Sudan and Acute Malnutrition of Young Children in El Fasher in Darfur
Kanako Mita, Sawako Utsumi, and Lee Jay Walker
Modern Tokyo Times
Last year, the United Nations urged the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and allied Arab militias to lift the siege of El Fasher (Al-Fashir). Despite this pressure, one year later, approximately 40% of young children in the city suffer from acute malnutrition.
Darfur gained international attention during the conflict between 2003 and 2005, when Arab militias were accused of carrying out brutal massacres against Black African communities—including the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa—resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths. Today, the region is once again gripped by violence. Since the outbreak of the current conflict in Sudan, ethnic attacks have resumed, once more targeting Black African populations across Darfur.
UN News reports, “Since April 2023, an estimated 780,000 people have been displaced from El Fasher town and the nearby Zamzam displacement camps, including nearly 500,000 in April and May of this year.”
Famine conditions have been ongoing since August of last year in El Fashir. However, unlike the crises in Gaza or the war between the Russian Federation and Ukraine, the humanitarian emergencies in countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Sudan, Yemen, and others—where populations face severe challenges ranging from malnutrition to ethnic and sectarian violence—often receive limited global attention or are obscured by non-sanitized or politicized language that defames Israel and the Russian Federation.
As a result, children and countless others continue to die in Sudan—and in similarly afflicted nations—with scarcely a word of acknowledgment from the international community.
Stéphane Dujarric (United Nations spokesperson) said, “Conflict and collapsing infrastructure continue to drive the spread of the disease and impede response efforts.”
Accordingly, at least 32,000 suspected cholera cases have been reported in Sudan so far this year. Beyond cholera, a range of other conflict-related health crises—stemming from widespread malnutrition, the collapse of the healthcare system, and a lack of access to safe water—are also claiming lives.
AFP reports, “The fighting in Darfur, with brutal attacks from the Arab-dominated Rapid Support Forces on ethnic African civilians, is reviving fears of another genocide, back in the early 2000s, when as many as 300,000 people were killed and 2.7 million were driven from their homes, many by government-backed Arab militias.”
The BBC reports, “Armed men are raping and sexually assaulting children as young as one during Sudan’s civil war, says the UN children’s agency, Unicef.”
Catherine Russell (the Executive Director of UNICEF – actively involved in highlighting the crisis in Sudan) said, “Children as young as one being raped by armed men should shock anyone to their core and compel immediate action… Millions of children in Sudan are at risk of rape and other forms of sexual violence, which is being used as a tactic of war. This is an abhorrent violation of international law and could constitute a war crime. It must stop.”
Unfortunately, international protests condemning the brutalization and killings of Black Africans by Arab Muslim groups in Sudan and surrounding areas have not sparked the same level of global outrage as events in Gaza or the conflict between the Russian Federation and Ukraine.
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