SUDAN, once the largest country in Africa before it split into Sudan and South Sudan, is facing the danger of another split as two avaricious generals carve the country up for themselves.
The civil war that began in April last year as a result of clashes between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, or Hemedti, has led to a devastating humanitarian crisis.
Burhan and Hemedti joined forces to topple then president Omar al-Bashir in a coup on April 11, 2019 to become the president and vice-president of the country.
The irony is Hemedti, a brigadier-general by courtesy of Bashir, was his trusted head of palace security.
Power may corrupt but the greed for power corrupts even more. Catastrophe is what has been happening in the land of the two Niles, now reduced to the size of France.
Bashir will be remembered for the first split; the greedy generals for the second.
One estimate says of the 48 million people of Sudan, half have fled their homes, with media reports saying close to three million people are housed in overstretched refugee camps across the borders.
Unicef rightly calls the Sudan conflict a children's crisis. Children, too, in the millions have fled their homes.
In Unicef's estimate, about 14 million children are affected by the displacement, of whom one million have sought refuge in neighbouring Chad, Ethiopia, Egypt and South Sudan.
Isn't there a way to bring this national catastrophe that threatens to grow into a regional cataclysm to an end? There is, but two things must be made to happen before any sense of normalcy can return to Sudan.
One, Burhan and Hemedti must be compelled to go. They have killed too many civilians, both during their brief rule after the overthrow of Bashir and during the more than a year of civil war.
It is hard to tell how many have died in the civil war since it began, but one media report in August advanced a conservative number: 150,000.
Two, outside powers, both near and far, must stop supplying weapons to SAF and RSF. It's common knowledge that nations near and far are either supplying weapons to both or allowing them to pass through the borders.
Once arms dry up, Burhan and Hemedti would be forced to give up their power chase. Elections can then be called to return the country to civilian rule.
We would be tempted to recommend the two generals to be tried by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes, but the ICC has lost all credibility.
So has the international justice system. The ICC's one rule for the West and one rule for the rest is the epitome of hypocrisy.
The United Nations Security Council? That is a graveyard for justice, not its maternity ward.
Burhan and Hemedti must be tried by Sudan's own legal system. Justice must be the goal, not vengeance as it often is the case with regime change.
As for the meddling foreign powers, we say this: remember, by fanning a civil war you are choosing to stand on the wrong side of history.