If so, he seriously underestimated the determination of the Ukrainian
people to fight for their independence and for democracy. And clearly
Hemeti had not calculated that the war could do severe damage to the
authority of the military junta in Khartoum. But Sudan relies on Ukraine
and Russia for more than a third of its wheat. The World Food
Programme has said that nearly half the population of 44 million will
fall into what it called “acute food insecurity.”
Corinne Fleischer, the WFP’s regional MENA director was speaking more broadly but had Sudan in mind when she noted:
“We are extremely concerned about the millions of people in this
region who are already struggling to access enough food because of a
toxic combination of conflict, climate change and the economic aftermath
of Covid-19. People’s resilience is at a breaking point. This crisis is
creating shock waves in the food markets that touch every home in this
region. No one is spared.”
Rampant price rises sparked by the invasion have further exacerbated a
situation that had already witnessed the collapse of the Sudan pound
after it was devalued on 8 March, reducing purchasing power by a fifth.
Civilians who had come into the streets in the days and weeks after
the coup calling for a return to a transitional government that would
put Sudan on the road to a democracy now face the harshly existential
threat of hunger set against the backdrop of a military regime showing
itself to be not only brutal and corrupt but incompetent in the face of
the accelerating food crisis caused by Putin’s war.
That may be why the junta released 25 protesters on 22 April. Their
release was noted in a tweet from the Emergency Lawyers Committee which
decried the continued detention of dozens of others: “Freedom,” the lawyers tweeted “is a right not a gift.”
Among those still held incommunicado is a former cabinet minister
in Hamdok’s civilian government Khalid Omar Yousif. He had also been
engaged with a task force aimed at reclaiming properties for the state
held by the former dictator Omar al-Bashir who was overthrown in the
uprising of 2019. In a gesture of support the British Embassy set an empty place for Yousif at an iftar meal on 22 April.
With various reports that al-Burhan and Hemeti are jousting
with each other to see who will gain ascendancy in a newly entrenched
military dictatorship the latter may come to regret his junket to Moscow
as the war drags on and Russia’s military inadequacies on the
battlefield further reinforce Putin’s international pariah status. But
for both men, as they compete for power and authority, the war
represents an immediate threat.
Kholood Khair from the Insight Strategy Partners think-tank in
Khartoum made a salient point when she was interviewed by Al Jazeera:
The food insecurity issue is … one of the reasons that Omar
al-Bashir fell. The inability of Burhan and Hemeti to manage the hunger
crisis will be a big challenge … Russia won’t be able to just give them
wheat.