That November day in 2013, the sky over Madrid was overcast when the Sudanese ambassador to Spain, Alhussain, offered me a glass of karkadé—the hibiscus tea so characteristic of his homeland. At the table in his residence, surrounded by its sweet aroma and comforting warmth, we shared more than a diplomatic conversation: he spoke with the frankness of a worried friend. He confessed to me that the 2011 referendum, celebrated as a liberation, had opened a wound that would not stop bleeding. Separating the South seemed to deactivate the war, but he saw in it the seed of a deep resentment—an anger that would one day devastate the nation. A decade later, the war consuming Sudan cannot be understood without that fracture, nor without the poison of hate speech that turned a rivalry into an attempt at annihilation.
Since April 2023, when the confrontation erupted, the rivalry between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has spiraled into a vortex of violence fueled by sectarian rhetoric. This incendiary language—broadcast from political platforms and amplified through social media—legitimizes killings, looting, and displacement in the name of competing identities. The result is an open wound: tens of thousands dead, millions displaced and wandering without direction, and the very notion of Sudanese citizenship dissolving.
This year, the army’s capture of the Presidential Palace in Khartoum briefly rekindled hopes of a united nation. However, government control is limited to the eastern half of the country; the RSF continues to dominate Darfur, and if El Fasher—its last stronghold in the north—falls, Sudan could effectively split into two entities, as happened in Libya. The military advance, far from heralding peace, threatens to establish a new balance of terror.
Adding to this bleak scenario is the world’s indifference, distracted by other conflicts. While international attention remains fixed on Gaza and Ukraine, Sudan is left at the mercy of regional powers moving their pieces without scrutiny. The United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt support one side or the other, and Russia sustains the RSF with money and weapons—contributing to a grim total of more than 150,000 dead and 12 million displaced. The Sudanese crisis is no accident; it is the sum of political decisions and accumulated hatreds over decades. The 2011 separation opened a fracture; hate speech widened it; impunity and foreign intervention transformed it into an abyss.
The ambassador’s prophecy has come true. We no longer evoke “Rosebud” from Citizen Kane as a distant symbol, but as a reminder of a wounded country yearning to be whole again. Beneath the bombs falling on Khartoum and the dust swallowed by those fleeing, Sudan calls out to us: what happens when we stop seeing one another as brothers? It returns the image of our own fractured world, a world fractured by resentment and hate. If we place our trust in justice, education, and a culture of peace, perhaps we can turn that warning into hope. Otherwise, we will continue repeating the same tragedy—at the cost of lives that can no longer bear the weight of oblivion.
