{"id":15550,"date":"2024-08-10T07:09:55","date_gmt":"2024-08-10T14:09:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=15550"},"modified":"2025-11-15T23:13:24","modified_gmt":"2025-11-16T07:13:24","slug":"issue-of-the-week-war-human-rights-hunger-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=15550","title":{"rendered":"Issue of the Week: War, Human Rights, Hunger"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Back to News<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The War The World Forgot<\/em>, August 11, 2024, The New York Times Magazine<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The world is on fire with war and has been for some time. Russia invading Ukraine and Israel at war with Hamas in Gaza, with Hezbollah attacking from Lebanon and Iran directly attacking Israel for the first time) are the best best known examples. The lack of consciousness beyond this (and the often one-dimensional consciousness about these examples) is a disgrace to all of the human race–and symptomatic of why we are where we are in the evolution\/devolution struggle of the species. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

War and deadly conflict are raging other places as well. The most infamous at present is Sudan. As the writer here said in the video on this news page in Reflections from the founder<\/em>, “Remember Sudan? Nah, not there anymore. Remember when it was like front page headline, it was the top of the news all the time, for a while, and then poof, gone. Do you think it\u2019s gotten better? No, its gotten way, way worse.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ukraine was already raging for some time and Gaza starting when this happened. Except not-fun fact: Sudan was worse in the basics most people react to. Probably at least 150,000 killed, more displaced internally than anywhere in the world and countless millions hungry and starving, more than Ukraine or Gaza by far. Famine on the level of the infamous mid-eighties famine in Ethiopia is starting–the latter being the famine that rallied the whole world to do something about, exemplified by “Live Aid” (which our documentary supplied the factual information for the brodcast). Darfur, in South Sudan, was again becoming the image it was not so long ago of genocide. Every worst thing was and is converging. And except for a brief hopeful moment, this is part of a long history including the Arabs in the North selling the Blacks in the South into slavery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why did Sudan go from being the primary news story to non-existent? The other two major wars and threat of their spread are crucial to the planet not exploding as we have written about at length. But so is Sudan. And all, along with other wars and even worse horror on the planet in terms of human damage and threat to human survival is rarely given light, much less righteous activism. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We’ll return to that multidimensional question before long. But our first obligation at the moment is to shed light on this grotesque conflagration in Sudan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We do so by relying on an old friend that often provides journailstic brilliance–the New York Times Magazine. As said before, we rely on the Times more than we wish we needed to. But another horrible story of our times is how journalism and particulalry newspapers have been destroyed, not just by the easy explanation of technology, but by choices of profit far beyond need–the age old story, and a system to protect the public interest which has in many ways been dismantled. So the Times is one of the few, and in many ways singular resources (although it too has succumbed to the worst aspects of the above at times) with the reach and quality to provide what is needed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In tomorrow’s Magazine (online now), the article “The War The World Forgot” is as wrenching and riveting and illuminating as it gets, thanks to the bravery and ingenuity of two journalists, Nicholas Casey and Moises Saman. The first is the writer and the second the photographer, with the work of both being stunning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here are some excerpts from the start of the story:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the time I reached the hilltop over Kadugli in June, the war in Sudan had been raging for 1 year, 2 months and 7 days \u2014 more time than the war in Gaza, less than the one in Ukraine. Yet despite having killed many thousands of people and displacing millions more, this brutal civil war has remained nearly unknown to most of the world. Many NGOs no longer operate in the country. The United States Embassy fled to Ethiopia shortly after the fighting erupted. I arrived in Sudan with the help of a rebel group that controlled parts of the south. Armed men ushered me in over a muddy border road two weeks before without even a stamp in my passport.<\/em> …<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sudan\u2019s war has <\/strong>left nearly 11 million people displaced from their homes \u2014 more than the entire population of New York City, and currently the single largest population of internal refugees anywhere in the world. One U.S. State Department official estimated in May that as many as 150,000 people might be dead in the fighting, though the chaos has made an accurate body count impossible. Hospitals have ceased operating. Khartoum\u2019s international airport is a ghost town, overrun by militiamen. Western Darfur, on the country\u2019s frontier with Chad, stands besieged by paramilitary groups who have rekindled the ethnic cleansing<\/a> that made Darfur a household name in the 2000s.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then there is the threat of starvation, the specter that haunts nearly all conflicts in Africa and makes no distinction between civilian and combatant. More than 15 million Sudanese faced crisis-level food insecurity even before the war began. Since then, the fighting has destroyed not just schools and roads but also farms and agricultural infrastructure, as the warring parties pillage the countryside to sustain themselves. The possibility of a great famine, like the one that ravaged Ethiopia in the 1980s, has become real again. Yet in a world already ravaged by entrenched wars and the threat of more, the tragedy of Sudan has hardly registered in many corners. Protesters do not march on capitals demanding a cease-fire. The United States has kept its distance. \u201cFor a Full Year, the Bodies Have Piled Up in Sudan \u2014 and Still the World Looks Away\u201d<\/a> was the headline of a piece this April by Nesrine Malik, a columnist at the British newspaper The Guardian who writes about the country and was born there.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here’s the full story:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“The War The World Forgot”<\/a>, By Nicholas Casey, Photographs and Video by Moises Saman, August 10, 2024<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inside the Mountain Stronghold of an Elusive Rebel Movement<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the conflict in Sudan rages on, an army has built its own state within a state \u2014 a vision of what the nation could become.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nicholas Casey and Moises Saman spent two weeks traveling with a rebel group in Sudan to document the civil war there.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n