Bishop of Bradford’s plea on media coverage of Sudan’s civil war

The Bishop of Bradford has called for wider media coverage of Sudan’s civil war after returning from a visit to the country.

The Sudanese army has been fighting the paramilitary Rapid Support Force for more than a year in a conflict that has killed thousands and forced millions from their homes.

The Reverend Toby Howarth visited the country last week with the Reverend Nick Baines, Bishop of Leeds.

Bishop Howarth said the Sudanese civil war had been overshadowed in the media by “the appalling events in Ukraine and Gaza”.

“It’s almost as if the bandwidth of the media and governments around the world just expanded so much,” he said.

“It’s like people don’t have room for anything else.

“But something that’s this big, but hardly hits our news feeds, is extraordinary to me,” he added.

Bishop Howarth said he and Bishop Baines visited Sudan against the advice of the British government.

“The main reason Bishop Nick and I went was basically to say, ‘You are not forgotten, we pray for you every day, we love you, we are with you,'” he said.

Bishop Howarth said people displaced by Sudan’s civil war “feel abandoned”.

“It’s horrifying. You hear these numbers – more than 10 million displaced people, more than three million children at risk of dying from malnutrition – but it really hit home for me when I visited a camp for internally displaced people,” he said.

Bishop Howarth said seeing the camp, where 800 families lived in tents, made things feel “very real”.

However, he said he also met “an extraordinary woman called Victoria in a broken-down tent”.

The bishop said that in the days after the fighting broke out, Victoria encountered “all these people sleeping on the beaches with nothing”.

“So she found a place on the land that was an old social club, cleaned it up and moved the people there,” he added.

Bishop Howarth said that over the course of a year, Victoria “campaigned, advocated, found tents and a toilet block and did an incredible work of love”.

He said Victoria told him: “What does love do in a situation like this? Love must stretch.”