Sudan’s war enters a fourth year

0:00This message comes from Working Forest Initiative. In American working forests, their professionals, from GIS analysts to biologists and even accountants, are committed to planting more trees than they harvest. They all have a role to play in planting for the future. Together, they aim to plant more than 1 billion seedlings in American working forests every year. They believe that protecting their working forests for tomorrow starts with planting more than they harvest today. Learn more at WorkingForestsInitiative.com. Today on State of the World, Sudan enters a fourth year of war.

0:41You're listening to State of the World from NPR, the day's most vital international stories, up close where they're happening. It's Wednesday, April 15th. I'm Christine Arismeth. In Sudan, in northeastern Africa, what began as a power struggle between the army and a paramilitary force spiraled into a devastating war that's now entering its fourth year. The scale of the crisis is hard to overstate. Nearly 14 million people have been displaced. Millions face severe hunger and famine. And some estimates suggest that as many as 400 ,000 people have died. While parts of the country show signs of recovery, elsewhere the situation continues to worsen.

1:27And so, a warning to our listeners, some details in this story are disturbing. NPR's Emmanuel Akinwotu begins in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum.

1:42Music spills out onto a busy street while traffic threads through a battered capital, gradually returning to life. It's been three years since the fighting broke out here in Khartoum, destroying one of Africa's major cities. Today, it's showing signs of a slow revival. The government is back in the capital. The airport reopened. And the UN says thousands of displaced people have slowly returned over the last year.

2:11But the city is still a shadow of its former self. Power and water remain scarce, while schools, hospitals and mosques are slowly being repaired. But the war is far from over between the Sudanese government and its former ally, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, or RSF.

2:32While a tentative peace holds in Khartoum, beyond the capital, whole communities have been scattered, living fractured lives in displacement camps like this one in Darfur. Here you can see the sorrow. Here you can see the hunger. Here you can see the diseases. Mohamed Tijani works for CARE, an NGO supporting aid camps and hospitals in Darfur, in the remote west of the country. This first time for me to understand what it means to be humiliated and broken, powerless. Tijani says the level of human suffering in Darfur was unimaginable. A woman told me that I buried two of my children because of hunger.

3:14Many of the men have been killed, while the women who've survived have often endured the worst. In the street, they search you, she says. They search your whole body, and they humiliate the girls.

3:33This teenage girl is sheltering in a nearby camp run by Plan International. We withheld her name to protect her identity. She was living in El Fashir, a regional capital in Darfur, that was besieged by the RSF for 18 months before it fell to them last year. Tens of thousands of people were killed in the violence the UN said bore the hallmarks of genocide.

3:59One girl was tied to a tree for three days in front of us, she said. Our friend was raped and couldn't speak. When she fled the city, she and other girls were stopped on a desert road by the RSF. They were raped, then whipped, and only then the fighters let them go. Almost nowhere is safe.

4:26Drone attacks like this one last month in Dufour have been increasing. In the first three months of this year, more civilians were killed in drone strikes than at any other point in the war. The front line of the conflict has now moved to the heart of the country, while new fronts are emerging, fuelled by international actors, including the United Arab Emirates, accused of backing the RSF. War crimes investigators and human rights advocates like myself kept thinking that all was required for concerted international action to stop this war was just one more massacre. Nathaniel Raymond is executive director of Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab, which has submitted evidence of atrocities to the UN Security Council.

5:08So far, he says, those warnings have gone unheeded. As we reach the third year, the state of the war in Sudan has become a mirror that reflects back the world's inaction on the largest humanitarian crisis currently occurring. Emmanuel Akinwatu, NPR News, Lagos.

5:33that's the state of the world from npr thanks for listening this message comes from working forests initiative in american working forests their professionals from gis analysts to biologists and even accountants are committed to planting more trees than they harvest they all have a role to play in planting for the future together they aim to plant more than 1 billion seedlings in American working forests every year. They believe that protecting their working forests for tomorrow starts with planting more than they harvest today. Learn more at workingforestsinitiative.com. These days, it feels like the news changes every hour.

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