I Will Not Look AwayI Will Not Look Away

MANIFESTO

For Sudan — The Genocide the World Looks Away From

Legal, ethical and political grounds for an attention that is owed · 2026

Manifesto for Sudan — The Genocide the World Looks Away From

Legal, ethical and political grounds for an attention that is owed

To whom it is addressed

To the governments of the States party to the Genocide Convention. To the European Union and its Member States. To the States that maintain commercial and military relations with those who arm the perpetrators. To the Western media, whose silence carries weight. And to every citizen who wonders why some victims fill the front pages and others do not even exist.

This manifesto is the third of a series. The first concerns the conduct of the State of Israel in Gaza and Lebanon; the second, that of the Russian Federation in Ukraine. All three apply the same identical legal framework — the non-recognition obligations under ARSIWA Articles 40-41 — to different violators, from different alignments, with different allies. Readers encountering this document for the first time are invited to read the other two, available at iwillnotlookaway.org: the principle that founds them is one, and it is measured precisely by its application without exceptions.

I. Premise

Since April 2023 Sudan has been devastated by a war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), heir to the Janjaweed who bloodied Darfur twenty years ago. The toll: over 150,000 estimated dead, 12 million displaced — the largest displacement crisis in the world — and the gravest famine of the 21st century.

In January 2025 the US State Department formally determined that the RSF have committed genocide against the non-Arab populations of Darfur. In February 2026 the United Nations International Fact-Finding Mission reached the same conclusion regarding the events of El Fasher.

Two formal determinations of genocide. And the world looks elsewhere.

This platform bears the name of a commitment: I will not look away. No case in the world makes this commitment more necessary than Sudan — the genocide without cameras, without demonstrations, without outrage. The genocide that does not divide public opinion for the most atrocious of reasons: public opinion does not know it exists.

II. El Fasher

On 26 October 2025, after eighteen months of siege in which the population was deliberately starved, the RSF took El Fasher, capital of North Darfur, home to a million and a half people before the war.

The UN Human Rights Office, based on over 140 testimonies, documented more than 6,000 killings in the first three days: at least 4,400 inside the city, over 1,600 along the escape routes, where fleeing civilians were systematically intercepted and executed. The real toll is certainly higher; some estimates speak of tens of thousands.

Survivors report the words of RSF fighters: "Is there any Zaghawa among you? If we find a Zaghawa, we kill you all." And: "We want to eliminate everything black from Darfur."

The UN Mission concluded: prolonged siege, deliberately inflicted starvation, denial of humanitarian aid, then mass killings, systematic rape, torture, enforced disappearances — "a planned and organised operation bearing the hallmarks of genocide", conducted "with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Zaghawa and Fur communities".

El Fasher is not an episode. It is the replica of El Geneina and Ardamata (2023, against the Masalit), of the Zamzam refugee camp (April 2025, two thousand dead, four hundred thousand in flight). It is a method.

III. Legal framework violated

The ICC has already shown it can act: in October 2025 it sentenced a Janjaweed leader to twenty years for the crimes of 2003-2004. Twenty years after the facts. Today's victims cannot wait until 2045.

IV. Who arms, who pays, who profits

The RSF are not a State. But no armed group commits a genocide alone. Behind every El Fasher massacre lies a documented chain of suppliers, financiers and beneficiaries.

The United Arab Emirates are the principal documented backer of the RSF. Amnesty International (May 2025) identified in RSF hands Chinese GB50A guided bombs — manufactured in 2024, never before documented in any conflict in the world — and AH-4 155mm howitzers: according to SIPRI, the Emirates are the only country in the world to have imported that weapons system from China. The Wing Loong II and FeiHong-95 drones that launch them are used in Sudan exclusively by the RSF. The UN Panel of Experts on Sudan found the same pattern. The Emirates deny — but bombs manufactured in 2024 exploding in Darfur in 2025 do not explain themselves.

The motive is not ideological: it is economic and geopolitical. Sudanese gold — whose main mines are controlled by General Hemedti's RSF — flows largely to Dubai, as documented by Global Witness and The Sentry. Add to this Emirati interests in Red Sea ports and Sudanese farmland.

China manufactures the weapons through Norinco, a state-owned defence conglomerate, and sells them to the Emirates without any re-export control mechanism being applied — in violation of the spirit of the Arms Trade Treaty which the Emirates themselves signed.

Russia played both tables: the Wagner group, through the companies Meroe Gold and M-Invest sanctioned by the US and EU, for years exchanged weapons and training for gold concessions in RSF-controlled areas, before Moscow's repositioning towards the regular army in exchange for the prospect of a naval base at Port Sudan.

And Europe? Europe did not sell weapons to the RSF. It did something subtler: through the Khartoum Process and migration-control funds, it for years treated as a border-management partner an apparatus of which the RSF proclaimed themselves the operational arm — outsourcing migrant containment to those now formally accused of genocide. And today, faced with the evidence gathered by the UN and Amnesty, it has not imposed a single significant sanction on the Emirates: too important as commercial, energy and financial partners.

The law is clear. Article 16 ARSIWA establishes that a State which renders aid or assistance in the commission of an internationally wrongful act is responsible for it. Article I of the Genocide Convention imposes on every signatory the obligation to prevent — an obligation the International Court of Justice (Bosnia v. Serbia, 2007) declared operative from the moment the State learns of the serious risk. Everyone knows. For years. The knowledge is on record at the UN. What is missing is not the evidence: it is the will.

V. The hierarchy of victims

For Ukraine, the West mobilised sanctions, weapons, refuge, permanent media attention. For Gaza, at least, the world divided, debated, filled the squares. For Sudan: nothing. No significant sanctions against those arming the RSF. No extraordinary summits. No front pages. One hundred and fifty thousand dead and twelve million displaced are worth less media space than a single week of any other crisis.

The Sudanese victims are not guilty of being on the wrong side. They bear a worse guilt: being on no side that interests anyone. No geopolitical leverage, no lobby, no spotlight. They are the definitive proof that the world's attention follows not the gravity of crimes but the convenience of the onlooker.

A legal civilisation is measured exactly here: by how it treats the victims who are of use to no one.

There is more. The same West that stays silent about the Emirates and forgets Sudan continues to present itself to the world as a teacher of civilisation. It presumes to export democracy to peoples who built empires, wrote poetry and codified law when Europe did not yet exist — to the Persia of the Cyrus Cylinder, which two and a half thousand years ago proclaimed the freedom of worship of subjected peoples. With what authority? Moral authority is not inherited from history books: it is earned through consistency, and lost through hypocrisy.

A West that sanctions selectively, that arms whoever suits it, that calibrates its outrage on the price of oil and on commercial contracts, is not exporting democracy: it is exporting the proof that its values are negotiable. And every people in the world sees it. The abandoned Sudanese see it, the Palestinians under the bombs see it, the Iranians fighting for their rights see it — and they need no lessons from those who betray at home the principles they preach.

The author of these lines has travelled for work in many countries, and has learned something no treaty teaches: today a Western citizen, before an interlocutor of any other civilisation, no longer starts from a position of moral superiority. He starts from a position of debt. He must first answer — at least within himself — for the double standard of his institutions, the silence of his governments, the selectivity of his outrage. This manifesto is also an attempt to honour that debt: to show that at least the citizens, if not the governments, still know how to apply a principle without regard for convenience.

VI. Concrete measures

  1. Targeted sanctions against the RSF chain of command and against every entity — state or private — involved in their supply, according to the findings of the UN Panel of Experts
  2. Targeted sanctions against the United Arab Emirates — state and private entities — until the arms transfers to the RSF documented by the UN and Amnesty verifiably cease; and the extension of the arms embargo from the current Darfur perimeter to the whole of Sudan
  3. Binding re-export controls on every arms sale to States violating UN embargoes — starting with Chinese (Norinco) and Western supplies to the Emirates
  4. Full support — financial and political — for the International Criminal Court's proceedings on present-day Darfur; guaranteed humanitarian corridors and funding of the famine response
  5. The formal activation of the obligation of prevention under Art. I of the Genocide Convention, with a Human Rights Council monitoring mechanism endowed with a strengthened mandate

VII. Fundamental distinction

This manifesto is not against the Sudanese people, nor against the Arab communities of Darfur — themselves victims, in many cases, of a war that overwhelms them. Nor is it an absolution of the Sudanese Armed Forces, whose crimes are also documented and deserve justice.

It is against a genocidal method, against those who arm it, and against the indifference that makes it possible.

Final declaration

I do not look away from El Fasher. I do not accept that a hierarchy of victims exists. I do not recognise as normal the world's silence before two formal determinations of genocide. And I do not accept that the West preaches to others the democracy it betrays at home. Sudan is the test of sincerity for anyone — myself included — who invokes international law for the crises that make the news. If the principle holds, it holds also when no one is watching. Especially when no one is watching. Because the law applies to all, or it applies to none.

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