Let’s be clear: There are a lot of ongoing genocides in the world right now — the Palestinian genocide, Uyghur genocide, Rohingya genocide and the Congolese Tutsi genocide.
There are even more that American and Western media outlets ignore, leaving those crises in a forgotten folder of their archives.
I want to pull that folder out and talk about one of the forgotten genocides. The one whose country President Donald Trump said he viewed as “a freelance, no government, no this or that.”
I want to talk about Sudan.
Sudan is an old and beautiful country. It’s a land of riches and strength. As Sudanese imam and author Ammar Alshukry spoke in his poem, “Where Niles Meet,” Sudan is a place where “the sun always shines and grandfathers tell tales of golden times … Meals, grief and happiness are never shared alone.”
Those collective memories have been shattered for nearly three years.
A quick look in history: A dictator named Omar al-Bashir controlled Sudan for roughly three decades since 1989. Under him, oppression and ethnic cleansing spread, specifically in the Darfur region of Sudan, which is comprised of both ethnically Arab and non-Arab indigenous groups.
Under Bashir’s tyranny in 2003, a part of the Sudanese army called Janjaweed led a genocide against non-Arab Sudanese citizens in Darfur. Today, the International Criminal Court has two arrest warrants for Al Bashir on charges of crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide. He was overthrown in 2019 by the civilian-led revolution.
A new joint-government agreement was put in place by the military to last three years. Factions split and a coup ensued based on disagreeing governing policies during this time. A counter-revolutionary war for control broke out in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, according to the BBC.
Both armies are supported by foreign governments and have committed war crimes against the Sudanese people. This includes murdering civilians, the destruction and looting of several cities across the country and the blockade of international humanitarian aid.
In the past two years, 400,000 Sudanese civilians have been killed. An approximated 26 million Sudanese are at risk of starvation. 12 million have been displaced from their homes.
The RSF, rooted in the Janjaweed, continues their systematic killing of non-Arab Sudanese in the Darfur region through increasing sexual violence of women and children, lynching of parents trying to smuggle food in the region for their families and pillaging villages under their control — genocide.
So why isn’t anyone talking about it? Because the media doesn’t show it.
As Americans, we’ve gotten quite the reputation for our ignorance towards foreign affairs. The sad truth is that most people still view Africa as a country, rather than the second-largest continent with the most diverse of cultures and nearly 2000 different languages.
The root problem is ignorance.
Sudanese journalists and media influencers have been using their platforms to raise awareness for more than two years, but it hasn’t been enough, which leads to a second problem.
What are the chances that, with knowledge of Sudan, news outlets will consistently broadcast images coming out of Darfur? Even if they do, is it on the front page? Because if it was, more people would know — the same way they do about Ukraine.
So it’s not just ignorance. It’s racism, too.
Deciding what to inform the public on and how to do it stems from the newspaper’s priorities of what’s important now. Journalist Barry Malone writes in his Middle East Eye article, “African stories are an afterthought.”
The mass killing of Black people around the world has been systematically ignored for decades. Their suffering is viewed as common, everyday news because of their “poor” and “underdeveloped” countries, like Sudan.
The reality?
Suffering is not common. Violence is never normal.
Sudan isn’t poor. It’s exploited.
Like many countries in the great, big continent of Africa, it was colonized and is still battling the effects of neocolonialism. That means Sudan’s real enemy isn’t in Sudan.
Neocolonialism is a powerful colonial nation’s control of another former colonized state through economic dependence and exploitation of resources. It is indirect colonization.
Sudan’s real enemy is the United Arab Emirates.
Dubai’s shiny skyscrapers and tourist industry was founded on the theft of Sudan’s resources. UAE’s golden image is built by stolen Sudanese gold. Worse, the UAE directly funds and arms the RSF to continue their plundering agenda to extract Sudan’s resources at the expense of innocent Sudanese women, men and children.
UAE is responsible for the genocide of hundreds of thousands of Sudanese citizens. Call them out on it the way you do against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
We need to decolonize our minds and shift the way we view everyone outside of our American bubble. We are not alone in this world, and it’s time we stopped acting like it.
Talk about Sudan the way you do other humanitarian crises.
Talk about Sudan the way you do about your plans for tomorrow.
Eyes on Sudan.
