Millions of people can starve, flee, and die almost unnoticed when their tragedy doesn’t serve the interests of the great powers
Millions of people can starve, flee, and die almost unnoticed when their tragedy doesn’t serve the interests of the great powers
What is happening in Sudan today should, by every standard the international public supposedly lives by, be one of the world’s leading stories. Mass killings, rapes, abductions, sieges, starvation used as a weapon, the displacement of millions, destroyed cities, a shattered society, children dying before they even become part of any statistic…
And yet Sudan remains somewhere at the edge of global attention, a catastrophe that occasionally surfaces in a humanitarian organization’s report, on the margins of a UN session, or in a brief wire story, before sinking back into the dark. There is something deeper than ordinary bad-news fatigue in that silence. Sudan shows how the contemporary media-political system does not necessarily respond to the scale of human suffering, but to its usefulness.
The latest UN investigation has further confirmed this picture. According to the findings of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) committed acts during the siege and capture of El Fasher in North Darfur that rise to the level of genocide: mass killings, widespread sexual violence including gang rape, the abduction of women and girls, and the deliberate infliction of starvation through the blockade of humanitarian aid and attacks on food infrastructure. The RSF denies the accusations, but the UN mission speaks of a systematic and deliberate policy of violence. The International Criminal Court, meanwhile, claims that important progress has been made in linking the crimes in Darfur to higher levels of command — meaning this is no longer just talk of the “chaos of war,” but of chains of accountability.
The war in Sudan began in April 2023 as a conflict between the Sudanese army, led by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the RSF, the paramilitary formation of Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti. This is not a war that can easily be sold as a fight of “good against evil.” Both sides have a long history of violence, both have taken part in the destruction of civilian life, both speak the language of “saving the state” while producing the collapse of the state on the ground. In such a conflict there is no clean hero who could be turned into the cover story of a Western magazine, no liberal David against an authoritarian Goliath, no simple banner under which a moral campaign could be organized. This is precisely why Sudan so brutally exposes the rules of global attention — suffering alone is not enough. It has to be politically legible.
The numbers are terrifying. OCHA (the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs), in this year’s plan for Sudan, states that 33.7 million people need humanitarian assistance — the highest number in the world, and more than two-thirds of the country’s population. The WFP (World Food Programme) estimates that more than 19 million people face acute hunger, while 825,000 children under the age of five could suffer from severe acute malnutrition during 2026.
The Associated Press, citing the latest estimates,reports at least 59,000 dead, 13 million displaced, and more than 30 million people in need of assistance.
These are figures that, had they concerned a region Western capitals regarded as strategically important, would be shown daily on screens, in parliaments, and on front pages.
Darfur, meanwhile, is a name that ought to trigger historical memory. In the early 2000s the world already witnessed genocide in that region, when forces of the Sudanese state and Arab Janjaweed militias attacked non-Arab communities, killing more than 200,000 people and displacing more than two million. Today’s RSF did not fall from the sky — it grew out of the very same structures of violence that for years functioned as a useful instrument of the state, before turning into an independent military-economic power. Sudan, then, is not a sudden humanitarian accident. It is the long-term consequence of militarized politics, a peripheral economy, international indifference, and regional rivalry playing out over the bodies of the extremely poor.
What is especially terrifying is that Darfur is not repeating itself as a ghost from the past, but as a pattern that keeps spreading. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, warned a few days ago of a catastrophe unfolding around El Obeid, a strategic city in North Kordofan, where civilians face siege conditions, water shortages, drone attacks, abductions, torture, sexual violence, and executions along the routes used by displaced people fleeing.
The UN Human Rights Council has since ordered an urgent investigation into alleged RSF crimes in that region, warning that the El Fasher scenario could repeat itself.
The world, then, cannot claim not to know. The catastrophe is unfolding under the spotlight of international reports, but without the spotlight of international politics.
That is where the most uncomfortable part of the Sudanese story lies. When a war can be fit into a grand ideological framework, the media machine runs nonstop, day and night. If a tragedy can be portrayed as a clash between democracy and autocracy, between Europe and its enemies, the West and its rivals, then the victims are given a name, a face, a symbol, a history, a future. But if the tragedy is unfolding in a country that isn’t close enough, where the actors are too unsavory, the alliances too awkward, and the causes too tied up with money, gold, weapons, and state collapse, then the suffering remains merely a technical fact, neglected by the media.
Sudan simply doesn’t offer a simple moral product. It doesn’t ask its audience to cheer the way they did with the war in Ukraine — it asks them to think. And for today’s media system, that is often a bigger problem than the violence itself.
Clearly, one could argue there is also a practical dimension to this invisibility. Sudan is an extremely dangerous country for journalists. Local media have been destroyed, journalists killed, expelled, or forced into exile. Nieman Reports States that hundreds of Sudanese journalists have been displaced or left jobless, that newsrooms have been looted and destroyed, and that foreign journalists have great difficulty entering the country. But if regular media stories about Iran and North Korea can be produced, why not about Sudan? The UN reports alone are already strong enough material for analysis and front-page coverage — yet that isn’t happening.
Journalistic access was difficult in other wars too, and they still became global obsessions. The difference is that in those cases there was political will to find the images, amplify them, and turn them into a moral campaign. In Sudan, that will is absent.
One reason lies in the war’s uncomfortable external ties. The Sudanese war is not an isolated African conflict, as it is often lazily portrayed. It is a war fueled by regional ambitions, control of resources, smuggling networks, weapons, gold, and a strategic position along the Red Sea. A particularly sensitive issue is the role of the United Arab Emirates, which the Sudanese army accuses of arming the RSF, while Abu Dhabi firmly denies this and claims its role is humanitarian.
UN observers have described the accusations of UAE military support for the RSF as credible, while the UAE has denied providing any military support to parties in the conflict.
When accusations are directed at a country that is an important Western partner, a massive investor, a weapons buyer, and part of the broader Gulf security order, moral reflexes suddenly become slower — or disappear altogether.
Gold, Toyotas, and Dubai: how a paramilitary becomes a corporation
The RSF is not just a militia that feeds on war. It is an example of a new type of armed force: a paramilitary that functions as a political party, a private army, a smuggling network, and a corporation. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti, did not emerge from a military academy but from the desert economy of power, from the camel trade to control over people, roads, weapons, and gold.
The key to that transformation was gold. Darfur is not only a site of mass violence, but also a site of mines, concessions, smuggling, and private enrichment. Once the RSF consolidated control over gold deposits, especially around Jebel Amer, the paramilitary gained something many states lack — its own source of revenue outside any budget, outside parliament, and outside any form of public oversight. Gold was extracted from a land where people are starving, then entered regional trade flows, and from there moved into a world that would rather not ask too many questions about its origin.
In such an economy, genocide doesn’t look merely like hatred — it looks like logistics. It requires vehicles, fuel, spare parts, satellite phones, bank accounts, intermediaries, export documentation, and safe harbors for capital. It is no accident that Toyota Hilux and Land Cruiser vehicles keep appearing in stories about the RSF — vehicles that, in wars from the Sahel to the Middle East, are turned into mobile machine-gun platforms. These are cars repurposed as instruments of peripheral death: bought legally, used militarily, financed by gold, driven across the desert toward villages that disappear.
Dubai appears in this picture as a symbol of a much broader problem. It isn’t just about one city, but about the logic of a world in which dirty money can be laundered faster than blood can be washed from a crime scene. What begins as a mine in Darfur can end up as a bank transfer, a piece of real estate, a company, or leverage with no biography attached. That is why Sudan cannot be explained away as “African chaos.”
This is precisely why the Sudanese war is so uncomfortable for a world that likes to believe violence always happens somewhere outside civilization. The RSF is not a relic of the past, but a product of the present. It shows how a militia can turn into a business model, how genocide can be financed by a mine, and how the global market can swallow gold without asking questions about the mass graves it was dug out above.
Much the same applies to the very structure of the war. Sudan does not destabilize global markets in a way that would rattle stock exchanges, does not threaten nuclear escalation, does not open a direct line of confrontation between great powers. Its collapse threatens Chad, Egypt, Ethiopia, South Sudan, the Red Sea, migration routes, and the future of the Horn of Africa — but these are threats that Western centers of power treat as peripheral for as long as they don’t knock directly on the door.
An analysis by the Stimson Center describes Sudan very precisely as an example of a crisis that has been marginalized within the global system — not because it is small, but because it does not rank high enough in the hierarchy of strategic interests.
That hierarchy of interests also produces a hierarchy of death. Some deaths become political capital. Others remain merely a humanitarian burden. For some, conferences are organized, sanctions packages drawn up, rhetorical contests of moral superiority staged, and nonstop television coverage broadcast. For others, insufficient funds are raised, reports are written, and “deep concern” is expressed. Sudan falls into that second category. There, people are not dying because the world is blind, but because it is looking through the filters of power. When violence cannot be used against a geopolitical rival, it becomes “complex” much more quickly. And as soon as something is deemed sufficiently “complex,” it can be pushed aside.
France’s role
France is not a direct party to the Sudanese war, but its military technology has been found on equipment used by the RSF. Amnesty International identified the French Galix defense system on Nimr Ajban armored vehicles, manufactured in the United Arab Emirates and later filmed in the hands of paramilitary forces in Sudan. Their use in Darfur could constitute a violation of the arms embargo, it states.
However, the problem is broader than a single weapons system. France and the UAE have spent years developing a close military and political partnership, and French companies delivered around €2.6 billion worth of military equipment to the Emirates between 2014 and 2023. At the same time, the UAE is accused of supporting the RSF with weapons and logistics, which Abu Dhabi denies, even though UN sanctions monitors had earlier assessed those accusations as credible.
Paris arms and politically shields a close ally, while French equipment indirectly ends up with forces accused of genocide. France may not be running the war, but it can hardly claim it bears no responsibility for where the technology it exports ends up.
None of this means Sudan should be simplified into yet another moral slogan. Quite the opposite. Sudan demands that we discard the banal image of “African chaos” and a “war between two generals,” as if peripheral societies were condemned to violence by their own nature. What we see here is the collapse of a postcolonial state, prolonged militarization, a brutal resource economy, the destruction of civilian politics after the fall of Omar al-Bashir, the international tolerance of militias for as long as they were useful, and the utter wretchedness of a system in which armed groups turn into territorial enterprises. This is not tribal fatalism. It is modern war capitalism in its most naked form.
That is why Sudan matters beyond Sudan itself. It exposes the end of one of the great illusions of the post-Cold War era — the illusion that there exists some neutral international moral order which, however slowly and imperfectly, responds to the worst crimes. In reality, that order increasingly functions only as a market for attention. Suffering must have a sponsor, a narrative, political usefulness, a visual identity, and an enemy who can be named without consequence.
Save Darfur, and the question of why no one is rising up today
About twenty years ago, Darfur managed — at least briefly — to break through the wall of global indifference. The “Save Darfur” campaign emerged in 2004 and quickly brought together a broad network of organizations, activists, religious communities, students, and celebrities who tried to turn a distant African tragedy into a matter of conscience for Western society. Darfur appeared at that time on university campuses, in churches, synagogues, at concerts, protests, and on television programs. For a moment, it seemed that the phrase “never again” could still be turned into political pressure rather than just a ritual phrase repeated after every new massacre.
Celebrity politics played an important role in that campaign. George Clooney became one of the most recognizable faces of international activism around Darfur. Together with John Prendergast, he later launched the Satellite Sentinel Project, which used satellite imagery to try to monitor threats to civilians and document possible preparations for mass violence. Clooney, Don Cheadle, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, and other Hollywood figures, through initiatives like “Not On Our Watch,” tried to do what classical diplomacy often refused to: turn a distant crime into a visible moral obligation.
Today Darfur is once again at the center of horror, and Sudan is gripped by a crisis of even greater scale. Yet there is no comparable mobilization. There are no major campaigns dominating American campuses, no television moment breaking through public consciousness, not even a celebrity who has become the face of one distant suffering. One could say the world has changed: social media produces constant noise, there are too many wars, political attention has grown shorter, and humanitarian activism has worn itself out in an endless string of defeats. But that explanation isn’t enough. The question isn’t only why people are tired — it’s why the system no longer even tries to generate moral energy around Sudan.
The answer is uncomfortable. In the early 2000s, Darfur could still be fit into the liberal narrative of saving civilians, pressuring a “criminal regime,” and moral responsibility after Rwanda.
One obvious point should also be noted: Sudan was far more interesting to the West while Omar al-Bashir was at its helm. Bashir was certainly no hero. His regime was authoritarian, brutal, accused of mass atrocities, and by the early 2000s Darfur had already become synonymous with a catastrophe the government was trying to crush through its army and militias. But Bashir was, at the same time, a geopolitically inconvenient ruler — he defied Western pressure for a long time, was linked to Islamist networks, maintained relations with Iran, Russia, and China, ruled a country positioned along the Red Sea between the Arab world and Africa, and represented the kind of regime that could not easily be fit into the American order. In other words, Sudan’s suffering back then had a politically useful villain.
Bashir was overthrown in April 2019 after months of mass protests against economic collapse and his thirty-year rule — in the end, the army itself removed him, arrested him, and took power through a transitional military council. He was subsequently convicted in Sudan of corruption and illegal acquisition of wealth, but was never handed over to the International Criminal Court, which still seeks him over Darfur — namely charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. According to available reports, after the outbreak of the new war he was kept under military control, and in 2024 he was transferred to a hospital in Merowe in northern Sudan due to his health condition.
After Bashir, Sudan no longer served the same propaganda function. As with Libya after Gaddafi, the West could declare itself morally satisfied once the man who had been a nuisance for decades was removed. What followed — the collapse of institutions, militias, a war economy, territorial fragmentation, refugees, hunger, and death — suddenly wasn’t equally interesting anymore. The suffering hadn’t disappeared; what disappeared was the political narrative that made it useful. As long as Bashir existed, Sudan could be a story about a criminal regime. Once he was gone, leaving behind generals, militias, gold, regional sponsors, and millions of fleeing civilians, that story became irrelevant to many of the engaged actors.
The cruelest part is that the silence around Sudan is not an empty void. It speaks for itself. It says we live in a time when universal human rights are increasingly becoming a language for selective use, and less and less an obligation. It says the international community is not a community at all, but a collection of interests that occasionally borrow the language of conscience. It also says that genocide can happen even in an age of satellites, social media, open-source investigation, UN inquiries, and endless communication — and still fail to become an event that moves the world.
In the end, Sudan is not forgotten because it is too far away. It is forgotten because it is too uncomfortable for a system that likes to believe it responds to suffering, when in fact it most often responds to the political usefulness of suffering. In El Fasher, El Obeid, Darfur, and Kordofan, people are not dying in silence because there is no information. They are dying amid the noise of a world that has learned to tell apart the deaths that mean something to it from the deaths that obligate it to nothing.
About the Author
Mario Hoffmann is an independent analyst and writer covering global economics, geopolitics, and international affairs. With a background in history and politics, he writes for EconoPuls to provide in-depth context on the stories shaping our world.
