Thousands of people had been killed and seven million had fled their homes. In that time, Sudan was mentioned on 12 separate occasions in the Dáil; 10 of these focused on the risks to Irish citizens there. Since then, the media has reported daily on the news from Gaza, keeping a running total of those killed. For Sudan, however, there has been no running total, because news has been so sparse. The total killed in Gaza is now between 30,000 (according to Israel’s estimate, as of last month) and 37,000 (according to figures produced by the Hamas-run health service, last week). Estimates of deaths in Sudan have ranged from 15,000 to 30,000, but the US special envoy to Sudan, Tom Perriello, told the Senate recently that those estimates could be out by a factor of 10 or 15 and that some had estimated a death total of 150,000. So the level of fatalities in Sudan is comparable with that in Gaza, or worse – but deaths in Sudan have provoked nothing like the outrage amongst the Western (and Irish) public at deaths in Gaza. Other consequences of war which have — rightly — been newsworthy in Gaza have barely been newsworthy in Sudan. The allegation of genocide against Israel has been a mainstay both of commentary and protest; genocide has also been alleged against one of the parties in the Sudanese civil war, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), to little international response. In Gaza, three quarters of the population — 1.7 million people — have been displaced. Almost 10 million are displaced within Sudan, with a further two million Sudanese having fled to neighbouring countries. In Gaza, more people are at immediate risk of famine than anywhere else in the world, according to the global monitoring standard known as the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC). However, Sudan is the second-most food-insecure place — and the numbers ultimately at risk in Sudan are far greater. So the level of fatalities in Sudan is comparable with that in Gaza, or worse A collective of UN agencies warned recently the people of Sudan were at “imminent risk of famine”, with 18 million already acutely hungry, including 3.6 million children who are acutely malnourished. Coverage of the threat of famine in Gaza has been constant since Israel first blocked aid deliveries, last October. That threat in Sudan has barely broken through to the mainstream news. This disproportion in attention is evident internationally and domestically. Since October 7, Gaza has been mentioned hundreds of times in Dáil debates, with multiple mentions at leaders’ questions and dedicated debates on recognition of the state of Palestine and the International Court of Justice genocide case against Israel. In the same period, Sudan has been discussed once, for barely a few minutes. (It has also received a few brief discussions at the foreign affairs committee.) (That anti-semitism may be a factor at the aggregate does not mean any individual’s outrage or protest is anti-semitic. I think protest an appropriate response to Netanyahu’s war on Gaza; I just wish it could be protested without endorsing the apparent obliteration of Israel “from the river to the sea”.) But anti-semitism is far from the only cause of this disproportion. Identity is a factor: the Western left (and Irish republicans) have long identified with the Palestinian cause (as they once did with the anti-apartheid movement), while conservatives (and Northern unionists) have often championed Zionism. Tribal identify has only room for so many inflections; the Middle East crowds out other causes. The media, too, has room for only so many narratives: after Ukraine and Gaza, there is little bandwidth left. Complexity is another factor. Though the Middle East is itself endlessly complex, those who seek to do so can reduce it to a satisfying binary of good and evil. There have been no calls for a boycott of the UAE, no pressure on our politicians to speak out and precious few editorials This Sudanese civil war, meanwhile, is a bewildering new permutation in a country long riven by post-colonial dysfunction and resource-fuelled corruption. This time, the factions are based neither on ethnicity nor geography but on a personal power struggle — between the head of the army, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and his former deputy, Hemedti, a one-time Janjaweed warlord who heads the paramilitary RSF. So there may be multiple reasons why any one producer or consumer of news, or politician, chooses to focus on Gaza rather than on Sudan. But if the causes at the individual level are opaque, the effects at the aggregate are transparent. Sudan needs $2.26bn (€2.1bn) in humanitarian funding this year (according to OCHA); less than one dollar in eight has been provided. Political capital is a scarce resource, too; leaders have to choose where to spend it. Madeleine Albright was the US ambassador to the United Nations during the Rwandan genocide. Asked, later, to explain why the US had failed to intervene to stop the genocide, she said the phones weren’t ringing: there was insufficient pressure on the administration to make it a priority. Sudan may seem remote and obscure to us but, like any other country with sought-after resources (gold) and a strategic location, it is bound into the global economy and regional geopolitics, in particular through the United Arab Emirates. Dubai is the hub for the gold exports helping to fund the RSF, and the UAE is believed to have supplied the RSF with weapons. (The UAE has denied this.) The US could exert greater direct pressure on the warring sides and indirectly via the UAE. The Biden administration has pushed for a ceasefire in Sudan, but has done so merely through a special envoy, while the attention of that envoy’s boss, secretary of state Antony Blinken, is focused elsewhere — on a ceasefire in Gaza. Ireland, too, could choose to exert influence, via trade links: our exports to the UAE, at roughly half a billion euro, are comparable to our exports to Israel. But there have been no calls for a boycott of the UAE, no pressure on our politicians to speak out, no protests, precious few editorials. The phones aren’t ringing.
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