Warring Sides in Sudan Use Access to Food as a Weapon

ADF STAFF

Of all the weapons at their disposal, Sudan’s two warring generals have turned in recent months to one that is cheap, familiar and devastating: starvation.

“Both the SAF (Sudanese Armed Forces) and the RSF (Rapid Support Forces) are using food as a weapon and starving civilians,” a panel of United Nations experts reported recently. They described the situation in Sudan as unprecedented.

About 25.6 million people — half of Sudan’s population — face a food crisis across 14 areas, including Darfur, Khartoum and al-Gezira, the heart of Sudan’s agricultural zone. As many as 2.5 million people could die from starvation by October, according to experts.

The war has disrupted Sudan’s agricultural production following on the heels of 2023 when food production was also lower than normal.

“This dire situation is not the result of a bad harvest or climate-induced food scarcity,” Sudan expert Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation, wrote recently. “It is the direct consequence of actions by both sides of Sudan’s terrible civil war.”

Along with starvation, diseases such as malaria are sweeping through populations weakened by hunger.

As RSF fighters have moved across southern Sudan from Darfur to Sennar, they have looted homes and shops of everything they can carry away. They are also raiding international aid storehouses. The communities they conquer are left with nothing.

“The RSF fighters operate like human locusts,” de Waal wrote.

In North Darfur, where the RSF has laid siege to the SAF-controlled capital, el-Fasher, residents have turned to eating dirt to survive.

Garang Achien Akok and his family fled to North Darfur in December after Arab militiamen attacked their community and burned their home. Akok told Reuters he watches helplessly as his wife and children roll soil into balls and swallow it with water.

“I keep telling them not to do it, but it’s hunger,” he said. “There is nothing I can do.”

Elsewhere in the Darfur region, el-Geneina, the capital of West Darfur, is the African city most remote from a seaport. In normal times, deliveries take weeks to get there. Since the RSF took control of West Darfur, the region is completely cut off from supplies.

For its part, the SAF is using its control over Port Sudan to block the transport of food and other imports to regions outside its control. The strategy aims to turn RSF fighters against their leadership.

International organizations have called up on the SAF and its leader, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, to relent and allow aid convoys to move across the front lines into RSF-controlled territory. Al-Burhan, the country’s de facto president, continues to refuse to do so.

Experts say al-Burhan is taking a lesson from Sudanese history by using starvation as a weapon against his enemies. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Sudanese leadership tried to starve out rebels in then-southern Sudan to put down a rebellion there. According to analysts, Sudan’s leaders eventually relented under international pressure and later saw those aid deliveries as a key reason the rebellion led to South Sudan independence in 2011.

“Even today, the generals who led those efforts regret that international humanitarian aid prevented them from taking that war of starvation to its logical conclusion,” de Waal wrote.

U.N. experts have called on both sides to stop blocking aid and looting local resources. De Waal sees that as unlikely.

“Neither side is likely to relent on its own,” de Waal wrote. “Starvation is cheap and effective, and without strong international pressure. The leaders expect to get away with it.”