Tragedy in Sudan

"Why is the world community turning a blind eye to this conflict? At the government level, there's geopolitics: there are few strategic considerations or resources at stake in the region for major players such as the United States, Russia or China. There is also the memory of the 2003 genocide in Sudan and the protracted UN peacekeeping operation; last week, Sudan's military government asked that the remaining humanitarian mission be withdrawn, though it claims to remain 'committed to constructive engagement with the UN'."

"But at the 'civil society' level, the reason is simple: the conflict doesn't fit the left's anti-colonial narrative. The oppressors are not white or white-adjacent. This crisis cannot be blamed on capitalism, the U.S. or Jews. There is nothing for the left to gain politically, by calling out a community that is part of its own coalition. So just like feminists stay silent when Jewish women are raped, progressives fail to stand up for Black Africans when they are massacred."

"The crisis in Sudan exposes 'intersectionality' for what it is: a big, fat antisemitic lie. the hypocrisy is beyond belief. And the Masalit are the ones to pay the price."

Tasha Kheiriddin, journalist, National Post

A Sudanese woman carrying her daughter on the outskirts of Adre, Chad, July 2023

Zohra Bensemra / Reuters

From Democratic Republic of Congo, to Gaza, just about anywhere in the 'underdeveloped', tribal, sectarian, uncivilized reaches of the world community, where war is prosecuted, women's lives are consumed by rape and slaughter. Terrorists don't much mind killing babies, either. Women are subject o mass rapes, the victimization of the most vulnerable in any society. Perhaps it has always been that way, from ancient history forward, but we like to believe we've progressed as humans since primal times.

 

Yet, terrorists are free in some places where we are thankfully not, to shoot babies in the head, and "punish and terrorize" people, burning communities to the ground. Women and girls taken hostage, held in "slave-like conditions". Ah, a familiar story by now, but one when repeated injudiciously risks the careless of being identified as Islamophobic. Arab terrorists determined to drive an ethnic group away from their ancestral geography. 

In the Darfur conflict when the government of Sudan and its military employed Arab Janjaweed (horsemen) to attack and slaughter and disperse Black Sudanese farmers in a regional conflict that pitted agrarians against herders, when land was valued not for its wealth of grain-growing conditions but for pasturage, the powerful swept down on the vulnerable to drive them off their land, raze their villages, rape their women, and commit mass slaughter; helicopter gunships came in handy for all of that as well.

The scene? Sudan, once again targeting Black Africans, the Masalit. It has been seven months and world leaders, human-rights groups and the progressive left don't seem to have noticed. In Europe and North America there have been no university protests, no rampaging mobs in public arenas. Arab businesses  haven't been targeted, no one has been calling for the isolation of Muslim colonizers. They haven't been condemned as genocidal killrs of babies. Black Lives Matter are nowhere to be seen.

That Islamists have targeted people of colour in yet another attempt at extermination is of little interest, it seems. If the United Nations has been wringing its hands, has anyone noticed? In Sudan 5.6 million people have been displaced as a result of fighting between the Arab paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (which renamed itself from simply 'Janjaweed') and the Sudanese army. Both got along very well for a while after the government coup of 2021.

The RSF killed over a thousand Masalit in 72 hours in the Ardamata refugee camp. 9,000 people were killed since the summer when the conflict broke out. In the five years 2003 to 2008, 300,000 Masalit were killed, 2.5 million displaced by the Arab militia force, Janjaweed when former Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir used the terrorists to crush Darfur's rebel groups revolting against the neglect suffered by the Black African population.

Researchers at the Centre for Information Resilience verified videos of militiamen rounding up and whipping Masalit men in Ardamata. The  uniformed men wearing RSF insignia speak of their victims as "sons of dogs", targeting men and boys, an indigenous Darfuri group. "They killed every man they met in my neighbourhood. I was praying when I heard the sound of an explosion. A shell killed my friends and nearly cut off my feet", one Ardamata resident testified.

Lip service to a distaste for the situation did come from the European Union decrying the "ethnic cleansing campaign with the aim to eradicate the non-Arab Masalit community from West Darfur". Human rights obligation done, and done with. Oh, and in case anyone wonders, the Black African Masalit are faithful Muslims. Just not the right kind. 

Refugees fleeing the deadly violence in Darfur are arriving to sites like this one in Adré, in Chad, in dire need.  UNHCR/Ariadne Kypriadi