THERE is not and should never be a competition or comparison over which is the most important war taking place in the world.

But we should recognise that decisions are made all the time by the corporate media about which wars they are concerned enough about to give any air time or column inches to.

There can be little doubt that the civil war that has been raging in Sudan for the best (worst) part of two years is barely in the radar of these corporate media types. It simply does not get the coverage of the tragic wars in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria or Ukraine.

The fact is any war for the people caught up in it is the most important thing in the world — literally a matter of life and death.

But everyone outside of Sudan needs to understand what is happening to cause one of the greatest humanitarian crises in modern history.

We can’t run around saying that black lives matter and then ignore the millions of lives that are being hit by this conflict and understand what is behind it.

The number of people dying because of the civil war in Sudan is reportedly more than 61,000 in the Khartoum state alone.

Around 26,000 of this number were killed as a direct result of the fighting between the country’s military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

The leading cause of death across Sudan is preventable disease and starvation.

Experts are warning that some 25 million of the country’s 42 million population are expected to face acute hunger this year.

Many more people have died and are likely to fall victim to the civil war elsewhere in the country, especially in the western region of Darfur, where there have been numerous reports of atrocities and ethnic cleansing.

The United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that the civil war has left around 11 million people displaced, equivalent to about 2.1 million families.

Many of these individuals have sought refuge in northern and eastern Sudan while others, where they can, have evacuated to neighbouring countries.

It is impossible to get full access to the country to get true figures on the full scale of the catastrophe that is taking place, but aid workers on the ground say the civil war in Sudan has created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, with many thousands at risk of famine.

Earlier this year at a conference in Paris, the so-called international community made the usual noises about providing money for humanitarian support through the UN. But the actual cash provided has barely topped half the amount pledged.

This despite US special envoy for Sudan Tom Perriello saying earlier this year that some estimates suggested up to 150,000 people out of the population had already been killed, with many more likely to die.

The fighting has meant that exact figures on the scale of the human disaster unfolding are hard to come by. 

But Western powers clearly know the scale of the problem and the corporate media, along with the governments that provide them with the press releases for them to cut and paste, have chosen to turn a blind eye.

I wonder whether it is because Western capital, and their bought and paid for politicians, are complicit in this conflict and making a healthy profit.

An Amnesty International report recently showed that French military technology was being used in the conflict, in violation of a UN arms embargo.

Amnesty revealed the RSF was using vehicles in Darfur supplied by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) that are fitted with French hardware.

Amnesty’s secretary-general Agnes Callamard said: “Our research shows that weaponry designed and manufactured in France is in active use on the battlefield in Sudan.”

The Galix defence system — made in France by companies KNDS and Lacroix — is used for land forces to help counter close-range attacks.

Amnesty said the weapons could be used to commit or facilitate serious rights violations, adding that the French government must ensure the companies “immediately stop the supply of this system to the United Arab Emirates.”

Verified images have been shared on social media showing destroyed vehicles on the ground that had the Galix system visible on them.

It is reported that the UAE and France had a longstanding partnership in the defence sector and cited a parliamentary report indicating that French companies had delivered the equivalent of around £2.16 billion in military equipment to the UAE between 2014 and 2023.

This report suggests that French companies are making a mint from the humanitarian disaster taking place in Sudan through the UAE.

Amnesty says: “If France cannot guarantee through export controls, including end user certification, that arms will not be re-exported to Sudan, it should not authorise those transfers.”

This is all taking place while a UN arms embargo, first imposed in Darfur in 2004, following allegations of ethnic cleansing against the region’s non-Arabic population, is still in place.

We should all be joining the call made by Amnesty for the arms embargo to be expanded to the rest of Sudan, and to strengthen its monitoring mechanism following the outbreak of the civil war.

We should also all be calling out the French for being complicit in underpinning the human suffering that is taking place in Sudan.

I cannot believe that if French companies are making huge profits from this suffering that other Western companies are not also dipping their fingers into the bloodstained pie.

Much more must be done to bring about a permanent ceasefire in this catastrophic civil war.

But as with the other conflicts across the globe the arms companies are entirely complicit in providing the means by which the fighting can take place.

The international peace movement must prioritise a campaign to stop the arms companies from directly or indirectly supplying — and profiting — from the military hardware that fuels the Sudanese civil war.

We need to point out how international capital — as it has always done — continues to profit from the human misery of millions of people just as much in Africa as any other conflict zone in the world.