In the Shadows of History: Death and Destruction in South Sudan
Much of the world is rightly transfixed by the genocide in Gaza, the unimaginable horrors experienced by its Palestinian inhabitants, the callous antics of those who would ‘develop’ its ruins (Trump, Blair, Kushner, etc.), and the strong likelihood of more of the same to come for the West Bank.
But what is it that explains why one humanitarian tragedy commands global attention while others that have entailed as much or more suffering for as long or longer seem less deserving of the world’s interest and go relatively unnoticed and unremarked upon?
The case of South Sudan
If international humanitarian interest in a country was simply a function of the extent of death, destruction, and human misery there, then the scorecard for South Sudan would place it among the most deserving of cases.
More than 20 years ago, in 2002, I was employed via an NGO to carry out a short consultancy for the South Sudan rebel government in waiting, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, which was the political wing of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. My field work was carried out in the heart of rebel-held territory in the town of Rumbek. Tellingly, I was accommodated in a US special forces tented camp alongside Rumbek’s murram air strip. The presence of the US military in the middle of nowhere was a mark of the post-9/11 frenzied hunt for Al Qaeda, in a country that had once provided shelter to Osama bin Laden and was – and, according to some, still is – a stronghold of radical Islam. No prizes for guessing where the NGO’s funding probably came from.
In my final report, among others, I noted as follows:
For almost half a century [1955-2005], the people of Southern Sudan have been engaged in a bitter liberation struggle with the Government of Sudan based in Khartoum. It is a war that has resulted in the deaths of at least two million Southern Sudanese and the displacement from their homes of many millions more. There have been horrifying human rights violations on a grand scale. With the exception of large parts of western Equatoria, where war damage is relatively limited and has resulted mainly from sporadic bombings, there has been widespread destruction of, or serious damage to, physical infrastructure. The institutional infrastructure of government has been completely destroyed.
… it is also a war that has not impinged greatly on the economic or strategic self-interests of the major world powers and has therefore failed to attract their serious attention or that of the international media. Accordingly, it is a war that for the most part has been conducted in the shadows of history – a war that has resulted in more death, destruction and suffering than many conflicts whose causes and casualties for other reasons have been widely publicised by the world’s media (Blunt, 2002).
An indicator of the magnitude and severity of the effects of the protracted liberation struggle was that there were estimated to be twice as many women as men in the adult population of South Sudan (UNICEF, 2000 in Blunt, 2002). By comparison, after WWII, the country that had suffered the most casualties, Soviet Russia, had a female to male ratio of 1.3 to 1.0.
The atrocities that were committed during the 50-year civil war and since then bear an eerie resemblance to some of the main features of the Israeli genocide in Gaza – as if they were drawn from the same playbook.
Ironically, confirmation of this can be found in the account given by The US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
In both the south and west, the Sudanese government established a pattern of assaults against civilians. They killed, tortured, raped, and displaced millions. Assault tactics included:
Mass starvation and forcible displacement;
Blocking humanitarian aid;
Harassment of internally displaced persons;
Bombing of hospitals, clinics, schools, and other civilian sites;
Use of rape as a weapon against targeted groups;
Employing a divide-to-destroy strategy to pit ethnic groups against each other, causing enormous loss of civilian life;
Training and support for ethnic militias who commit atrocities;
Destruction of indigenous cultures;
Enslavement of women and children by government-supported militias; and
Impeding and failing to fully implement peace agreements.
Since gaining independence in 2011, civil wars have raged more or less continuously in South Sudan, killing tens of thousands more civilians. Much of the conflict and abuse has been funded by oil companies and European banks.
In 2024, the humanitarian crisis there was depicted by Human Rights Watch as one of the worst in the world (which it probably had been for at least the previous half century):
… driven by the cumulative and compounding effects of years of conflict, intercommunal violence, food insecurity, the climate crisis, and displacement following the April [2023] outbreak of conflict in Sudan. An estimated 9.4 million people [out of a total population of about 13 million] in South Sudan, including 4.9 million children and over 300,000 refugees, mostly driven south from the Sudan conflict, needed humanitarian assistance.
According to Oxfam (2025): “Reduced attention and [already grossly inadequate] funding to the country is further deepening the humanitarian crisis and putting millions of lives at immediate risk.”
A ‘sleeper’ in the New Great Game
Setting aside for the moment the fact that the death and destruction in South Sudan is and has been happening in the heart of darkest Africa to some of its blackest inhabitants — people who therefore would be classified among the most unworthy of victims — consider the following (typical) ingredients of the ‘civilised’ world’s calculations in such matters.
Though landlocked and largely inaccessible, South Sudan is a large and attractive piece of real estate (about twice the size of Germany) that has an estimated 5 billion barrels of oil reserves (the third largest in Africa); significant deposits of gold and other minerals such as iron ore, dolomite, and aluminium, which are largely untapped; approximately 33 million acres of mostly (94%) uncultivated arable land; and a wealth of renewable natural resources, primarily fish (in the massive wetlands known as the Sud), forests, and wildlife (World Bank, 2025).
However, it is South Sudan’s neighbour to the north – Sudan – that has a geostrategically vital 500-mile border on the Red Sea and controls access to world markets via Port Sudan for its landlocked neighbour, making it a critical piece in the New Great Game.
For now, while undoubtedly registered as a target of high potential, the considerable plunder and profit to be had in South Sudan is probably too difficult to extract, and the US is too heavily embroiled elsewhere, for it warrant the serious immediate attention of the current godfather of savage capitalism in the US.
The difficulties of extraction are made so by the incessant civil conflicts in South Sudan since independence in 2011, which are stoked by bitter ethnic rivalries that now threaten to cause another outbreak of violence; the absence or parlous state of South Sudan’s physical and institutional infrastructure and the inaccessibility of its natural resources; its extreme flood proneness and vulnerability to climate change (the highest in the world); and the choke hold on its exports, and trade generally, exercised by Sudan’s control of Port Sudan.
Regarding the latter, crucially, there are only two crude oil pipelines from the oil fields of South Sudan to Port Sudan. Their vulnerability is a function of their length – each of about 1,000 miles through inhospitable and lawless terrain – and their reliance on power plants in Port Sudan that supply electricity to the pipelines’ pumping stations, which have been subject to recent drone strikes.
For the US et al., all this could change very quickly of course if the already substantial Chinese interests in oil and infrastructure development in South Sudan continue to grow and US-supported strikes against those interests escalate. China is already South Sudan’s biggest export market and one of its main trading partners and donors, giving China a foothold in the country and region that the US would no doubt not want to become too firm.
Whatever the case, Black lives don’t matter
We can infer from this snapshot of the ‘property development’ potential and strategic significance of South Sudan an answer to the question posed at the beginning of this essay. An answer that many readers of this journal will be unsurprised by, but is worth repeating, nonetheless. Namely, that – per se – humanitarian crises and death and destruction on a massive scale lasting for decades clearly count for nothing in the mercenary and cynically self-interested calculus of the so-called ‘civilised world’. This is particularly so of course when the victims are among the darker races, as I have argued elsewhere and the likes of Chris Hedges and Caitlin Johnstone assert so emphatically.
Indeed, when the balance tips in favour of more intense US-led Western intervention in South Sudan, as eventually it is bound to (and South Sudan becomes newsworthy), these failed state conditions will be ‘refined’ or augmented (with ‘development assistance’ and more direct and brutal means of persuasion) to produce the type of ‘investment climate’ that results from the ‘shock therapy’ referred to by Naomi Klein (2008). That is, a catatonic condition and tabula rasa in the subject nation that clears the way for ‘free market fundamentalism’ and natural resource predation, as was the case in Iraq and other places.
As now, when that time comes, the humanitarian crises in South Sudan will be the subject of attention only in so far as they serve to embellish or decorate whatever narrative the corporate media have been told to run in support of greater Western intervention or only in so far as they provide an exotic curiosity for the entertainment of their indoctrinated Western audiences.
