With the news coming out of Sudan, it’s been a long and emotional week. So, I’ll lament a bit below… if you’ll bear with me.
El Fasher is a city in Sudan which has been under siege by the Rapid Support Forces for over 500 days. The siege was so severe that people were starving to death. The US and many European nations decided to reduce their humanitarian aid and development funding this year (image with details attached) – while increasing their military budgets. Funds that were used to keep alive the malnourished – preventing the war-induced, man-made famine in Sudan from killing more people – all dried up earlier in the year.
El Fasher fell to the RSF last weekend – two days after the Sudanese Army retreated, abandoning the civilians to a genocidal militia. The RSF moved in and, as expected, have been killing civilians en masse – including over 400 people at a MATERNITY hospital. The blood and piles of bodies are visible in satellite images. Cell networks have all been shut down, but using starlink access, the RSF has been uploading terrible videos of their war crimes. Before the war broke in 2023, El Fasher was a city of over 1 million people. At the time it fell to the RSF, there were an estimated 220,000 people there. We have no idea how many souls were lost to the RSF slaughter.
This is personal ~ we have family living in locations under occupation or siege by the RSF… all suffering from the man-made famine of this war… three pregnant sisters… lots of young nephews and nieces whose growth is being stunted by malnutrition and whose lives are all still at risk by this genocidal militia.
The RSF’s violence is backed by the United Arab Emirates (UAE- aka, Dubai, Abu Dhabi) – who has been providing weapons and trafficking foreign soldiers to fight for the RSF since the beginning of the war. The UAE is trying to exploit the natural resources of Sudan- stripping Sudan of its natural wealth at the cost of Sudanese lives. Despite US and UN intelligence verifying that the UAE is backing the RSF with weapons – and despite the US designating the RSF violence as genocide – the US and Canada continue to sell weapon systems to the UAE. US weapons and Canadian armored vehicles (produced by Streit Group) are being used in Sudan. I can’t adequately express the devastation in knowing my government and my tax dollars are contributing to the destruction of our family there.
To add insult to injury, the US and Canada are shut off to any Sudanese refugees. The Canadian government veils its racist refugee resettlement by imposing bureaucratic delays for Sudanese (I keep hearing of Sudanese people dying while waiting for the Canadian government to respond to their requests to take refugee with their own families in Canada); the US does not veil its racism at all – putting a blanket travel ban on any Sudanese visa applicants while reducing refugee numbers by 94% and prioritizing the 7,500 refugee spots now available for White South Africans. The racism and the complicity in Sudanese death is too much.
I have a few requests for you:
1 – Please keep your eyes on Sudan, bear witness to their suffering, and pray for them.
2 – Please ask your friends and faith communities to pray for peace in Sudan, too. Please do so openly and publicly.
3 – If you have any extra funds, please share with grassroots groups trying to pick up the pieces dropped when our governments stopped sharing with the world’s hungry. Here are a few groups needing emergency help: www.tinyurl.com/SudanFamine
4 – Take action to boycott the UAE, tell our governments to stop sending weapons to the UAE, encourage an arms embargo on Sudan, and protest racist refugee resettlement policies: https://www.instagram.com/decolonizesudan/p/DQZ5iJukWma/
Sincerely grateful to any of you who don’t look away.
Boycott the UAE: No Business With Genocide
Sudanese communities have been abandoned by the international community, and raising public pressure is one of the few tools we have to push governments and corporations to stop enabling violence.
Are Imperialist powers replicating the Congo model in Sudan?
As Donald Trump’s administration brokers what it calls a “peace roadmap” in Sudan, a familiar pattern is emerging: like in the Democratic Republic of Congo before it, imperialism’s seemingly-contradictory manoeuvres around war and peace serve only to destabilize Sudan, facilitating the extraction of its wealth.
📧 Dear Senator / Dear Representative 📞
I recently drafted the following letter to my US Senators and Representative, asking them to stop the flow of US weapons contributing to violence in Sudan. Please send your own letter and call your leaders to ask them to take action.
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Seeds Will Grow 
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