Sudan is enduring the largest humanitarian crisis on earth, with more than 25 million people needing urgent assistance and nearly nine million displaced as entire cities are reduced to rubble.

In Darfur, the crisis has taken on genocidal dimensions. What began in April 2023 as a power struggle between Sudan’s army, the Sudanese Armed Forces, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces, commanded by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (“Hemedti”), has devolved into a civil war marked by atrocities reminiscent of the early 2000s. The RSF, an outgrowth of the Janjaweed militias once armed by the state, has turned its guns on non-Arab civilians to consolidate control of Darfur and key trade routes.

The RSF and allied militias have carried out mass killings, ethnic cleansing and widespread sexual violence against non-Arab communities, particularly the Masalit people. In  El Fasher, the last major city still under government control, tens of thousands have been killed or displaced as RSF fighters bombard neighbourhoods, hospitals, and displacement camps in what human-rights monitors call a campaign of genocide. Satellite imagery shows scorched earth, blood-soaked soil, and mass graves, while witnesses recount entire communities wiped out in systematic attacks.

Even the  recently announced humanitarian truce, meant to allow aid deliveries and evacuations, is collapsing. Reports from El Fasher show RSF forces continuing bombardments despite the ceasefire, striking hospitals, markets and shelters. What was supposed to be a lifeline, has become another hollow promise in a war where every pledge of restraint is followed by new atrocities.

Behind this carnage lies a web of regional enablers. The RSF’s war machine is financed through  gold-smuggling networks tied to the United Arab Emirates, while weapons and fuel flow through  Chad and Libya. The SAF, meanwhile, receives support from  Egypt, Iran, and elements of Russia’s Wagner network, turning Sudan into a proxy battleground for regional power and resource control. The result is a conflict sustained not only by local brutality but by international complicity, fuelled as much by foreign interests as by domestic hatred.

While the international community has sanctioned the RSF and several commanders, those behind its financing and protection remain untouched. The group’s wealth is built on a war economy centred on gold. For years, the RSF has controlled Sudan’s  Jebel Amer mines, smuggling tonnes of gold through Chad and the Central African Republic to the UAE, where it is refined and sold. These profits fund weapons purchases and loyalty networks.

Investigations by The Sentry, Global Witness and Reuters link RSF front companies to Dubai-based firms operating with minimal oversight. The UAE has denied involvement, saying it complies with sanctions and supports peace efforts. Still, it remains Sudan’s largest gold importer, and  satellite flight data show cargo moving between RSF-held airstrips and Gulf airports.

There have been some international measures — US and European sanctions, calls for  gold-trade transparency, and limited asset freezes — but enforcement is uneven and weak. The RSF’s networks exploit loopholes and opaque corporate structures, allowing money and materials to flow freely. Without co-ordinated enforcement or accountability for complicit states, these gestures remain symbolic.

Meanwhile, arms continue to flow into Sudan despite embargoes. Shipments move through Libya, fuel through Chad and the SAF keeps receiving backing from Egypt, Iran and Wagner. Civilians remain the expendable currency of regional ambition.

The  United Nations warns of famine, and aid groups say Sudan is collapsing faster than any country since Rwanda in 1994, yet the world remains largely silent. I have been drumming my fingers on the table of humanity, waiting for the marches, the videos, and the podcasts from angry pundits to appear as images of  mass graves from El Fasher flood social media, but it seems there will not be any. The genocide, suffering and carnage in Sudan have been “Othered”, treated as something that happens over there, as if African suffering were inevitable rather than a global moral emergency.

Despite the quiet acceptance that “that is just how it is”, no one can truly become numb to Sudan’s horrors. Mothers search for missing children, families walk for days across deserts to reach safety, and refugees flee only to find hunger waiting across the border. This pattern of apathy is tragically familiar. It echoes the  wars in Congo and the atrocities in Darfur two decades ago, each met with fleeting outrage and long silences.

As someone who has worked in the human rights space for nearly two decades, I know that following every conflict is exhausting and perhaps impossible. Many of us are consumed by our own national struggles, the rise of authoritarianism, deepening polarisation and growing disillusionment even within Western democracies. Yet without sustained international pressure and attention, Sudan’s crisis will only escalate, destabilising the region and worsening one of the world’s largest refugee catastrophes. Sooner or later, it will capture global attention, not out of compassion but out of self-interest, when refugees begin seeking safety at others’ doorsteps.

For those of us who live in democracies, our power lies in our votes and voices. As constituents, we must tell those we elect where we stand and what we expect on foreign policy and human rights. Too often, outrage is selective and mobilised only when it fits domestic narratives. Some conservative figures have urged the Trump administration to respond to the alleged systematic persecution and murder of Christians in Nigeria, even threatening military intervention, yet they say nothing as Sudan bleeds. Compassion has become conditional, and outrage confined by borders.

Nor is the silence confined to the right. Many liberal factions, once vocal about Gaza due to perceived notions of Israel-Palestine’s settler-colonial dynamic, are now quiet as foreign powers fuel a genocide in Sudan for profit and influence. The silence cuts across ideologies, exposing a deeper moral fatigue, a world more comfortable with outrage as performance than accountability as policy.

Humanitarian action should never depend on the strategic interests of great powers, yet history shows that it often does. We should have learned this lesson from the Holocaust, Bosnia and Rwanda, and countless other crises the world ignored because they did not fit political agendas. Silence is complicity and we have seen where that leads again and again. Sudan is becoming the next horror we will one day mourn, even as it unfolds before our eyes and the world turns away.

Republished from CounterPunch, 12 November, 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.