Racial Cleansing In Sudan

[Keith_M]

“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, signalling 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. And then, “they raped many, many girls”. They called them “slaves” and told them: “There is no place for you Black people in Sudan.”

The slaughter continues in Sudan, but no one seems to care.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/11/world-humanitarian-disaster-sudan

[DaveF]

Put me in the group that had absolutely no idea about this. I assumed Sudan / South Sudan split had gone some way to stabilising it but that article is a tough read.

[Stairway 2 7]

I posted this year that people rightly and bravely March for Palestine and Ukraine but nobody cares when it's a war involving people of colour on both sides.

Russia and Assad killed 600k in Syria as your article says and you wouldn't see a banner in the city centre let alone the football. Sudanese genocide, Myanmar, Christians being slaughtered in Syria and Iraq, Hindus in Bangladesh, 1.5 million Afghans being thrown out of Pakistan in the last 2 years causing thousands to die.

All happening now but barely a peep and silence from every government

[Paul1642]

I’ve never been able to get my head around why certain events get so much coverage whilst many equally as horrific events / conflicts pass entirely unrelated, with the one linked above being a good example that I hadn’t been heard of until now.

Another that springs to mind is slavery. The Atlantic slave trade ended almost 200 years ago, having an estimated 12.5 million slaves over a 350 year period. This is still a widely discussed topic to this day which everyone is well aware of. Meanwhile an estimated 50 million people are living in modern slavery right now and it hardy gets a mention.

Likewise with the holocaust in comparison to the Uyghur camps in China. Should be a massive topic with intentional pressure and sanctions to try to put an end to it, but I guess 2 million people in concentration camps in one of the worlds most powerful countries isn’t deemed important.

Seems we are good at acknowledging and condemning some wrongs of the past without doing much to learn from them or help those in need today.

[Keith_M]

I posted this year that people rightly and bravely March for Palestine and Ukraine but nobody cares when it's a war involving people of colour on both sides.
...


Sadly that seems to be the case.

As the article says, events occurring in Africa seem to be greeted with just a shrug of the shoulders, and gains little to no press coverage.

Which of our politicians have even mentioned this recently?

[Ozyhibby]

I’ve never been able to get my head around why certain events get so much coverage whilst many equally as horrific events / conflicts pass entirely unrelated, with the one linked above being a good example that I hadn’t been heard of until now.

Another that springs to mind is slavery. The Atlantic slave trade ended almost 200 years ago, having an estimated 12.5 million slaves over a 350 year period. This is still a widely discussed topic to this day which everyone is well aware of. Meanwhile an estimated 50 million people are living in modern slavery right now and it hardy gets a mention.

Likewise with the holocaust in comparison to the Uyghur camps in China. Should be a massive topic with intentional pressure and sanctions to try to put an end to it, but I guess 2 million people in concentration camps in one of the worlds most powerful countries isn’t deemed important.

Seems we are good at acknowledging and condemning some wrongs of the past without doing much to learn from them or help those in need today.

There is a significant eco system for criticising any action the west is involved that also turns a blind eye to others. It’s correct we should hold ourselves to higher standards though.
In the end, there is no appetite for us to get involved in policing other regions. The war in Iraq killed that for at least another generation.


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[Pretty Boy]

I donate monthly to a charity called Mary's Meals and they announced they were being forced to pull out of Sudan a few months ago. Most of their work is carried out by locals but the logistics in Sudan were proving too challenging and dangerous. They are based in schools and their meal times were being targeted due to having a large number of children in one place. These guys are working in some of the poorest and most dangerous places in the world so if they cease working in an area it's noteworthy.The situation on the ground sounds horrific. They are still working in South Sudan and it seems there is an indirect overspill there as well and they have plenty problems of their own to contend with.

I can't really get my head around the whole situation. You have Sudanese Arabs ethnically cleansing various groups who span various north and central African nations. Many of these groups whilst not Arab ethnically are also Muslim (and predominantly Sunni, the same as the Arab majority) so it's not explicitly a religious issue. But among the Arab majority you have several different groups at war with each other, often breakaways from the original military coup which installed the junta. The situation is similar in South Sudan with various groups fighting and commiting acts of genocide based on longstanding tribal loyalties and claims on grazing land dating back centuries.

From an outside perspective both seem like a problem it is nigh on impossible to solve. I think the linked article touches on the reason for much of the lack of engagement here: there isn't a clear cut good guy and bad guy; that may be true of something like Israel v Hamas as well but that isn't as intricately interwoven. It's possible to believe in a Palestinian's right to a state without wanting to see Hamas leading it (or indeed acknowledge Israel's right to exist without condoning it's current government). In Sudan and South Sudan it's multi layered and there is fault on many sides.

[Keith_M]

PB makes some good points in his comment above.

It is a very complex issue and there isn't an obvious 'good guy'/'bad guy' in this, so it's not as simple as hanging a flag outside a council building.

Thing is, though, that the whole situation seems to be irrelevant to the people in power: politicians, media etc.

I get that it's complex but it's almost as if they don't care.


p.s. Sorry to hear the charity situation, and the lack of safety for the volunteers.

[Stairway 2 7]

PB makes some good points in his comment above.

It is a very complex issue and there isn't an obvious 'good guy'/'bad guy' in this, so it's not as simple as hanging a flag outside a council building.

Thing is, though, that the whole situation seems to be irrelevant to the people in power: politicians, media etc.

I get that it's complex but it's almost as if they don't care.


p.s. Sorry to hear the charity situation, and the lack of safety for the volunteers.

Some are clear cut like Assad killing hundreds of thousands of Syrians including tens of thousands of Palestinians, Uyghur genocide mentioned above or Pakistan removing millions of Afghans to starvation. It's not really the colour of the victim as Assad and Russia were slaughtering Syrians and Palestinians. I've no idea tbh.

There of course are groups like amnesty and many others that do talk about this but they don't get the traction of other genocides

[Moulin Yarns]

There is a significant eco system for criticising any action the west is involved that also turns a blind eye to others. It’s correct we should hold ourselves to higher standards though.
In the end, there is no appetite for us to get involved in policing other regions. The war in Iraq killed that for at least another generation.


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Ecosystem???

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/ecosystem/

[AgentDaleCooper]

There is a significant eco system for criticising any action the west is involved that also turns a blind eye to others. It’s correct we should hold ourselves to higher standards though.
In the end, there is no appetite for us to get involved in policing other regions. The war in Iraq killed that for at least another generation.


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Did we really go into Iraq as 'police', though? Sure it wasn't just colonialism under the guise of liberalism, looking to plunder resources?

[Ozyhibby]

Did we really go into Iraq as 'police'? Sure it wasn't just colonialism under the guise of liberalism, looking to plunder resources?

No, not at all. It was an idiotic decision that has deterred any foreign troop deployments since.


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[AgentDaleCooper]

No, not at all. It was an idiotic decision that has deterred any foreign troop deployments since.


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As in you don't think there was any colonialism going on there, just an honest, massive mistake?

[Stairway 2 7]

As in you don't think there was any colonialism going on there, just an honest, massive mistake?

To colonise don't you have to colonise something. US never wanted to take Iraq or the oil fields. They wanted to kill Sadam and thought they would leave and all would be fine.

The Iraqi oil fields are still Iraq owned now as they have always been and most of the oil goes to India and China and China has more economic interest in them than the US.

It was about trying to be the world police and overthrow dictators they didn't like. Straight after the first gulf war there was massive sanctions on Iraq, a no fly zone and funding for the Kurds and shi'its. Sadam destroyed the turds and used chemical weapons but that wasn't enough for an invasion, 9/11 gave them their excuse.

It was a horrendous stupid invasion which caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people just to topple an admittedly evil dictator.

This conversation sums up the point of thread perfectly though

[judas]

“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, signalling 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. And then, “they raped many, many girls”. They called them “slaves” and told them: “There is no place for you Black people in Sudan.”

The slaughter continues in Sudan, but no one seems to care.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/11/world-humanitarian-disaster-sudan

I had no idea. This is shocking.

[judas]

PB makes some good points in his comment above.

It is a very complex issue and there isn't an obvious 'good guy'/'bad guy' in this, so it's not as simple as hanging a flag outside a council building.

Thing is, though, that the whole situation seems to be irrelevant to the people in power: politicians, media etc.

I get that it's complex but it's almost as if they don't care.


p.s. Sorry to hear the charity situation, and the lack of safety for the volunteers.

Maybe in this era of 24 hour news, conveyed like some perverse entertainment show, the complexity of the Sudan crisis is hard to sell.

Maybe our increasingly undereducated populous can’t process it.

[AgentDaleCooper]

To colonise don't you have to colonise something. US never wanted to take Iraq or the oil fields. They wanted to kill Sadam and thought they would leave and all would be fine.

The Iraqi oil fields are still Iraq owned now as they have always been and most of the oil goes to India and China and China has more economic interest in them than the US.

It was about trying to be the world police and overthrow dictators they didn't like. Straight after the first gulf war there was massive sanctions on Iraq, a no fly zone and funding for the Kurds and shi'its. Sadam destroyed the turds and used chemical weapons but that wasn't enough for an invasion, 9/11 gave them their excuse.

It was a horrendous stupid invasion which caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people just to topple an admittedly evil dictator.

This conversation sums up the point of thread perfectly though

i think i'm maybe referring to neo-colonialism - which is still colonialism - where countries are colonised by being subsumed into a market by force, i.e. through regime change and westernisation of markets...they failed to do this in Iraq, but they bloody tried. They weren't intending to capture the oil fields, but they were trying to install someone that would do business with them in a 'reasonable' way.

Obviously, they gave different 'official' reasons, which I don't take in good faith. The WMD stuff was obviously just rubbish, and the human rights issue just begs the question 'why have you only started caring about this NOW?'. It was never a problem that he was an evil dictator so long as he did what he was told. The al-qaeda links and 'war on terror' angle also proved to be nonsense.

I agree that this isn't relevant to the thread - but I think the difference between issues like our intervention in Iraq and conflicts like that in Sudan is that we are directly and currently responsible for the former (though obviously the war in Sudan will have some/lots of colonial factors), and I suppose I feel inclined to focus my energy on the issues I can at least fool myself into having a sense of agency over. This isn't to say that I'm right about this, or that the war in Sudan is any less important or in need of support - it's obviously crucial - so I'll not deflect any further.