People rest in a makeshift encampment near the town of Tawila, in war-torn Sudan's western Darfur region, on April 13.-/AFP/Getty Images
Meredith Preston McGhie is the secretary general of the Global Centre for Pluralism. She has facilitated and supported a range of peace processes in Sudan and across Africa over the past 25 years and continues to advise and support civilian efforts to end the war in Sudan.
As global assaults on democracy continue, Canada should be at the forefront of defending the systems and movements that support democracies around the world. And if we are serious about this mission, our leadership must extend to efforts to achieve peace in Sudan.
Sudan’s humanitarian crisis is the worst in the world. El Fasher, a town of around one million inhabitants (roughly the population of Ottawa), has been under siege for more than 500 days. Walls have been built around the city to hem in the residents. People are being shot for trying to leave. This is biblical in its scope and scale and cruelty.
Here’s what you need to know about the war in Sudan, including how the conflict started, and its human toll so far.
Headlines capture this horror, but they also risk numbing us into inaction. Is this not endless suffering without meaning? Anne Applebaum recently wrote that this was a “war about nothing,” but what this misses is that it is a war against democracy – one of the defining global struggles of our time.
There is a risk that we miss the real texture of places like Sudan in our litany of catastrophes of the day. Sudan is not only a battlefield. It is a society with deep history, music, art and culture; its universities have been intellectual engines that have reached far beyond its borders. It is a country of farmers, traders, doctors, engineers, artists, politicians, activists, intellectuals, and so much more. To consign it to being a place of endless conflict erases both the richness of the society as well as the causes of the war.
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These causes are not only Sudan’s. They present us with stark lessons about what it means for democracy when institutions are weakened and undermined, when identities are weaponized, and when the tools of the state are captured for use against its people. These are stories we have seen elsewhere – and continue to see, in different forms, around us today.
We can learn from the legacy of collective action in Sudan as we think about resisting authoritarian moves. We can learn from the decades of careful and quiet organizing that led to the revolution that removed Omar al-Bashir from power in 2019. We can see the legacy of this in brave civic responses today – in the Emergency Response Rooms working against huge odds to deliver assistance, in the leadership of women and youth who continue to hold the line for democracy and talk across divides, embracing the complexity of every civilians’ predicament in the war. We see it in the civilian leaders and political parties still trying to carve out an independent space amid the forces of the war. They are the ones who will lead Sudan toward peace – if the world gives them meaningful support.
So, as we think about how we defend democracy around the world, let us not only think about Ukraine, Taiwan and our European friends and allies. We need to support democratic civilians in Sudan.
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To truly do so, we must see Sudan in its fullness, as a society of contradictions and complexity. Peace must be rooted in the leadership of independent Sudanese civilians who have long struggled for democracy. The failure of any meaningful move toward peace is not only a Sudanese tragedy, but a blunt warning that peace is constantly under threat in the global fight against authoritarianism. Let this not be one more time the international community – and Canada – failed to stand up for democracy, thus emboldening ever more anti-democratic forces through our collective inaction.
Canada has an opportunity to do more if we are committed to being a global leader defending democracy. We can support civilian networks working to hold the Sudanese social fabric together across deeply polarized spaces, protect civilians, and negotiate access and build pressure for a real peace process to take place. We can engage more to build spaces for real discussions of peace and the future of Sudan – a future where its people are at the centre. This is real and meaningful work that Canada should be at the forefront of leading.
The world’s many conflicts and the high-profile siege of El Fasher deserve our attention and action, but so does Sudan in its entirety, as a full, complex, and nuanced society. That’s what makes this conflict about the survival of democracy itself. The stakes are high – and they matter for Canada.