By Larry Luxner
When veteran Sudanese diplomat and educator Nureldin Mohamed Hamed Satti arrived in Washington back in July 2020, he was welcomed as Khartoum’s first ambassador to the United States in 23 years.
Yet Satti’s mission proved to be short-lived. On Jan. 31, the 75-year-old former United Nations official was forced to resign as a consequence of the military coup back home that has plunged Sudan into a political and humanitarian crisis.
“The situation is disastrous,” he told The Washington Diplomat last week via Zoom. “Politically, economically, socially, really from all points of view, Sudan is on the path to collapse.”
With 45 million people and a land area 2.7 times that of Texas, Sudan is Africa’s third-largest country in size. It had ranked as the largest until 2011, when the largely Christian south seceded from the predominantly Muslim north and formed the independent nation of South Sudan.
