KHARTOUM, Sudan — Idris Nazil, a newspaper editor and head of a publishing firm here, is well-to-do by Sudanese standards. But when he and family members recently came down with fevers, even he couldn't afford the medicine his doctor prescribed.
"I said to my wife that I should go to my company and get a loan for this," Nazil recalled scornfully. "Everything is so expensive--even for the director of a company like me."
In a country facing its 29th year of civil war, and with electricity a fast-receding memory in Khartoum, the capital, problems of everyday life seem to keep piling up.
Nazil is not alone in wondering if his country's tribulations are ever going to end. As almost anyone who has been to Sudan will admit, it is a place that tends to confound hope.
This country of desert and savanna straddling the middle course of the Nile could be described as nearly 1 million square miles of poverty, hunger, civil war, slavery, terrorism, religious persecution and repression. It is ruled over by a clique of extreme Islamist politicians whose claims to legitimacy and popularity are dubious.
The south of the country is in the throes of famine. There is little that millions of dollars in international food assistance have been able to do to save tens of thousands of people from a miserable, slow death from hunger.
As for the government-controlled north, the United States has charged that the regime has links with international terrorist networks, from Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden and Venezuelan-born guerrilla Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, known as "Carlos the Jackal," to Iraq's clandestine chemical weapons program. In August, the U.S. used cruise missiles to destroy a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum that it claimed was involved in chemical-weapons production, although the evidence of that connection is in dispute.
List of Problems Fuels International Apathy
Terrorism and hunger--these are the two faces of Sudan that the world most commonly sees. Humanitarian and political crises occur in Sudan with alarming regularity and grab the spotlight briefly. But Sudan's underlying problems are so complex and intractable that the international community tends eventually to just look the other way.
"The world's attention very quickly leaves Sudan," said Jemera Rone of Human Rights Watch/Africa.
"It's a forgotten place--no question about it," said Rep. Tony P. Hall (D-Ohio), who this year visited Sudan.
