As fighting between rival military factions escalates in Sudan, a report published at the end of last month by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) sounds the alarm that the country’s cultural institutions and their vast collections are at risk of irreparable damage.
In the report, the director of Sudan’s Natural History Museum, Sara AK Saeed, warns that some of the country’s most valuable museums, located in the capital Khartoum, are “caught in the crossfire of battles between the two sides in conflict” with nothing to “protect them”. looting and vandalism.
Specifically, Saeed points to the National Museum of Sudan, the Museum of Ethnography, the Republican Palace Museum and the Museum of Natural History of Sudan as the main targets of damage. These institutions all run along the Blue Nile in the center of the city, where fighting has been concentrated since mid-April. She also mentioned the Military Museum, which is located slightly to the north.
THE the war in Sudan broke out last month between de facto military leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, after the alliance between the two broke down last year.
The fighting – which has been concentrated in Khartoum, Omdurman and other cities across the country – has had devastating consequences for civilians. Before the conflict, Sudan already had 3.7 million internally displaced people. Today, an estimated 334,000 more people have been internally displaced and another 120,000 have fled to neighboring countries, according to World Health Organization reports. As of May 1, authorities say at least 550 people have been killed and more than 4,900 injured, although the toll is likely higher.
Due to heavy fighting in the area, there have so far been no confirmed reports detailing the extent of the damage.
“The problem with the museums and the main museum, the National Museum, is that they are located in the heart of the capital, which is exactly in the center of where the fighting between the two groups is taking place,” said said the Sudanese journalist and political cartoonist. Khalid Al Baih said Hyperallergic.
The National Museum of Sudan is the largest museum in Sudan. Built in 1955 and established in 1971, the two-story building and its surrounding gardens house the largest Nubian archaeological collection in the world, with artefacts ranging from the Paleolithic to the Islamic period from across the country.
“Nobody knows how bad it is, inside or out, and what happened to the artifacts,” Al Baih said.
He said an artist who had been trapped inside the museum for two weeks after the fighting began, communicated by telephone that there was “a lot of damage” inside the National Museum, but the details regarding the extent were unclear.
“People have been in this area trying to get out since the conflict started 23 days ago,” he continued.
The museum collections, said Al Baih Hyperallergictell a larger story about Sudan as a whole, as a country struggling to unite around a national identity.
“One of the main problems in Sudan is the identity crisis,” he said. “Because of colonialism and the neglect of those in power, we have a lot of stolen history; we have a lot of history that we don’t know; and we have a lot of artifacts that are not supported in the right way. And now it will be even worse when 6,000 years of the country’s history will literally be erased.
