IN RECENT weeks the eyes of the world have been fixed on Israel’s illegal and unprovoked attack on Iran.

But during this time little notice has been taken over the humanitarian disaster taking place in Sudan caused by the more than two-year-old civil war.

Of course, this is no competition to see who is being “genocided” or warred against the most. But it is instructive about the relative weight of importance placed on one humanitarian disaster over another.

There are lots of reasons for this — not least the relative weight on the geopolitics of the day.

But overall the African continent largely fails to figure in analysts or many Western activists’ priorities.

I think the conflicts in Africa, stoked by Western imperialism, should take much more of our collective attention.

The news narrative around Africa often descends into famine, coups and how the people of the continent simply can’t stop fighting with each other.

The subtext to this of course is that none of this would be happening if the Western colonial powers were still in charge of the continent.

The reality is that the former colonial rulers are still exercising power over the continent. It is just being done in a way that is different from the racist, brutal and sadistic colonial methods of the past.

The racism, brutality and sadism remains unchanged but now relies on treating the African continent as an extractive zone with large swathes supervised by a slew of puppet misleaders who are content to rake in the cash at the expense of their fellow countrymen and women.

Millions have been forced to flee the conflict that has caused starvation in Sudan. The fighting between the country’s military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces has led hundreds of thousands to seek refuge in countries already grappling with their own Western-caused challenges.

Around 40,000 people have been killed and nearly 13 million displaced, including to other countries, by Sudan’s civil war that began in April 2023, according to estimates from UN agencies.

The World Food Programme, the UN’s food agency, said last week that over four million Sudanese refugees in neighbouring countries are at risk of starvation as they flee to the Central African Republic (CAR), Ethiopia, Libya, Uganda, Chad and Egypt.

The CAR has one of the world’s poorest populations but is one of the richest places on Earth, with massive deposits of diamonds, gold, oil and uranium.

The wealth of the country has continued to be siphoned off since the country won independence from France in 1960 — all at the expense of the people.

Ethiopia is Africa’s oldest independent country and its second largest in terms of population. Apart from a five-year occupation by Mussolini’s Italy, it has never been colonised.

The country may well become one of the first places on Earth where conflict breaks out because of the climate emergency. Most experts accept that the climate emergency has largely been caused by the burning of fossil fuels that has helped the growth of Western industrialisation.

Ethiopia has just completed building a mega-dam on the Blue Nile that has been a major source of tension between them and their neighbours, Egypt and Sudan.

The dam, Africa’s biggest hydro-electric plant, is seen by Egypt and Sudan as threatening their water supply from the mighty River Nile. A clear and present danger as the climate emergency kicks in across the region.

Libya has been unstable since the Western-organised ousting of former leader Colonel Muammar Gadaffi in 2011.

The UN-backed government in the capital of Tripoli has very loose control over about a third of the country. To the east, Libya is controlled by a general leading what they have called the Libyan National Army.

Libya is on the front line of the European Union’s “Fortress Europe.” The major powers seek to stop Africans from reaching the continent where many of the nation’s responsible for the wars they are trying escape are located.

There have been widely reported eyewitness reports of slave auctions of sub-Saharan Africans taking place in Libya and “detention facilities” that appear to amount to nothing short of concentration camps.

The Western powers know what is taking place. But Libya is in receipt of considerable funding from the EU to be its gatekeeper into a Europe that has clearly decided to turn a blind eye to the atrocities being committed in the north African nation.

Uganda has been accused by the UN of providing active support to the M23 militia group in its fight against the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

The UN says Uganda is providing supplies for M23 recruits coming through the country. Some have accused Uganda of also sending its own troops into the fray.

The fighting in the DRC is in the hugely mineral-rich eastern region of the country that supplies vast amounts of the rare earth minerals vital for Western economies.

In 2022, the International Court of Justice ordered Uganda to fork out the equivalent of £238 million for looting gold, diamonds and timber during its war with the DRC from 1998 to 2003.

In the meantime, nearly one in six citizens live below the absolute poverty line — less than $1 a day.

Chad is one of the world’s poorest countries, with almost 50 per cent of the population living below the absolute poverty line.

Before Sudan’s civil war, Adre was a town of about 40,000. As Sudanese began to arrive, sympathetic residents with longtime cross-border ties offered them land.

Now there is a sea of markets and shelters. There are signs that the Sudanese intend to stay with some even constructing multistorey buildings.

Locals say the price of water has quadrupled since the start of Sudan’s civil war as demand rises. There have been reports of fights breaking out at the few water pumps for them, installed by the International Committee of the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders.

Chad simply can’t sustain its own population, never mind hundreds of thousands fleeing the conflict in Sudan. It’s also under threat from the Boko Haram terrorist group and the impact of the climate crisis is hitting the country hard.

Egypt will need a feature article all of its own to get into its role in propping up Western interests in the region. Not least of course its virtually non-existent support for the Palestinians.

All of this should mean that we pay far more attention to Africa and in particular the attempts to break the cycle of Western domination — such as the very important Alliance of Sahel States.

Africa is central to the geopolitical chessboard that the Western powers are playing against the likes of China, Russia and Iran — the new Primakov Triangle to counterbalance the United States and its Western underlings.

The sooner we appreciate this the deeper will be our understanding of how best to build the new multilateral world.