What Is Needed on Int’l and Regional Levels to Stop the War in Sudan?

 A damaged army tank is seen on the street, almost one year into the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), in Omdurman, Sudan, April 7, 2024. (Reuters)
A damaged army tank is seen on the street, almost one year into the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), in Omdurman, Sudan, April 7, 2024. (Reuters)
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What Is Needed on Int’l and Regional Levels to Stop the War in Sudan?

 A damaged army tank is seen on the street, almost one year into the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), in Omdurman, Sudan, April 7, 2024. (Reuters)
A damaged army tank is seen on the street, almost one year into the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), in Omdurman, Sudan, April 7, 2024. (Reuters)

By Rasha Awad

The war in Sudan between the army and Rapid Support Forces (RSF) entered its second year with no progress made on reaching a peaceful negotiated solution to the conflict. Some hope appears on the horizon with the announcement that the Jeddah negotiations will resume in Saudi Arabia in two weeks.

On the internal scene, the military escalation has continued on the ground and through military speeches. The situation has raised alarm among experts and observers in Sudan that the country may be headed towards a long war that may lead to the division of the country and the spillover of the conflict into the region, especially in wake of the RSF launching a drone attack on army positions in the eastern city of al-Qadarif.

Eastern Sudan has been largely spared from the war up until the April 9 attack.

Time as a decisive factor

The success of the negotiations will rely heavily on time. If the war stretches on, then new obstacles will emerge that will complicate negotiations. Such complications include defections from the army or RSF.

In this regard, Dr. Bakri al-Jak, official spokesman of the Coordination of Civil Democratic Forces (Taqaddum), warned the war could take on regional and ethnic dimensions, instead of its current ideological and political ones.

There is the possibility that the army and RSF leaderships could lose control over their forces on the ground and that the country could be divided into areas of influence and control, which would be the first step in the division of Sudan, he added.

He therefore underscored the need to speed up reaching a negotiated solution and intensifying regional and international contacts in support of peace to avert the prolongation of the war.

Internal political will

Experts estimate that one year of war has cost Sudan 100 billion dollars. Around 90 percent of factories have been destroyed, 65 percent of agricultural production has come to a halt, and 75 percent of the services sector has stopped functioning. Moreover, wasted opportunities have cost Sudan an estimated 200 billion dollars.

Around 14,000 civilians have been killed, thousands are wounded and reported missing and 11 million have been displaced.

As for the military losses, the army and RSF have both refrained from disclosing figures, but the estimates are that they have both incurred heavy losses.

In spite of these massive losses, neither side has demonstrated the political will to turn to a negotiated solution even though the majority of the millions of Sudanese people want peace.

National and regional determination

Like all wars in the region, the conflict in Sudan is unlikely to come to an end without a national drive to reach peace. It should also be coupled with effective regional and international pressure on the warring parties to agree to a negotiated solution.

Writer and analyst Al-Haj Warraq said several factors will determine whether the war will stretch on or wind down. Among them is whether the United States would come with a unified position on Sudan.

He explained that the US is currently deeply divided between Republican and Democrat strategic visions. President Joe Biden’s Democrat administration itself is divided between supporters of the civilian rule in Sudan and others who would opt for empowering the Islamists (National Congress) under the command of army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan.

Advocates of civilian rule, meanwhile, continue to propose “empty general slogans” that offer nothing in specific, continued Warraq.

He went on to say that the declared goals of the American administration are “unachievable” because they don’t follow any specific policy and they contradict Sudan’s democratic leanings. In the end, however, several of the cards to end the war lie in American hands.

“So, the civilian democratic forces need to invest in Washington’s openness to draft a specific policy that would guarantee the end of the war, reestablish the democratic system and restore Sudan’s unity based on real federal foundations,” he stressed.

War and gold

Another significant factor in the war are the networks of looting that are funding it, especially the gold miners and smugglers. Besides financing the war, the networks have led to rampant corruption and bribery in the country.

They have played a role in tearing apart the ranks of the civilian forces. The powers pursuing peace must address this problem with the West and seek sanctions on these networks, which would be a step forward in ending the war.

Another factor that should end the war is the unification of the forces of peace and civilian democratic rule. Warraq said that even though Taqaddum was the largest coalition of civilian forces, “it needs to be more open to the people and include new forces and non-partisan figures.”

It also needs to develop its internal structure to make it more effective, he suggested.

The unification of an effective and united movement of civilian democratic forces will help “remove the legitimacy of the war”, said Al-Jak, who stressed the need for the forces to refrain from adopting the narrative of either of the warring parties. Rather, they should work on stopping them.

*Rasha Awad is a Sudanese researcher and spokesperson of Taqaddum.



As the UN Turns 80, Its Crucial Humanitarian Aid Work Faces a Clouded Future

Students in an English class at a primary school run by URWA for Palestinian refugees at the Mar Elias refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon, Monday, June 2, 2025. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)
Students in an English class at a primary school run by URWA for Palestinian refugees at the Mar Elias refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon, Monday, June 2, 2025. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)
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As the UN Turns 80, Its Crucial Humanitarian Aid Work Faces a Clouded Future

Students in an English class at a primary school run by URWA for Palestinian refugees at the Mar Elias refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon, Monday, June 2, 2025. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)
Students in an English class at a primary school run by URWA for Palestinian refugees at the Mar Elias refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon, Monday, June 2, 2025. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)

At a refugee camp in northern Kenya, Aujene Cimanimpaye waits as a hot lunch of lentils and sorghum is ladled out for her and her nine children — all born while she has received United Nations assistance since fleeing her violence-wracked home in Congo in 2007.

“We cannot go back home because people are still being killed,” the 41-year-old said at the Kakuma camp, where the UN World Food Program and UN refugee agency help support more than 300,000 refugees, The Associated Press said.

Her family moved from Nakivale Refugee Settlement in neighboring Uganda three years ago to Kenya, now home to more than a million refugees from dozens of conflict-hit east African countries.

A few kilometers (miles) away at the Kalobeyei Refugee Settlement, fellow Congolese refugee Bahati Musaba, a mother of five, said that since 2016, “UN agencies have supported my children’s education — we get food and water and even medicine,” as well as cash support from WFP to buy food and other basics.

This year, those cash transfers — and many other UN aid activities — have stopped, threatening to upend or jeopardize millions of lives.

As the UN marks its 80th anniversary this month, its humanitarian agencies are facing one of the greatest crises in their history: The biggest funder — the United States — under the Trump administration and other Western donors have slashed international aid spending. Some want to use the money to build up national defense.

Some UN agencies are increasingly pointing fingers at one another as they battle over a shrinking pool of funding, said a diplomat from a top donor country who spoke on condition of anonymity to comment freely about the funding crisis faced by some UN agencies.

Such pressures, humanitarian groups say, diminish the pivotal role of the UN and its partners in efforts to save millions of lives — by providing tents, food and water to people fleeing unrest in places like Myanmar, Sudan, Syria and Venezuela, or helping stamp out smallpox decades ago.

“It’s the most abrupt upheaval of humanitarian work in the UN in my 40 years as a humanitarian worker, by far,” said Jan Egeland, a former UN humanitarian aid chief who now heads the Norwegian Refugee Council. “And it will make the gap between exploding needs and contributions to aid work even bigger.”

‘Brutal’ cuts to humanitarian aid programs UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has asked the heads of UN agencies to find ways to cut 20% of their staffs, and his office in New York has floated sweeping ideas about reform that could vastly reshape the way the United Nations doles out aid.

Humanitarian workers often face dangers and go where many others don’t — to slums to collect data on emerging viruses or drought-stricken areas to deliver water.

The UN says 2024 was the deadliest year for humanitarian personnel on record, mainly due to the war in Gaza. In February, it suspended aid operations in the stronghold of Yemen’s Houthi group, who have detained dozens of UN and other aid workers.

Proponents say UN aid operations have helped millions around the world affected by poverty, illness, conflict, hunger and other troubles.

Critics insist many operations have become bloated, replete with bureaucratic perks and a lack of accountability, and are too distant from in-the-field needs. They say postcolonial Western donations have fostered dependency and corruption, which stifles the ability of countries to develop on their own, while often UN-backed aid programs that should be time-specific instead linger for many years with no end in sight.

In the case of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning WFP and the UN’s refugee and migration agencies, the US has represented at least 40% of their total budgets, and Trump administration cuts to roughly $60 billion in US foreign assistance have hit hard. Each UN agency has been cutting thousands of jobs and revising aid spending.

“It's too brutal what has happened,” said Egeland, alluding to cuts that have jolted the global aid community. “However, it has forced us to make priorities ... what I hope is that we will be able to shift more of our resources to the front lines of humanity and have less people sitting in offices talking about the problem.”

With the UN Security Council's divisions over wars in Ukraine and the Middle East hindering its ability to prevent or end conflict in recent years, humanitarian efforts to vaccinate children against polio or shelter and feed refugees have been a bright spot of UN activity. That's dimming now.

Not just funding cuts cloud the future of UN humanitarian work

Aside from the cuts and dangers faced by humanitarian workers, political conflict has at times overshadowed or impeded their work.

UNRWA, the aid agency for Palestinian refugees, has delivered an array of services to millions — food, education, jobs and much more — in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan as well as in the West Bank and Gaza since its founding in 1948.

Israel claims the agency's schools fan antisemitic and anti-Israel sentiment, which the agency denies. Israel says Hamas siphons off UN aid in Gaza to profit from it, while UN officials insist most aid gets delivered directly to the needy.

“UNRWA is like one of the foundations of your home. If you remove it, everything falls apart,” said Issa Haj Hassan, 38, after a checkup at a small clinic at the Mar Elias Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut.

UNRWA covers his diabetes and blood pressure medication, as well as his wife’s heart medicine. The United States, Israel's top ally, has stopped contributing to UNRWA; it once provided a third of its funding. Earlier this year, Israel banned the aid group, which has strived to continue its work nonetheless.

Ibtisam Salem, a single mother of five in her 50s who shares a small one-room apartment in Beirut with relatives who sleep on the floor, said: “If it wasn’t for UNRWA we would die of starvation. ... They helped build my home, and they give me health care. My children went to their schools.”

Especially when it comes to food and hunger, needs worldwide are growing even as funding to address them shrinks.

“This year, we have estimated around 343 million acutely food insecure people,” said Carl Skau, WFP deputy executive director. “It’s a threefold increase if we compare four years ago. And this year, our funding is dropping 40%. So obviously that’s an equation that doesn’t come together easily.”

Billing itself as the world's largest humanitarian organization, WFP has announced plans to cut about a quarter of its 22,000 staff.

The aid landscape is shifting

One question is how the United Nations remains relevant as an aid provider when global cooperation is on the outs, and national self-interest and self-defense are on the upswing.

The United Nations is not alone: Many of its aid partners are feeling the pinch. Groups like GAVI, which tries to ensure fair distribution of vaccines around the world, and the Global Fund, which spends billions each year to help battle HIV, tuberculosis and malaria, have been hit by Trump administration cuts to the US Agency for International Development.

Some private-sector, government-backed groups also are cropping up, including the divisive Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has been providing some food to Palestinians. But violence has erupted as crowds try to reach the distribution sites.

The future of UN aid, experts say, will rest where it belongs — with the world body's 193 member countries.

“We need to take that debate back into our countries, into our capitals, because it is there that you either empower the UN to act and succeed — or you paralyze it,” said Achim Steiner, administrator of the UN Development Program.