The Neighbours Are Burning
One of the best gifts that I got with my marriage was the Sudanese half of my husband’s family. They are warm, loving, accepting, and have a real joy of living and helping others that I appreciated from the first moment I met them. Where much of his Egyptian family seemed to be looking at me like “And what are we supposed to do with THIS?” The Sudanese family just opened their arms, laughed when I had trouble remembering who was who, and made me feel welcome. I visited them twice in Sudan, once just before my son was born and a second time when he was about 18 months old. The ups and downs of Sudanese politics and then the logistics of growing families kept us out of Sudan later, but the same things brought many of them to Cairo in later years and our children’s generation became friends.
Our family are, for the most part, out of Sudan now. We are all thankful for their safety, but families in the Middle East are extended, not nuclear, so we all know that not everyone is safe. All of us with Sudanese families are aware of the fact that they are not all outside of Sudan, that they may be scattered all over north Africa now out of touch with other family members. And most of all we are aware that although there are many people in Sudan who wanted to have a civilian government, they too are scattered, many are hiding, but many of them are still trying to do what a government is SUPPOSED to do (although it rarely happens), which is to provide for its people.
The ghouls who are fighting each other in Sudan are neither a government when combined nor when they are separated. They are basically mercenary forces fighting over whatever is being left lying on the roads after the bombings. The RSV have their hands on the Sudanese gold mines, and have been shipping the gold to the Wagner Group in Russia. The SAF (allegedly the armed forces of Sudan who want to run the country as the armed forces to the north run Egypt) want the gold mines. This is not a fight over ideas, needs, or ethics. It is a fight for booty. They don’t care about the people, the cities, or the country. They just want to take things. Everyone is wringing their hands and crying out for truces or negotiated settlements, but this isn’t going to happen when two mercenary forces who are looking forward to collecting on pay day.
At the very least, everyone in Africa should be looking to this conflict and taking some serious hints that are being writ large over one of the largest and theoretically richest countries in the continent. One army cannot properly run a country without a citizenship in government. Egypt’s steady slide into insolvency on the back of loans for vanity projects should be evidence of that.
The saying is that when elephants fight, it is the grass that dies. With the changes in climate these days, that grass is dying and drying, which makes the situation ripe for wildfires.
