It was an ethnic massacre so bad that it could be seen from space. Satellites picked up bloodied patches of soil in North Darfur’s capital, El Fasher, after Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) swept into the besieged city. Pools of blood and piles of bodies were identified. Thousands of people are feared to have died in the appalling violence. Many thousands more have fled for their lives. Others remain trapped in the city.
Satellites picked up bloodied patches of soil in North Darfur’s capital, El Fasher
The scenes of slaughter were so blatant that it should have brought marchers out on to the streets of London in passionate protest. But there wasn’t a peep from the usual suspects. Was this because the killings did not take place in Gaza or the West Bank, but in Sudan, one of Africa’s largest countries? The perpetrators, of course, weren’t the Israeli Defence Force, but Sudanese militants fighting a vicious civil war in that vast country that has witnessed so much bloodshed.
The RSF, which had been besieging the town of El Fasher for eighteen months, is primarily an ethnically Arab group. The victims in the most recent atrocities appear to be black Africans in the famine and war-torn Darfur province of eastern Sudan. When El Fasher finally fell, helpless civilians were gunned down in cold blood. There are reports that in one maternity hospital alone almost 500 people were killed. The Sudan Doctors’ Network said that RSF fighters had ‘cold bloodedly killed everyone they found inside the Saudi Hospital, including patients, their companions, and anyone else present’.
Yett seemingly this was of little interest to the marchers here in Britain, whose protests against ‘Genocide’ by ‘Zionists’ in Gaza have regularly disfigured the streets of our capital since Hamas carried out their pogrom on October 7th 2023 – the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Do black lives matter?
The slaughter in El Fasher echoed the massacres in Darfur in 2003, which were declared a genocide by the United Nations. In those terrible scenes, Sudanese government militias killed approximately 200,000 black African Darfuris and tortured, abused and displaced thousands more. Once again, protests in Britain were notable by their absence.
This one-eyed hypocrisy is remarkable since Sudan, like Palestine, is a former de facto British colony. Events there were were once of such pressing concern, that the Victorian prime minister William Gladstone was forced by public opinion to send a military expedition up the Nile to save the legendary General Gordon, who was besieged by followers of a messianic Islamic leader called the Mahdi in the Sudanese capital Khartoum.
The expedition arrived too late and Gordon was murdered by a Mahdist mob. For years after that, British troops attempted to gain control of Sudan by force. In 1898, the young Winston Churchill rode in one of the Army’s last cavalry charges at the battle of Omdurman when an Anglo-Egyptian army commanded by Sir Herbert Kitchener killed 20,000 Mahdists for the loss of fewer than 500 of their own men.
The tomb of the Mahdi was desecrated and Kitchener was widely – but falsely – rumoured to have used his skull as a drinking goblet. When Sudan finally won independence in 1956, the country continued to be the scene of conflict and inter-ethnic slaughter as the ethnically Arab north oppressed the mainly Christian and black African south.
This finally led to South Sudan breaking away and being recognised by the UN in 2011 as Africa’s most recent independent state. But coups, civil wars and inter-ethnic violence continue to scar the Sudan. So when will the London rent-a-mobs pay attention and act? I’m not holding my breath.
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