The main sessions of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York begin on Tuesday 24 September. The lead-up to this annual conclave has been punctuated by a succession of speeches and press releases from most of the agencies concerned with what is currently the world’s worst humanitarian disaster – Sudan.

After 17 months of bloody, unrelenting civil war between the official Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia, their warnings are universally dire. With the failure of several peace (or just ceasefire) talks brokered by countries and officials from all points of the compass, Sudan is on the brink of complete disaster. It is at immediate risk of breaking up entirely, with appalling, wide-ranging consequences for both its people and the region.

All this will be the focus of debates and meetings at the UNGA, fuelled by a growing consensus that this will be the very last chance that the UN has to influence events in the country. If no progress is made this year, in all likelihood, by the time of next year’s UNGA, Sudan will no longer exist in any meaningful sense of the word. The death toll will  have risen inexorably. It’s now or never.

Statistically, the main contours of Sudan’s disaster are clear. It is already deadlier than the two crises that claim far more attention: Ukraine and Gaza. Over 150,000 people have been killed in Sudan’s civil war and 10 million have been forced to flee their homes (a little under one quarter of the population). Of those, two million have fled the country, straining the resources, goodwill and political stability of its neighbours. With harvests difficult to collect and food prices rocketing, famine has already been declared at one enormous refugee camp (Zamzan, holding about 500,000 people) in the western region of Darfur. One humanitarian outfit warned in May that, on the present trajectory, hunger and related diseases could kill more than two million people in Sudan by the end of the year. Both sides of the conflict have almost certainly committed war crimes and crimes against humanity; genocide (committed by the RSF) has returned to Darfur.

In the past week, on the sidelines of the UNGA, desperate Sudanese have been filling in the details. Munzoul Assal, a Sudanese professor of social anthropology, currently a scholar at the Christian Michelsen Institute in Bergen, Norway, addressed the Science Summit, telling his audience that 90 per cent of the staff at the University of Khartoum – once one of Africa’s most prestigious centres of learning – have fled the country. Most will never return. Even after decades of neglect, before the war Sudan’s health facilities were among the continent’s best. Yet now, according to one academic, 70 per cent of the country’s hospitals are ‘out of service’. Akram Ahmed Elkhalifa, a professor of architecture at the University of Khartoum, told the same meeting that many of the country’s higher education institutions have been looted, or repurposed as military barracks. In short, much of the manpower and capacity the country would need to recover, even if the fighting stopped tomorrow, has already been hollowed out, perhaps irretrievably.

What could the UN do to help? For a start, countries should be bullied into fully funding the UN’s appeal for more aid. The UN office for humanitarian affairs says that its appeal is still $1.3 billion short of the $2.7 billion total that it has asked for. Seeing as this sum, by any standards, can only be regarded as ‘emergency’ aid, such pledging should easily bypass the many internal domestic debates about ‘aid dependency’ and so forth. Furthermore, all the donors can apply more pressure on both the RSF and SAF to actually allow what aid there is to be distributed speedily and in full. At the moment there are far too many stories of ‘bureaucratic’ delays, as both sides play political games by attempting to control the distribution of aid in order to reward potential support.

A much harder task, but equally necessary, is to reduce both sides’ access to armaments and ammunition. As both the SAF and RSF still appear to be fully committed to gaining an outright military victory, whatever the cost in lives and destruction, the only sensible course must be to starve them of the weapons that enable them to keep fighting. These weapons (and money) come from Russia, which now appears to be hedging its bets and backing both sides; the United Arab Emirates (UAE), supplying the RSF to further its own geopolitical interests; and Egypt and Iran, which back the SAF. Of these, the UAE is probably the most significant, as it draws its other allies into the conflict and gives the murderous RSF leader Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti, a sense of legitimacy he scarcely deserves.

The UN has already compiled a confidential report giving chapter and verse on UAE’s involvement with the RSF, which was leaked to the press at the start of the year. The UAE denied any such involvement, but surely the time has come to start sanctioning the UAE – and others, if necessary – if the supply of arms does not cease. With all the countries gathered together at the UNGA, this is as good a time as any to take the UAE to task collectively over Sudan.

Finally, the various UN bodies will have to consider whether to intervene, or not, with boots on the ground. Clearly, the conflict in Sudan is so severe, and spread over such a large area, that at this point any sort of ‘peacekeeping’ force would be futile. Besides, the UN tried such a force before in Darfur – the largest such army of blue helmets in the world at the time – with only limited success. Starting in 2007, It was withdrawn ignominiously three years ago. That does not, however, preclude inserting UN-backed military observers to support local ceasefires. Such options are being actively explored.

Despite the apparent awfulness of the situation, the UN, with its enormous convening power and diplomatic clout, still has cards to play in Sudan. It is up to the individual countries that make up the UN to act. Next week may be their last chance to do so.