The Face of Truth: Sudan: The Dilemma of Relief and International Condemnation
Ibrahim Shglawi
The humanitarian tragedy in Sudan has become an undeniable reality, confirmed by explicit testimonies from within the United Nations system itself. Yet this consensus is met with a genuine practical void, as reports and warnings accumulate while legal and humanitarian responses remain unable to keep pace with the scale of the catastrophe.
The question remains—humanitarian, political, and moral:
Why does international will fail to rise to the level of the consequences of the war? And who benefits from keeping Sudan captive to a cycle of denunciation and condemnation without tangible action?
The UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, Reem Alsalem, described the situation in Sudan yesterday, according to news agencies, as “catastrophic and worse than imagined.” Following a field visit to several states, she confirmed that sexual violence is being used as a systematic weapon of war, not as isolated incidents. This testimony does not fall within the realm of human rights monitoring alone; it constitutes a political characterization of the nature of the conflict, in which women and girls are targeted to destroy the social fabric and turn the human body into a battlefield for the Rapid Support Forces militia.
UN testimonies reveal a complex pattern of violations that goes beyond direct victims to affect families and communities, where relatives are forced to witness crimes. The situation is exacerbated by fear of social stigma, meaning that documented figures represent only a limited fraction of the truth. This physical violence is accompanied by systematic economic violence, manifested in the looting of homes, theft of crops, destruction of infrastructure, and stripping communities of their sources of livelihood.
Accordingly, the war in Sudan is not waged by weapons alone, but through policies of impoverishment, starvation, and displacement, in an attempt to entrench illusions of famine used as a tool of subjugation and blackmail against the Sudanese government, and to project an image of loss of control and state collapse.
Despite the United Nations’ acknowledgment of the weakness of the humanitarian response compared to the scale of the catastrophe, data from the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the World Food Programme indicate limited funding for the response plan, at a time when nearly half the population requires urgent assistance and millions of Sudanese face severe food insecurity. The World Food Programme has warned that Sudan is at risk of becoming the worst hunger crisis in the world if this pattern of failure continues.
In the political context, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, affirmed that Sudan is “trapped in a proxy war fought for control over its natural resources,” warning that what occurred in El Fasher and Kordofan represents “the most dangerous anticipated crimes that could have been prevented.” He added that the international community “pretends to care but acts little,” an important legal and moral admission that exposes structural paralysis within the UN system.
When mass rapes, ethnic executions, forced displacement, and the destruction of livelihoods are used as systematic tools of war, and these acts are carried out within the context of regional and international interests, the matter goes beyond describing violations to the level of crimes that require accountability, including the designation of the Rapid Support Forces militia as a terrorist organization. This demand has become a political and legal entitlement, grounded in credible UN testimonies and the very nature of the violations themselves.
On the relief front, despite the Sudanese government’s facilitation of aid entry through airports and crossings, the international response has remained limited and fragmented. Previous experiences in Yemen and Syria, as well as relief operations in Sudan, reveal that delays in delivering aid are not neutrality or incapacity, but a stance that rises to the level of complicity, with a heavy human cost measured in civilian lives.
In conclusion, Sudan’s real crisis lies in the gap of international will and the failure of the UN system to translate condemnation into accountability and concrete action. While millions of Sudanese are left to face hunger, violence, and displacement, the crisis turns into a harsh test of the credibility of the international system, where protecting victims and freeing humanitarian aid from geopolitical calculations become the bare minimum of a long-overdue duty.
According to #Face_of_Truth, the UN trajectory toward Sudan reveals a profound betrayal expressed in feeble legal language. While UN reports, including testimonies of the Special Rapporteur on violence against women, have acknowledged the commission of systematic rape, mass displacement, and widespread killing, the Rapid Support Forces militia continues to be treated as a party to the conflict rather than as a terrorist organization, despite the availability of the elements of war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. This contradiction between acknowledgment and inaction reflects UN political paralysis that has left Sudanese people as victims without protection, complete evidence without accountability, at a moment when law was supposed to prevail, not be suspended in the name of international balances.
With wishes of well-being and health.
Sunday, 28 December 2025
Shglawi55@gmail.com