Marhaba,

This is the 43rd issue of Atar English magazine, from Sudan Facts Center for Journalism. It will be coming to you on Monday, every two weeks.

It comes together under the weight of a single, insistent question, what does life look like when war ceases to be an event and becomes a system.

Across the pieces gathered here, Sudan appears not as a series of disconnected crises, but as an interlinked political and economic landscape in which violence, hunger, policy and history reinforce one another. From besieged cities to abandoned fields, from colonial arithmetic to contemporary budgets, the stories in this issue trace how survival itself is reorganized under conditions of prolonged conflict.

The issue is published as Sudan marks seventy years since independence, a milestone often accompanied by speeches and symbolism, yet stripped of meaning by lived reality. Independence did not dismantle the structures that determine whose lives are protected and whose are expendable. It frequently transferred power without undoing the political economy of violence, extraction and neglect. Seventy years on, famine continues to be engineered through policy, war is normalized as a mode of governance, and citizenship remains conditional for large segments of the population. Seventy years after the flag was raised, the struggle is no longer only against foreign rule, but against structures that have survived it.

The stories gathered here remain anchored in the present, in siege, in markets, in fields and in flight. Taken together, they reveal how history operates not only as memory, but as structure, shaping everyday survival and determining whose suffering is rendered visible, tolerated or ignored. In this sense, independence appears not as a completed moment, but as a question still unresolved.

In Kadugli, war is no longer episodic, it is infrastructural. Mohamed Abdelbagi’s reporting depicts a city compressed by siege, famine and militarization, where geography becomes a trap and movement a gamble between death and starvation. Hunger here is not incidental, it is produced through road closures, the withdrawal of humanitarian actors and the tightening ring of armed forces. Kadugli stands as a warning of what happens when violence is allowed to harden into permanence.

That same logic echoes in the countryside. In Al-Gadarif, farmers are not merely changing crops, they are recalculating life under economic pressure and ecological risk. The shift from sorghum to sesame to watermelon seeds is not innovation for its own sake, but adaptation under duress. Mohamed Adam Diab’s arithmetic is stark and unforgiving, grow what survives pests, debt and market volatility, or do not survive at all. Agriculture here becomes a form of crisis management rather than a foundation for food security.

Yet even adaptation has limits. In Al-Jazirah, Osama Abdel-Hai documents a cruel paradox, fodder without livestock, abundance without buyers. War has hollowed out entire production chains. Crops still grow, but the social and economic ecosystems that once sustained them have collapsed. Farmers stand before neatly stacked sorghum stalks that symbolize not wealth, but loss. What once cushioned risk now decays in the fields.

Threaded through these contemporary accounts is a longer historical reckoning. Najlaa Eltom’s essay forces a confrontation with the genealogy of this violence, tracing a line from colonial massacres to present day hierarchies of whose lives are counted and whose are discarded. The mathematics of empire, one life weighed against thousands, has not vanished. It has been updated, disguised in diplomatic language, security partnerships and selective outrage. Sudan’s current war, like Gaza and Darfur, is rendered tolerable through inherited logics of unequal life.

The weekly news section sharpens this contradiction. Announcements of budgets, electricity tariffs, gold production and the return of government institutions to Khartoum project an image of administrative continuity and recovery. Yet opacity, secrecy and inconsistency dominate these moves. Economic growth is promised amid displacement, drone strikes and collapsing services. Development is declared even as famine expands. The language of governance persists, while its social contract steadily erodes.

Taken together, these pieces insist on reading Sudan not through the lens of emergency alone, but through structure. Hunger is political. Markets are militarized. History is active rather than past. This issue does not offer easy solutions, but it refuses fragmentation. It asks readers to see how siege and policy, farming decisions and colonial memory, all occupy the same terrain.

To read this issue is to confront a reality in which resistance is endlessly demanded, while accountability remains scarce. The question that lingers is not only how Sudan survives, but how long the world will continue to treat that survival as optional.

Atar Editorial Team