Sudan's Civil War and the Elephant in the Room

While all eyes are turned to the Israel-Hamas war and the accompanying rioting in many Western nations, another conflict is going on that isn't getting nearly as much attention. That forgotten war is in Sudan, where an irregular militia is committing an actual genocide.

Riding horses, camels and motorbikes, the paramilitaries arrived on the outskirts of Ardamata in early November. Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) fighters took men from homes that they then burned down; at least 800 people were killed and survivors were ordered to bury the dead.
The RSF went door-to-door in Ardamata, in west Darfur, according to the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, rounding up and killing people from the Masalit ethnic group.
Investigators at the non-profit Centre for Information Resilience (CIR) have collated images from Ardamata that appear to confirm attacks on civilians. CIR’s Sudan Witness project has been monitoring human rights violations in the region, which is closed to foreigners and journalists, using open-source information, satellite imagery and Nasa-provided data, as well as gathering images from social media that are geolocated.

This RSF, which has resisted being folded into actual Sudanese military forces — such as they are — is well on its way to seizing control of the country. And, unlike Western liberals and progressives complaining about Israel's war on Hamas, the RSF is committing what, by every indication, is an actual genocide. This, of course, is not particularly new to Africa.

CIR researchers have verified videos of militiamen rounding up and whipping men dressed in civilian clothing in Ardamata. One video shows men being struck with rifles by uniformed men, some of whom wore RSF insignia and called the men “sons of dogs”.
“They killed every man they met in my neighbourhood,” says Ibrahim Abakar (not his real name), a 40-year-old Ardamata resident. “I was praying when I heard the sound of an explosion. A shell killed my friends and nearly cut off my feet.”

To those who bemoan any "genocide" in the Middle East, I can only advise them to take a good look at Sudan, where an actual genocide is taking place. The Sudan war is not the only such genocide to take place in Africa in recent years. People in the high-tech, comfortable Western world, especially the younger generations, have very little real idea of what most of the world is like; much of the world is a nasty, ugly place.

Horrible as all this is, it's not an isolated event; nor is the war in Gaza, nor is the war in Ukraine. There are dozens of ongoing conflicts around the world today; war appears to be a built-in feature of mankind. Throughout much of the history of mankind, atrocities and the massacre of innocents have been a built-in feature of war. But there is an important exception: To see that, look at a map of ongoing conflicts and note the areas where there are not ongoing conflicts: The United States. Canada. Western Europe. Australia. And, yes, China.

China is the odd man out here, being essentially a Communist dictatorship under Xi; but the other nations do have one thing in common: They are modern Western nations, developed countries that (at least when compared to the rest of the world) have limited government, private property rights, modern technological societies and (at least to some extent) individual rights.

This concept, I would point out, is very fragile. And if one looks at events in the world's major cities, even here in the United States, it's easy to see a possible end to our comfortable, developed-nation lifestyle as our major metropolitan areas are taken over by lunatics, who are enabled by the municipal governments. Don't think it can't happen here; it can.

George Santayana famously said, "Only the dead have seen the end of war." Sadly, he was probably right.

See the links below for more coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict.