Sudan’s landslide tragedy is more than just a natural disaster
To fully sit with and respond to the tragedy in Tarsin, we must move beyond its passive framing as a random act of God.
Suad Abdel aziz and Sarah Elbakri
Many news headlines described the landslide that struck the village of Tarsin in western Sudan on 31 August as a natural disaster, but this tragedy was not just a random act of nature. The forces that set its victims up for mass death cannot be separated from climate injustice, imperial extraction, and the ongoing genocide in Sudan.
The landslide came after days of relentless rain that destabilised bedrock in Jebel Marra, the Marra Mountains of central Darfur in western Sudan. Climate change has made such extreme weather events more likely. Climate change isn’t fuelled by “nature”, but by the pollution of corporations and industrialised countries.
The people who lived in Tarsin, at least 1,000 of whom are now dead, are unlikely to have contributed much to the pollution driving climate change. But their fate fits a tragically common pattern: it is people with minimal resources and political power who inhabit the world’s most environmentally fragile areas.
In Sudan’s current war context, many of these people were driven to Tarsin and the wider Marra Mountains by the United Arab Emirates-backed Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and their ongoing genocidal campaign in Darfur and Kordofan. The militia is attempting to violently annex the west of Sudan, in an ethnic-cleansing campaign in which it burns villages and besieges cities to drive out the indigenous populations so it can take control of the land and resources. Many in Tarsin were displaced from their homes in North Darfur’s Fasher and Tawila areas after the RSF laid siege to nearby El Fasher. Families fled into the Marra Mountains, where they settled on steep and unstable terrain.
Mass displacement strips communities of their capacity to withstand environmental shocks, while forcing them into unsustainable land-use practices, including deforestation and soil degradation, which makes their new locations even more fragile.
The landslide disaster was, therefore, not just the result of heavy rainfall, but the direct outcome of a war strategy.
The RSF keeps up its brutal campaign in part because it has external support, primarily from the UAE. This financing is about resource extraction and strategic control: the militia would give the UAE unfettered access to Sudan’s gold reserves, agricultural land, and supply routes in the areas it comes to control.
Given all this, the landslide was driven by decades-long ecological destruction, powered with pollution by the industrialised world and militarised internal displacement, externally funded to make way for imperial extraction.
It’s important to get beyond speaking passively of “natural disasters” to connect these dots. Only then can we speak meaningfully about justice.
For Sudan, climate justice in the wake of this tragedy must go beyond temporary aid. True justice requires: ending the genocidal RSF campaign; confronting the UAE’s attempt to grab land and resources; supporting grassroots movements that defend indigenous people’s ancestral lands; and continuing to demand accountability and reparations from the polluting countries and corporations whose profits fuel climate collapse.
We owe it to the people of Tarsin – like countless communities rendered vulnerable by extraction, imperialism, and hunger for power – to sit with these complexities and work at unspooling them simultaneously. Even if this isn’t the simplest story – or the path of least resistance.