Don’t Look Away From the Genocide in Sudan
Friday night’s panel (9 May 2025) on the catastrophic humanitarian situation in Sudan was well attended… but overwhelmingly by members of the Sudanese community in Sydney.
By Dr Eyal Mayroz, University of Sydney
The event, hosted by the Sydney Peace Foundation with support from USYD Faculty of Medicine and Health, was very timely—or more accurately, long overdue.
To be sure, many of us have been passionate and dedicated to addressing other man-made catastrophes, particularly the horrors in Gaza (my own tally of invited media engagements has been 140 on Israel-Palestine, compared to one only on Sudan). However, absent greater public attention to Sudan, the three-way dependency between media, audiences, and policymakers will remain at a standstill, allowing countless innocents to be massacred invisibly.
Now entering its third year, the war has reportedly claimed 150,000 lives, displaced 13 million people, and left 30 million (more than half the country’s population) fully dependent on humanitarian aid.
The term “civil war” is actually misleading, as we are witnessing a protracted power struggle between two brutal generals and their forces, both sides guilty of numerous mass atrocities against innocent civilians (though one side bears significantly more responsibility).
In the worst-affected western province of Darfur, an area the size of France, intermittent genocide has been taking place…since late 2003.
And the world remains silent.
Global media attention, and consequently public interest, has focused elsewhere, allowing governments to do what they do best—make moralizing statements of condemnation while committing vastly insufficient funds for humanitarian aid.
Under-resourced and understaffed NGOs—the few still operating on the ground in Darfur (most having withdrawn due to high risks to their staff)—are struggling against a fresh wave of mass killings, displacement, rape, insecurity, and enormous difficulties in bringing lifesaving aid into the war zone.
The absence of food, water, medicines, and other essentials led the UN to declare a state of famine in North Darfur, a year ago already. Yet, without political will to stop the fighting, conditions continue to deteriorate.
Three weeks ago, most of the 500,000 African-Sudanese inhabitants of Darfur’s largest IDP camp, Zamzam, were forced to flee for their lives after a long-warned-about assault by the RSF, a reincarnation of the original Janjaweed responsible for the 2004-2005 genocide. This is another ethnically targeted campaign of mass destruction, murder, and rape.
The use of the word “mass” can easily hide the fact that these are individual persons, women, children, elderly, and men, all with names and faces, and families who love them, if they are still alive, so important to try to keep that in mind.
I could continue on and on, but to keep this post concise, I’ll refer you to the highly authoritative update by Nathaniel Raymond, Director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, who for the past two years has been “satellite tracking” and alerting the world to the unfolding mass atrocities. Nathaniel’s recent webinar is titled: “Watching a Genocide Unfold from Space: Monitoring Attacks on Civilians in Sudan.“
It is incumbent on all of us to pay more attention, make much more noise, and push more media to cover the situation in Sudan. Let’s show our Sudanese brothers and sisters, both here and in Sudan, that for us Australians, innocent Black lives matter as much as Brown and White.
Eyal Mayroz
PS. The UAE, Australia’s main trading partner in the Middle East, is the primary weapons supplier to the murderous RSF. Sudan recently took the UAE to the International Court of Justice on charges of aiding genocide, but the case was dismissed earlier this week due to jurisdictional issues (a matter of legal constraints unrelated to the merits of the case itself).
Despite well-documented evidence linking the UAE to the RSF and the prolonging of this war, we have yet to hear any response from Canberra on this troubling relationship.