Your editorial (15 May) is right to state that there is no more time to be lost in stopping Sudan’s civil war, but exactly how this should be achieved is not explained. Even if the security council had an appetite for reviving Unamid, the hybrid UN/African Union peacekeeping operation in Darfur that was closed in 2020, it would be no more effective than its predecessor, itself an expensive spectator to the violent clearances of peasant farmers in Darfur. But as there is no international political will for such military gestures, what is to be done?
After decades of marginalisation, Sudan’s pastoralist herders started hitting back in 2003, destroying peasant farmers’ villages and converting the most favoured agricultural zones in Sudan into gigantic militarised ranches.
Since December 2023, the Rapid Support Forces have been repeating this process in Gezira, Sudan’s largest irrigated agricultural scheme. All this to take advantage of the burgeoning livestock trade with the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia, and now re-established as Sudan’s leading export industry.
This is the principal driver of Sudan’s civil war. The fastest and most effective way of stopping it would be to control this trade and thereby remove the incentives that underlie the brutal land clearances. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states could stop the war in Sudan at a stroke by adopting ethical trade policies that exclude all livestock exported from Sudan’s killing fields.
Nicholas Stockton
Retired UN senior humanitarian adviser; former Oxfam director of emergencies
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