Mick Hartley

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid at Spiked on the horrors of Sudan’s civil war:

The violence visited upon the people of Sudan, particularly its non-Arab population, is without parallel in the 21st century. Darfur has been the epicentre of this misery. In the three decades in which Sudan was ruled by al-Bashir, the Sudanese army repeatedly attempted the ethnic cleansing of the state’s non-Arab population. This was done with the help of Arab militias such as the Janjaweed, many of whose fighters now belong to the RSF. The Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups bore the brunt of al-Burhan and Hemedti’s war crimes.

With the fall of El Fasher, the tally of those displaced in Sudan is now approaching 13million. It has been described as the world’s ‘largest humanitarian crisis’ by UNICEF with 25million people – half of Sudan’s population – experiencing malnutrition or famine. As many as 400,000 people have been killed since the start of the civil war.

Massacres of the region’s non-Arab population are sadly nothing new. This violence is rooted in the Arab colonisation of east Africa, beginning with the seventh-century conquests that converted northern Africa to Islam.

The enslavement of the region’s non-Arabs also has a long history. After Arab armies were thwarted in their bid to expand southwards from Egypt by the Christian Nubian kingdom of Makuria, the Baqt treaty of AD 652 allowed Arabs to trade grains and spices in exchange for slaves. The land acquired the Arabic name Bilad as-Sudan, or ‘Land of the Black People’. By the end of the 19th century, Sudan was a critical source of slaves for Egypt and the rest of the Ottoman Empire.

Sudanese independence in 1956 did nothing to change the subjugation of Sudan’s non-Arabic population. A succession of coups ended in 1989 with the ascent of Omar al-Bashir, who continued the Islamisation of Sudan with a vengeance.

Just recently the escalating violence has edged into the news, but basically no one in the West has much interest. The media, and the left – who you might perhaps expect to be concerned about the genocide of black Africans – are obsessed with Gaza. The wrong people here, the Arabs, are doing the slaughtering. By the rules of the racism game, Arabs are victims. Does Not Compute. Avoid. Keep focusing on the evil Jews.

As I’ve said before (can’t find it now) whoever’s doing the public relations for the Arabs is doing a cracking job. Here they are committing a clear-cut genocide against black Africans, and no one cares. The violent imperial spread of Arabs across North Africa under the banner of Islam is never confronted, nor the long-lasting and brutal slave trade – there long before the West got involved in African slavery, and still continuing. And now they’re the biggest victims the world’s ever seen at the hands of the Jews in Palestine, and the world erupts in support of their noble cause.

Nice work if you can get it.