What is Happening in Sudan, Why There Is a Genocide, and What You Can Do To Help
(Originally published November 23, 2023)
Sudan is being torn to pieces by antiBlack violence committed against them to make the powers that be in other nations pleased and a corrupt government of their own that is largely indifferent to their pain, in many cases aiding in it.
Despite calls for a free Sudan many in the Western world, and really the world as a whole, do not actually know what this genocide of the Sudanese people encompasses.
Any support for the Sudanese people when they are trying their hardest to survive is good but it can only be so good until a lack of information on anything about the genocide starts to slow down efforts to fight it. As such we need to be and stay educated on what is happening in Sudan.
What is happening to the Sudanese people?
The Sudanese people are finding themselves and their neighborhoods attacked by the RSF (Rapid Support Forces) and other Arab militias.
Along with them being attacked by Arab militias the SAF(Sudanese Armed Forces) are fighting the RSF without a care of civilians being harmed and in some cases, they even, in a show of power, purposefully harm Sudanese civilians as well. Battles are being conducted in residential and commercial areas rather than empty plots of land with many people of Sudan caught in the gunfire. The government has shown corruption and lack of care for these massacres taking place all over Sudan.
As of October 2023, the estimate of deceased Sudanese citizens is nearly 10,000 people and that is the number garnered since April of 2023. In only seven months so many lives have been shattered.
Infants and children left without caretakers and food have starved to death, and women and girls are being sexually assaulted and raped by the RSF and at times the SAF as well. Many who once had safe homes have seen their homes destroyed and are now refugees in camps where their only cover from the elements are makeshift shelters in places such as Chad.
Who are the RSF?
The RSF is a paramilitary militia. They have ties to militias such as the Janjaweed who had previously worked for the Sudanese government.
Even then when members of RSF worked for the Sudanese government they had massacred many with the corrupt government not caring so long as their whims were catered to. Not only do they do everything in their power to harm the Sudanese people but they also stop NGOs from providing humanitarian aid to Sudan.
The racial makeup of those in the RSF are Sudanese and Sudanese-Arab men.
This is relevant because a major part of why the RSF are genocidal is in their belief that their nonBlack heritage makes them superior to Black people like the Sudanese.
Even those who are in appearance fully Sudanese point to the possibility they have Arab ancestry of proof of their better bloodline than other fully Sudanese people, despite their unambiguous Blackness and that that same idea of some level of Arab/nonBlack heritage could apply to the Sudanese people they are harming. The Sudanese-Arab people vary in Black heritage and have a more definitive Arab lineage to which they base the racial superiority they believe they have over the fully Black people of Sudan on but they still are Black and therefore the men in the RSF of that background are too killing people they share heritage with.
Obviously, nonBlack people are not in any capacity better than the indigenous Black people of Sudan or Black period and it is clear more than they would like that the fully Sudanese and Sudanese-Arab Black people within the RSF share Blackness with the very people they are killing but self-hatred is a hard thing to dispel and murderous self-hatred is rarely the kind of thing that can be talked down with common sense to a not-murderous level.
The RSF mentality can be summed up as the idea that through their ethnic cleansing of the Sudanese people, they can gain more favor with Arab powers and fully Arab people. They work closely with these powers and even lend their manpower in the thousands to Arab armies like the Libyan National Army.
Many Sudanese believe this is a delusional frame of thought to have. The RSF is still comprised of Black people. They do not believe the nonBlack powers that be that the RSF works for have any plans to see completely Sudanese race traitors or Afro-Arabs as their equals no matter how much the RSF supports their goals.
Despite the actual racial makeup of the RSF, make no mistake, the RSF is an Arab militia hoping to garner the approval of Arab rule like the UAE (United Arab Emirates). To the Western public understanding, it doesn’t make sense that a group of Black, Black-mixed, and Brown people such as those who are Arab could get together to man this antiBlack genocide but it is all too true of a reality.
What role do Arab-led powers (and citizens) play in this?
To give the full extent of how forces like the UAE and other Arab powers are a culprit in what is happening to the Sudanese people we would have to go all the way back to the history of the Trans-Saharan slave trade, which I encourage any reader to look into, and work our way back up to present-day.
The UAE may only be a little over 50 years old and other nations who engage in the same actions not much older than that but what they do in Africa has been built upon the colonialism nations in the eastern arab region along with pre-common era Europe (Rome and Greece) committed against Africa over thousands of years ago.
With the history of colonialism in mind, we have the starting point for how these powers play a role in this. To keep this semi-brief I do not have the room to go into the full extent of that history here but there are references at the end of this reading that do and there will be a follow-up article discussing it.
In today's world, the UAE has lied about supporting refugees with supply drops only for that supplies to actually be weapons for the RSF who HARM displaced people, given in areas like Darfur where Remnants of the Janjaweed militia that now are a part of RSF have previously committed atrocities.
As mentioned, other Arab powers such as Libya recruited the RSF into working amongst their army ranks. Libya has had a major human trafficking problem but now has functionally had slavery reinstated on a massive scale in recent years and enslaves Black immigrants of other nations that make it into their country. With Sudan in such peril that even those who know the risk but can’t make it to Chad go there this gives them a steady supply of more slaves.
From a Western perspective, this information can come as a shock because in our world people of color have a somewhat limited amount of more power than Black people but this is not the case for other parts of the world like North Africa where Arab citizens and government consider themselves a defacto white people and wield white supremacy systematically against Black people like the Sudanese. We also must remember that many Arab citizens in nations like the regions under the UAE and others with nonBlack Arabs at the helm of power have white ancestry from when Europe tried their hand at colonizing North Africa.
When you peel back the image of the RSF as Black people committing genocide against Black people you see the people leading, paying, and supplying this genocide to happen are nonBlack heads of governments with plentiful reasons built on greed and belief in their racial superiority that lead them to want this genocide to continue.
What role does the government play in this?
Diplomats of Sudan wanted the RSF, which has done so much harm to their people and already had a defined allegiance to Arab powers, to combine with their military. Where regard for the victims of the RSF should have been instead there was a quest for more militarization of an already heavily militarized Sudan.
It may seem confusing as to how a genocidal anti-Black group could have ever been of use to the Sudanese government throughout the years but the Sudanese government has been corrupt for a long time, spanning the change of leaders
The government itself, during the time of Omar al-Bashir, shared sentiments that groups like the Janjaweed did as far as Arab supremacy which is what led them to start their genocide in Darfur. This is why it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Janjaweed at one point worked for the government of Sudan in the genocide of Darfur which the government launched against their own people rather than provide them with services like hospitals and roads. While Omar is no longer in power many who came after him on the same scale did not have more care for the Sudanese people and those who did usually did not stay around in power for long.
Sudan’s government has been in the pocket of nonBlack powers for many years while having their own reasons to see citizens moved from areas of Sudan with use of murderous force (such as oil in inhabited land).
As mentioned, the government has little care for how their military fights with the militias, not to protect the people of Sudan but as a power struggle for their leaders, which gets Sudanese citizens in the middle and contributes to more deaths of the population.
What can I do to help the Sudanese people?
The U.S. has had a very, very friendly relationship with the UAE and is heavily intertwined with them, having military bases located in their territories and selling them weapons. One major way those of us, especially people in America, can fight the horrors committed against the Sudanese is by putting pressure on the American government to acknowledge and condemn all the nations that are taking part in their oppression.
As of now, President Biden has put a sanction and visa restriction on those tied to RSF and SAF but we have yet to see any sanctions on the UAE and other nations that have taken part in this atrocity specifically because of it. That is not good enough. Avoiding taking them to task will just allow for more corrupt heads of government and antiBlack paramilitary groups to arise in the future as the people who pay them to continue being genocidal are not identified by the government as being the main factors of the entire ordeal.
It is easy to scapegoat just the RSF and SAF as being the end-all-be-all of this and while they hold the gun the politicians know the true force behind everything is the collective Arab powers with their hands in North Africa. Making calls to state officials to ask that they push up this issue to Congress is a good start.
Another way to help is by making calls to officials and protesting for the nation you live in to start and/or extend a Temporary Protected Status (TPS), or your country's version of such, to the Sudanese people. Right now the U.S has done such but there are various time limits. Organizing to help those who are Sudanese get or extend a Visa is also a good move. When they arrive they will need care such as housing, food and other resources. Contacting and collaborating with organizations that can get these things to them will help organize the effort.
Remember that the Sudanese need real effort. We cannot let antiBlackness, colonialism, and lack of care that has taken so much away from them also lead to inaction from those who can be actionable in helping them, including ourselves. They deserve to live and heal from what's been done to them and their people, we have the ability to make it so.
References:
https://www.unhcr.org/news/stories/sudanese-refugees-fleeing-darfur-find-safety-chad#:~:text=After%20fleeing%20horrific%20violence%20in,children%20who%20are%20often%20malnourished.
https://worldwithoutgenocide.org/genocides-and-conflicts/darfur-genocide#:~:text=In%202003%2C%20some%20African%20rebel,Arabs%20in%20the%20Darfur%20region.
https://earthjournalism.net/stories/the-dark-side-of-sudans-oil
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Arab_Emirates%E2%80%93United_States_relations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Arab_Emirates%E2%80%93United_States_relations
https://reliefweb.int/report/sudan/sudan-situation-health-nutrition-update-july-2023
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Sudan_(2023)
https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/sudans-rsf-arab-militia-force-battling-army-power-2023-07-13/
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/6/6/who-are-sudans-rsf-and-their-commander-hemeti
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/longform/2023/8/14/dont-let-the-other-soldiers-watch-rape-as-a-weapon-of-war-in-sudan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janjaweed
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Libya
https://pomeps.org/anti-black-racism-and-slavery-in-desert-and-non-desert-zones-of-north-africa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery_in_the_Muslim_world
