Remember when people said that Black Lives Matter? They did not mean it. That much is clear now, as the world watches a war that is killing tens of thousands, that has displaced more than 10 million and which is threatening to devour 13 million more through famine — and barely gives it a glance. Most of those are black lives and it could not be more obvious that, to an indifferent world, they do not matter at all.
Do not be too hard on yourself if you have not yet guessed which conflict, and project of ethnic cleansing, I am speaking of. With a few honorable exceptions, it is barely covered on TV, on the radio or in the papers. Most politicians never mention it. There are no mass demonstrations on the streets, no hashtags on social media. Instead, the war in Sudan is out of sight and out of mind — for reasons that say a little about Africa and much more about everyone else.
The conflict has raged since April last year, so there has been no shortage of time to notice it. Nor is it lacking epic scale. On the contrary, aid organizations say Sudan faces “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.”
The suffering is not complicated or abstract, but heart-rending, brimming with the kind of horror that ordinarily would seize global attention.
Take the testimony of one of those many millions who has fled Sudan for neighboring Chad, a young woman called Maryam Suleiman. She told the New York Times about the day that the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the rebadged version of the Janjaweed — the Arab militia guilty of the Darfur slaughter two decades ago — stormed into her village. The gunmen lined up the men and the boys as their leader said: “We don’t want to see any black people. We don’t even want to see black trash bags.”
He then promptly shot a black donkey, signaling his intent. After that, the RSF men set about executing all black males over the age of 10, including Maryam’s five brothers, and some younger ones, too. A day-old baby boy was thrown to the ground and killed, and a male toddler chucked into a pond to drown. Then, “they raped many, many girls,” she said.
They called them “slaves” and told them: “There is no place for you black people in Sudan.”
How, then, is this attempt to complete the destruction of a population begun 20 years ago not one of the dominant issues of our time, clearing the front pages and the broadcast news, prompting hoarse demos and fervent protests? I spoke to Protection Approaches founding director Kate Ferguson, who is doing all she can to get policymakers especially to focus on this vicious war. However, it is such a struggle.
There is not even a rough estimate of the death toll — you can see ranges that go up to 150,000 or more — because no one is counting all the dead. In this civil war, there is no official state machinery, no health ministry, to publish daily figures. No international non-governmental organizations can do it because, “no one has big teams on the ground,” Ferguson said.
Local groups do their best, but “the world isn’t listening to them,” she said.
That goes for the media too, whose coverage of, say, the disaster that is the Israel-Hamas war, has been orders of magnitude more extensive than its coverage of the violence in Sudan. I do not exempt myself, by the way: I have written dozens of times on the former and only now on the latter.
With multiple disasters unfolding around the world, there is scarcely any capacity left for this one.
Still, all this does not answer the question so much as reinforce it. It is true that there is apparently endless agony competing for attention, from Ukraine to the Middle East, and that bandwidth is limited. However, none of that explains why it should be the catastrophe in Sudan that loses out.
Ferguson said she wonders if there is a sense that Darfur was meant to be “done” 20 years ago and many of the celebrities and others who took a stand then are wearied by the prospect of having to do it all over again.
It is also clear that the nature of the Sudan conflict, a civil war, means there is no single government, no Volodymyr Zelenskiy figure, for outsiders to line up behind.
I fear that baser factors are at work, starting with the fact that this is a war in Africa. Certainly unstated, and possibly unconscious, is the thought that this is just what happens in a place that for centuries existed in the western imagination as “the dark continent.” In the silence of the west, there is a whisper of what, in a different context, former US president George W. Bush once called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”
As if news editors and foreign ministers, too many of them, are quietly saying: “It’s Africa. What else do you expect?”
However, while that might explain the inattention of media and politicians, it does not tell us why activists and progressives have been so lethargic. The very same people who took to the streets when George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis have barely raised a murmur at the organized murder of tens of thousands of black men and women, in Sudan.
Could it be that the western progressive does not know who to root for? Both the RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) are guilty of appalling crimes and there is no simple, comfortingly familiar narrative structure into which this conflict can be slotted. Many on today’s left have organized the world, past and present, into two neat categories. There are the oppressed and there are the oppressors, there are the colonized and the colonizers. With some conflicts it can seem easy to label each side — however mistakenly — and to cheer or boo accordingly. You do not even have to think. However, what are you meant to do when good and evil are not clear cut, when a conflict is not, either literally or metaphorically, black versus white?
Faced with that conundrum, it is easier just to declare the whole thing too complicated and look the other way. Many on the left did that during the civil war in Syria. Some relied on their well-worn, at-a-glance guide to international conflicts — support whichever side is opposed by the US — but it led them into an awkward place. Others preferred just to sit that one out, even as more than 600,000 people were killed.
It is further proof that, when it comes to viewing the world, crude “anti-colonialism” is a terribly clouded lens. It works only if you think our planet is divided into goodies and baddies, rather than understanding that some clashes pit two just causes against each other, while others involve a collision of two varieties of wickedness, each claiming to act in the name of the oppressed.
The people of Sudan should not have to apologize for that their tragedy does not fit the storybook version of morality that so many seem to hanker for. It is us who should apologize to them, for ignoring them in their desperation — and for pretending we ever cared.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist.
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