Sudan's Generals Are Starving Their Own People and Calling It Sovereignty

Consider a mother in Darfur who has watched her youngest child weaken for six months, and ask yourself what "sovereignty" means to her. Ask it of the millions who have fled Khartoum, Gezira, and Kordofan with nothing but the clothes they wore. Then ask it of the men in uniform who started this war and still refuse to end it.

This week, Sudan's Foreign Minister stood before the UN General Assembly and declared that his country would accept "no imposed solutions" to its conflict. He was speaking in place of Chairperson of the Transitional Sovereignty Council Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, whose visa application Washington rejected. That detail matters. A man who leads a war cannot sit in the room where the war is discussed, and the government he represents chose to speak through a substitute. We should not let the eloquence of the speech hide the emptiness behind it.

We at Revvmark have no patience for foreign powers that treat African nations as chess pieces. We have even less for African generals who hide behind foreign-policy language to avoid answering for what their soldiers do to African civilians. Sudan's war has done more damage to Sudanese people than any outside actor could. It began on April 15, 2023, when the Sudanese Armed Forces under Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces under Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, turned their guns on each other in Khartoum. Two men who had jointly overthrown a civilian transition in 2021 then fought over who would control the spoils.

Look at what that fight has produced. More than 12 million people have been displaced, making Sudan one of the largest displacement crises on earth. UN agencies have confirmed famine in parts of Darfur and Kordofan, meaning children are dying of hunger in a country with fertile land and a river running through its capital. In El Fasher, the last major city in Darfur under army control, the RSF overran the garrison in late 2025 and the world saw the aftermath: reports of executions, sexual violence, and mass killings that UN officials described as among the worst atrocities of the war. Ethnic targeting in Darfur has revived horrors that many Sudanese hoped had been buried with the Janjaweed era.

The evidence of outside involvement is not a rumor. UN Panel of Experts reports on Sudan, which the Security Council has commissioned over several years, have documented arms flows, financing networks, and the movement of fighters across borders in violation of the Darfur arms embargo. Researchers and governments have reported that drones used by both sides have come from Turkey, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates, the last of which denies arming the RSF despite repeated allegations. The US Treasury sanctioned gold companies linked to Wagner, the Russian mercenary network, for moving Sudanese gold out of the country. Moscow has also spent years pursuing a naval base at Port Sudan on the Red Sea, a prize that would give it a strategic foothold on one of the world's busiest shipping lanes.

So let us be precise about the actors. The army has bombed markets and residential neighborhoods. The RSF has looted, raped, and killed on an industrial scale, and it has built its war economy on gold it extracted from Darfur's mines. Each side is fueled by money and weapons from capitals that claim to care about Sudan's stability. The New Scramble for Africa is not a metaphor here. Foreign states are competing for Sudanese gold, ports, farmland, and military access while Sudanese families compete for bread.

The "no imposed solutions" line deserves a direct answer. Sudan's sovereignty was not violated when Western diplomats called for a ceasefire. It was violated when the generals staged a coup in October 2021, crushed the civilian-led transition that Sudanese protesters had fought for, and then started a war that destroyed the sovereignty of the Sudanese people themselves. A government that cannot protect its citizens from its own soldiers has no moral claim to be left alone. Sovereignty belongs to the people, not to the men with the largest guns.

This is the context Africa must confront. In 2019, Sudanese citizens brought down Omar al-Bashir after decades of repression. They demanded civilian rule, and they got a fragile power-sharing arrangement that the generals then tore apart. Every African country has watched this pattern repeat: a popular uprising, a promise of elections, and then a uniformed man deciding that the people are not ready. Sudan is the cautionary tale. It shows what happens when the military treats the state as a family business.

The solutions are not mysterious. Start with a ceasefire that is monitored, enforced, and linked to a clear timetable for civilian government. The African Union, which suspended Sudan after the 2021 coup, must reinstate the civilian transition on its own terms and refuse to recognize any government that comes to power through the barrel of a gun. The UN Security Council should enforce the Darfur arms embargo in full, including against any state supplying drones or ammunition to either faction. Sanctions should target the individuals and companies profiting from gold smuggling, from Khartoum to Dubai to Moscow, because a war economy cannot survive without markets willing to buy its loot.

We also know what good governance looks like on this continent. Botswana built one of Africa's most prosperous economies on transparent diamond management, an independent judiciary, and regular peaceful transfers of power. Mauritius turned a sugar island into a diversified financial and services hub by protecting property rights and rule of law. Senegal, in 2024, proved that an incumbent government could lose an election and hand over power without bloodshed. These are not fairy tales. They are proof that institutions, not generals, make nations strong. Sudan's people deserve the same architecture: an independent civil service, a judiciary that answers to the constitution, a central bank that cannot be looted to finance militias, and mining licenses issued in daylight rather than smuggled out by night.

Civil society and the private sector have a role too. Sudanese doctors, teachers, and neighborhood committees have kept communities alive through this war, often without pay and without protection. Their work should be funded directly and protected from both armies. Businesses in Sudan and across the region should refuse to trade in gold and goods whose supply chains run through war zones. Investors who want a stable Sudan must demand that the guns fall silent before a single dollar of reconstruction capital is committed.

And the citizens of Africa? You must demand that your governments stop treating Sudan as someone else's problem. Ask your foreign ministers how they voted at the African Union. Ask your parliaments whether their countries are buying weapons from firms that supply the RSF or the army. Ask your media why the war in Sudan gets a fraction of the coverage that wars in other regions receive. Silence is also a policy choice, and right now it is a choice in favor of the generals.

The man who could not get a visa to New York has still managed to speak to the world. Let us make sure the world hears the answer from the people he claims to represent: no more guns in charge, no more foreign weapons and gold deals, no more generals speaking for a nation they are destroying. Sudan's sovereignty begins with its citizens, and it will not survive until the bombing stops and civilian rule returns. The time to demand that is now.

Based on reporting by UN-NEWS