Mali, sometimes Chad and a faction of Libyan power. The SAF receives support from Egypt and Saudi Arabia. “Whenever it comes nearly to an end, it is refuelled by injecting more and more arms—and support to this party or the other party,” Bashir Ismail added.

How many more lives will be lost as a small Sudanese diaspora struggles to bring attention to a crisis that has paralyzed Africa’s third-largest country? How many people will continue to die because of paralyzed humanitarian corridors and a lack of medical equipment? How many Sudanese people will remain trapped—in peril of murder, kidnapping or rape—because foreign policy deems their skin too dark or their country of origin too volatile to be considered “safe” for rapid response programs? And how much longer will a crisis be widely recognized as tragic, brutal and heartbreaking—but ultimately disregarded in practice as just another African war?

Lital Khaikin is a freelance journalist and author based in Montréal, and regularly contributes features on humanitarian and environmental issues related to underreported regions and conflict zones.