The ongoing catastrophe in Sudan stands as the greatest humanitarian crisis in the world today. There are no exceptions. An amplifying paraphrase needn't be added. Sudan, geographically largest of African nations, bears this ghastly distinction with agonizing clarity.
Numbers tell only part of the story, but they are sufficient for the moment.
A carefully assembled set of data for the US Committee for Refugees makes evident that almost 2 million human beings have perished in the most recent phase of Sudan's ongoing civil war. As many as 5 million refugees have been created, making the refugee problem alone the greatest of its kind in the world. And at the height of last summer's famine, over 2 million more human beings, mainly children, were at risk of starvation. And yet Americans remain disturbingly unaware of the dimensions of this human disaster. The answer is not so very difficult to find.