Not just genocide: Sudan’s crisis of imperialism 

Author’s note: This article is the second part of a two-part series on modern instances of imperialism that are receiving attention on social media. Online readers can view the first part here. 

Since Oct. 7, the international attention paid to the struggle of Palestinians against Zionist settler-colonialism and an internationally-armed ethnic cleansing campaign has effused to other nations. As I argued last week, the discursive value of the term “genocide,” which has received so much emotional and political weight in the global conversation about Gaza, gives activists and concerned global citizens currency to highlight crises that would otherwise receive little attention by mainstream media. On social media platforms like TikTok, the historic slogan of “Free Palestine” has joined a hashtag tripartite with two other nations: #FreePalestine, #FreeCongo and #FreeSudan. 

As viral explainers circulate on social media to promote awareness and action in solidarity with the people of these three groups, the tie that binds them in the public discourse has been that each is currently experiencing a genocide. But is this really the case? 

I have no intention of no intention of discussing genocide curtly or dismissing the very real concern over the overlapping crises enveloping Palestine, Congo and Sudan. The over 15,200 Gazans who have been killed by Israeli airstrikes since Oct. 7 weighs as heavily as the 9,000 Sudanese killed and 6.2 million displaced since the eruption of a civil war in April of 2023. I don’t believe that “gatekeeping” accusations of genocide is necessary to preserve its potency and evocativeness as a term — in other words, you can’t water it down. Moreover, in this specific moment, I think it is very important that social media users and people discussing politics in their everyday lives are charging genocide as a way of expanding awareness about today’s most vicious manifestations of imperialism. 

However, my concern is over people missing the forest for the trees — that our popular consciousness will focus entirely on the heinous crime of genocide and not the imperialist conditions that often precede and exacerbate it. The desire for capital accumulation on a global scale is the world’s greatest purveyor of violence and suffering (See “Late Victorian Holocausts” by Mike Davis). While Palestine and Congo each exemplify this in their own way, the most recent civil war in Sudan is yet another tragic, but fitting, case study to examine this.  

Politics on the African continent have been flattened to “instability” as much as African economics are to “poverty”; media scholarship suggests that this is in large part due to the utter decontextualization of African stories and histories from their root causes (pardon the progressive buzzword) by journalists and academics. What this narrative-without-a-narrative produces is a political anomaly at best — where African countries’ problems appear from a vacuum — or a racist stereotype that asserts Africans simply lack the governmental wherewithal of “civilized” Western liberal democracies at worst. The most perverse impact of this flattening of African political dynamics is the erasure of the role of international powers in the stoking of instability. 

Sudan’s current civil war is a clash between the country’s de facto leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and General Mohamad Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemedti. After al-Burhan led a coup in 2022 against the country’s first civilian leader in decades, Abdullah Hamdok, he set up a Transitional Sovereignty Council that included Hemedti as a deputy. Each commanding, powerful militias with their hands deep in Sudan’s economy, al-Burhan and Hemedti’s partnership unraveled in April. But even before today’s violence, both have storied (and genocidal) histories, which Horace Campbell and Mahder Serekberhan recap in their essay, “Sudan’s counter-revolution.”   
 
Under the government of President Omar al-Bashir, which lasted from 1989 until its much-awaited end by a democratic popular revolution in 2019, al-Burhan and Hemedti served as generals in the 2003 Darfur genocide. Waging a war for oil resources against the Darfuri ethnic group in western Sudan, al-Bashir’s generals were responsible for over 300,000 deaths from 2003 to the present. Hemedti’s Janjaweed, a paramilitary group also known as the Rapid Support Forces or RSF served as al-Bashir’s “shock troops” during the genocide. Recent atrocities against the African Masalit ethnic group in resource-rich Darfur attributed to the RSF only add credence to today’s charge of genocide.  

Since 2003, these generals have deployed troops to Libya to aid the U.S. and NATO overthrow of President Muammar Ghaddafi in 2011; Yemen, to fight in the Saudi-coalition against Houthi rebels; and Chad, al-Burhan, who was a member recognizing the value of their imperial violence exported through the Sudanese, both al-Burhan and Hemedti have been courted in the normalization process by the United States, Israel and European Union. Although the civil war has complicated normalization plans with the West, it shows that Sudan’s conflict lies in a cause much deeper than the simple desire for power and authority: capital.  

As Campell and Serekberhan write, Russian capitalists, operating via the mercenary organization Wagner Group, have “built a formidable alliance with the RSF forces to the point where the capital resources of the RSF placed them in a position to challenge the established military that was involved in accumulation through the state.” In other words, Hemedti’s turn to Russia and its imperialist economic ambitions has placed him in a position to forcibly compete for state power. Early into the conflict, Russia’s Wagner Group was alleged to have been supplying the RSF with missiles, displaying the interests of Russian capitalists post-conflict. To punctuate this, Moscow and Wagner Group alike have had significant investments in Sudanese gold long before the civil war.  

Of course, it is all too convenient for Western powers only to emphasize the exploitive interests of their economic adversaries, namely Russia. Having rushed to normalize American relations with Sudan in the wake of the 2022 coup — and having invested $11 billion in aid into South Sudan after the country’s inception in 2005 — Washington capital investments won’t be far behind Moscow’s once Sudan exhibits adequate stability for foreign direct investment to come in again. It doesn’t matter at whose expense that political stability comes, namely thousands more civilians. The exploitation of Sudanese national resources, much like the Congo, continues to be the alpha-and-omega of international interest in the country.