Our collective silence on the brutal genocide in Sudan is a betrayal.
In 1925, German journalist and satirist Kurt Tucholsky, a staunch critic of Nazi ideology, wrote a profound op-ed in a German newspaper reflecting on the threat of anti-semitic and anti-democratic tendencies that were finding root in western Europe.
Quoting a fictional French diplomat, Tucholsky stated: “The death of one man – that is a catastrophe. A hundred thousand deaths – that is a statistic!”
Tucholsky died in 1935 in Gothenburg, Sweden, just two years after the Nazi Party came into power in Germany. He was just 45.
He used the stated phrase in the essay to highlight how large-scale death in war often becomes abstract and impersonal, losing the individual tragedy it represents.
Tucholsky’s quote reflects a cognitive bias psychological phenomenon known as scope neglect, where people don’t proportionally value the importance of a problem based on its size.
Simply put, people have a greater emotional response to individual tragedies than to large-scale ones because it is easier to empathise with one person than with millions.
Two weeks ago, the Sudanese paramilitary group, Rapid Support Forces (RSF), made significant incursions into the city of El-Fasher, located in the Darfur region. Since then, thousands of people, including children, have been killed.
In just a single day, at least 460 people were killed in the last remaining functional hospital in El-Fasher. They were shot to death as they lay sick in hospital beds.
All patients in the maternity ward were gunned down, with reports indicating that some of the mothers were in the process of giving birth.
Accounts of horrific summary executions, mass killings, rapes, looting, abductions and attacks against humanitarian workers have been coming out of El-Fasher. Since the fall of the city and the withdrawal of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), tens of thousands of people have fled El-Fasher.
RSF forces are hunting these people down, shooting them as they attempt to make the escape to Tawila, a town west of El-Fasher that is already sheltering more than 650,000 displaced people. Food, shelter, water and medications are running out of the refuge camp in Tawila.
Sudan has become the site of the world’s largest humanitarian and displacement crisis on record. More than 14-million people out of a population of 51-million have been internally displaced, and the number is set to grow as the RSF makes advances in Darfur and other parts of Sudan.
Famine is widespread and outbreaks of cholera and other deadly diseases are increasing. Rape is being used as a weapon of war on a scale never seen before in any genocide. Making the situation worse is the massive funding shortfall for humanitarian aid.
The Sudan Humanitarian Response Plan to date is only 27% funded. There is no question that unless urgent intervention is made by the international community, the entire Darfur region is going to be wiped out within months.
Despite the scale of this catastrophe, the media in SA and many parts of the world has maintained an audible silence. Most people in our country don’t even know that a genocide of biblical scale is happening on the continent we call home.
Tucholsky may have had a valid point that large-scale death and tragedies are impersonal and abstract. But this cannot reasonably apply to Sudan, for it is not some faraway country that is completely removed from SA.
It is in our continent and the people being massacred look like us. Why, then, do we maintain an audible silence? Why are we, ordinary people and the government alike, treating the lives of Sudanese people with such cruel indifference?
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