We Can’t Bear to Think About Sudan and Haiti, So We Don’t
Media and governments in the West pay far less attention to the suffering there than in Ukraine or Gaza. The primary reason is not racism.
War of all against all.
Photographer: AFP via Getty Images
Desperate to find food for their children, the women go into the fields to forage, only to be raped, to come home and then to return to the same fields the next day. So one Sudanese woman told Tom Perriello, who was appointed US Special Envoy to Sudan last month. The people he met there told him the country was a “hell hole.”
For most Western observers, the scale and nature of the suffering in Sudan, like the origins and logic of the multi-layered conflicts causing it, exceed comprehension. One year into the most recent outbreak of warfare (of many rounds since Sudan’s independence in 1956), genocidal killing and famine have returned with a vengeance. The United Nations reports mass graves and gang rapes, 18 million people at risk of starvation, and almost 10 million displaced within the country in addition to the 1.8 million who’ve fled to neighboring states such as Chad and South Sudan, which are themselves in dire straits.