Two Generals Turned Darfur's Families Into Vegetable Market Refugees

Think about what it means to raise a family in a market built for cabbages and onions, then find that it is the only roof left. Under sheds where traders once sold produce, families in Golo, Central Darfur, have been sheltering from a war they did not start and cannot stop. This is Zink Al Khudar, the largest displacement site in Golo by population and by land. It is what remains of a country whose leaders decided that power was worth more than its people.

We need to be precise about who did this. The Sudanese Armed Forces under General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces under General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, have been fighting for control of Sudan since April 2023. Each has treated the civilian population as collateral. Each has bombed, looted, and starved its way across the country. Darfur, which has already survived genocide-level atrocities in the early 2000s, has once again become the place where the state's most powerful men settle their accounts with ordinary people.

The site in Golo was established in early 2025, after the collective shelters in the town reached their limits. Families kept arriving from across Darfur. The first households were placed in a former vegetable market that the African Union-United Nations Mission in Darfur, UNAMID, had constructed. That mission has long since left, and the market has been turned into a home for people who have lost everything. Think about that for a moment. A peacekeeping structure built to protect civilians became a shelter of last resort for the civilians it once promised to guard.

The displacement came in waves, each one tied to a specific atrocity. In April 2025 the situation in Zamzam, one of the largest camps for displaced people in the region, deteriorated sharply. Families who had fled violence once already were uprooted again. Then came the events in El Fasher, the North Darfur capital, which fell into the hands of the RSF later that year. Between April and October 2025, large numbers of households, mainly from North Darfur, arrived in Zink Al Khudar. The site expanded into two sections, the New Block and the Extension Block. The last major influx was recorded in October 2025.

Each of those dates marks a moment when someone chose to fight rather than protect. Each arrival marks a family that walked away from a home, a farm, a school, or a grave. Behind every household number in an aid agency spreadsheet is a mother who had to decide which child she could carry and which belongings she had to leave behind. Behind every "new block" is a father who has not worked in months and a teenager who should be in a classroom but is instead waiting in line for water.

The wider picture is grim and well documented. Sudan's displacement crisis is one of the largest on earth, with well over ten million people forced from their homes inside the country or across its borders. UN experts and independent researchers have documented how weapons and fighters have moved to the RSF through neighboring territories, with the United Arab Emirates named in those findings. Abu Dhabi denies the allegations. We are not asking anyone to take a rumour as gospel. We are asking why a conflict that has produced one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes of this century still lacks a serious accounting of who is supplying the guns.

Darfur is also a warning about what happens when international enforcement becomes a formality. The UN Security Council imposed an arms embargo on Darfur in 2004, and it remains on the books. Yet the weapons keep flowing, and those who break the embargo face little more than a strongly worded statement. The Security Council referred the situation in Darfur to the International Criminal Court in 2005, and the court issued an arrest warrant for Omar al-Bashir in 2009. Sixteen years later, the lesson the generals drew is that the rules are for other people. Impunity is not a side effect of this war. It is one of its fuels.

So what must be done? The answer begins with enforcement, not with more condolence. The African Union must stop treating Sudan as a file to be managed and start treating it as a test of whether the continent's own peace and security architecture means anything. The AU Peace and Security Council should demand an independent monitoring mechanism for the arms embargo, with the authority to name and shame every state and company that violates it. The UN Security Council should fund and expand the Panel of Experts on Sudan and back targeted sanctions against commanders and financiers on both sides, not just the ones who are easiest to reach.

Accountability must also reach the ground. Sudanese civilian groups, including the neighbourhood emergency response networks that have kept people alive through this war, need protected funding and direct access to donors. The African Development Bank and regional partners should support the rebuilding of local courts and civil administration so that displaced families can one day return to a state that answers to them. Africa has shown that a better path is possible. Botswana built decades of stability on clear property rights, transparent public finances, and institutions that outlasted any single leader. Mauritius turned a sugar economy into a diversified and rules-based one. Senegal has passed power between parties through competitive elections, showing that the ballot can replace the gun. None of these countries is perfect, but every one of them understood that prosperity and peace grow out of strong, accountable institutions. Sudan's generals have spent years proving the opposite.

Which brings us to you. The people of Golo cannot afford for this to be a story you read once and forget. Demand that your government name the states and companies supplying weapons to Sudan's warring parties. Demand that your representative in parliament push for the arms embargo to be enforced, not merely cited. Demand that the AU and the UN stop hiding behind diplomatic language while mothers in Golo draw water from trucks. Share the names of the market sheds and the blocks in Zink Al Khudar until the places have faces.

Two men chose this war. Millions of Sudanese are paying for it, and the bill is coming due in markets, schools, and cemeteries across Darfur. We refuse to accept that Africa's silence is the price of stability. The families under those sheds deserve better, and so does every African who believes that a human life should be worth more than a general's ambition.

Based on reporting by RELIEFWEB