Burning in Silence: When Sudan Dies

“Hi! We’re fundraising for the crisis in Sudan right now —”

“Sorry, I’m not interested.”

The past week of my life has been defined by the repetition of this interaction, accompanied by glances of pity and discomfort as I haul around posters and flyers advertising the fundraiser for medical relief for the crisis in Sudan. My peers avoid eye contact, cross the street, or rush to classes, dodging another plea for money for another seemingly backwards nation in crisis.

And it’s not to say that such a reaction is entirely unwarranted. In a world where we, as struggling college students, are inundated by a slew of worthy causes, it is hard — and frankly, emotionally taxing — to pick and choose which ones to amplify and donate to.

But what my peers do not realize is that to me, this is everything. The home and livelihood of my family, the streets I spent my childhood wandering — bombed and burned before my eyes.

On April 15, a war broke out in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, between the national army and a powerful paramilitary group. In the two weeks since, hundreds of civilians have been killed and thousands more wounded. More than half of Khartoum’s 59 hospitals have been shut down by the crisis, leaving very few open facilities to service its population of 6.3 million. Water and electricity have been cut off across much of the city, and the United Nations has termed the situation a humanitarian catastrophe.

Yet, many international relief organizations have stopped operations in Sudan. Powerful nations, including the United States, have pulled out their diplomatic personnel through emergency military evacuations in the span of barely over a week.

If you’ve been on Instagram or watched the news in the past few weeks, you may have caught glimpses of the crisis: Pictures of the capital burning, videos of soldiers firing into homes, and loaded tanks parading through the ash-covered streets. Alternatively, you may have heard about the crisis from the several people and organizations supporting the fundraiser at Harvard.

But these short interactions can only help so much, because the media continues to focus primarily on death and destruction rather than the conflict’s humanitarian toll, framing my people as complicit in a war we have no stake in. A war which cannot be won.

Corpses now litter the streets I walked just a few months ago, in a city where it is now a privilege to escape from and become a refugee. Yet it seems that the plight of Sudan falls upon deaf ears, our suffering almost an expectation of the international community. There is a perception that this is, and has always been, our normal.

I cannot help but compare our situation today to the beginning of the war in Ukraine a little over a year ago. Harvard flew Ukrainian flags in solidarity with American ones, held vigils and fundraisers, and hosted political discussions that were not suggestions but the expectation. I wonder why, when the current humanitarian toll is comparable, that the same courtesy and care is not afforded to us as well.

The answer, quite simply, is that where I see the beautiful, endless, glittering Nile, the towering pyramids, the rich and fertile soils that have raised generations of my family, and the fierce warriors of my proud Nubian bloodline, the world sees violence, death, and destruction.

How can the world possibly see humanity now when our African bodies were written off as disposable centuries ago?

How can it understand that we have one of the richest traditions of successful democratic civil uprisings in the world?

How can it see that when the coup came, when our democratic dreams of 2019 were dashed by the Sudanese military in 2021, we continued to fight? That it was the international community that legitimized the rule of power-hungry men in their own self-interest? That we were silenced, our dreams for democracy used to strangle our very being?

How can it begin to imagine our resistance, our livelihoods, our smiles, our power, our kindness?

The answer is that on the international stage, Sudan does not matter.

We are not just disposable — we are a nuisance. It feels like our diverse and beautiful population of 46 million people is written off as inconvenient, standing between the Western world and untapped natural resources. It feels as though the success of the international community can be equated with our extinction. Our inescapable reality was a controlled detonation waiting to go off to the nations of the West, a pressure cooker where the lives of the 16,000 American citizens who remain in Sudan are not deemed a priority, it seems, because of the otherness — the Blackness — of the Sudanese people.

And so, I question how it is possible that I entered college four years ago having been a part of the successful Sudanese democratic revolution, proud to inject my nation in the academic and political discussions here — yet I leave with a nation in tatters, and depart from a university that could not have done less to help.

Yet I will continue to fight and advocate and fundraise for Sudan. The international community may have written us off, but I guarantee you we will fight for survival with our very last breath. Sudan is deserving of freedom. Of peace. Of justice. Of life.

Reem K. Ali ’23 is a Government concentrator in Leverett House.