The Director-General of the World Health Organisation, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyuess, implored the world to “wake up and help Sudan out of the nightmare it’s living through”. Speaking from Sudan on Sunday, he said that over 20,000 people have been killed in the 17-month conflict and over 10 million displaced.
Ghebreyesus said that the best medicine for Sudan is peace. This would require an immediate ceasefire, responsibility and accountability from the warring groups, and international support. Without doubt, peace is both a vital and urgent tonic for the people of Sudan who have become the walking dead in the catastrophe and aftershock of civil unrest, armed coups, destabilisation, and persistent poverty.
Peace is the right prescription to end economic plunder in Sudan, kill the perilous and persistent proxy wars, and pave a new path for the country. However, peace efforts need to correctly diagnose the underlying causes of the Sudan crisis if these are truly to be treated and rooted out. Many efforts have failed.
Just days after the release of the report by the United Nation’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan, on Friday 6th September, its findings and recommendations have been rejected by the Sudan government. The Sudan government has described the report as both politically motivated and illicit.
The canvas is a bloodstain of tens of thousands of dead civilians, a chaos of over 10 million displaced, and a large spill of refugees flooding into neighbouring countries. Brutal strokes of the rape of women, shelling of schools, hospitals and critical water and electricity supplies, detention and torture, is part of a real-life portraiture of the current day Sudan.
