Near East Foundation

The Near East Foundation is a development institution whose field-based reporting provides crucial context for the book’s account of the 1998 destruction of Sudan’s Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory. Its reports connect the loss of affordable medicines to the country’s precarious public health conditions and help make visible consequences that a narrow count of immediate casualties would miss.

Institution and Work

The book describes the Near East Foundation as an established and respected organization dating back to the First World War. It provides technical assistance to poor countries in the Middle East and Africa, with an emphasis on basic development projects led by the communities concerned. Its work is conducted in close relation with major universities, charitable organizations, and the United States Department of State; prominent Middle Eastern diplomats and figures in education and development also collaborate with it.

Field Reporting on Sudan

The Foundation’s regional program director, Jonathan Belke, wrote about Sudan from field experience. The book singles out his reporting as especially authoritative among the journalists and commentators it cites, and also draws on technical field reports by Belke and Kamal El-Faki. Their evidence describes a country where harsh climate, scattered populations, health risks, and weak infrastructure make survival difficult. Endemic malaria and tuberculosis, recurring meningitis and cholera outbreaks, limited arable land, chronic shortages of clean water, high mortality, debt, AIDS, civil war, and severe sanctions compound the need for accessible medicine.

Al-Shifa and Human Consequences

The Foundation’s reporting helps establish why the loss of Al-Shifa mattered beyond the destruction of a single facility. The factory had supplied affordable medicines and veterinary products; the book cites estimates that its destruction could have left tens of thousands of people ill and dead within a year, while sanctions obstructed the pharmaceutical imports needed to replace its output. The account presents that estimate as plausible while acknowledging that the full consequences in Sudan could only be imagined.

The reporting also situates the factory’s loss within a fragile humanitarian and political setting. The bombing was followed by the evacuation of United Nations personnel from Khartoum and delays to relief efforts, including a project in which more than fifty people in a government-held southern town were reportedly dying each day. United Nations estimates cited in the book put 2.4 million people in parts of southern Sudan at risk of starvation. The book further reports that the attack appeared to interrupt movement toward compromise among the warring parties and a possible peace agreement, with potential consequences beyond Sudan, including for Uganda and the Nile basin.

Role in the Argument

The Near East Foundation’s significance here lies in the evidentiary bridge between a military action and its diffuse civilian costs. Rather than treating the bombing’s consequences as limited to the site struck, the book uses field reporting and development expertise to trace how the loss of medicines, the constraints on imports, and the disruption of relief could affect a population already facing severe hardship. The institution’s credibility and practical focus give this account a grounded counterweight to official rationales and to abstract assessments of the attack.