EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview was recorded prior to the horrific landslide that killed an estimated 1,000 people in Sudan’s Marra Mountains.
Over half of Sudan’s population, more than 30 million people, urgently need humanitarian assistance according to the UN, so where is the global outcry? Where are the headlines? And where is the help the Sudanese people desperately need? Mehdi speaks to Nesrine Malik, an award-winning British Sudanese columnist for the Guardian, and Niemat Ahmadi, leader of the Darfur Women Action Group, to find out why the atrocities in Sudan are so neglected.
“Many people have died in silence,” says Ahmadi, a survivor of the 2003 Darfur genocide herself, “People walk into Tawila [town in Darfur], and when they come there, women will remove their children from their backs only to realize that these children are dead.” Sudan’s suffering is not limited to war, displacement, and hunger, but also to diseases. As of August, there have been 99,700 suspected cases of cholera and more than 2,470 cholera-related deaths.
“There are actually no words to describe the suffering that people are going through,” says Malik, one year on since her last conversation with Mehdi on the show. Mehdi asks the Guardian Columnist how one can bring attention to the suffering in her country without the ‘Whataboutism’ often employed by supporters of Israel looking to pull attention away from Gaza.
“One of the biggest frustrations of trying to get attention for Sudan is that it has been used as a tool to prove that the concern for genocide elsewhere is motivated by a kind of nefarious actors,” says Malik, “I think people have a huge amount of bandwidth to be able to understand that other human beings are suffering elsewhere.”
Mehdi asks Ahmadi and Malik about the role of the United Arab Emirates in fueling this war by allegedly arming the RSF, how women in parts of the country are under constant risk of sexual violence, and how an end to the conflict can be reached.
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