Why is the Intifada crowd silent on Sudan? by Lara Brown
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/10/31/why-the-intifada-crowd-is-silent-on-sudan/
For the past 18 months, the city of el-Fashir in Darfur has endured a brutal siege. Over two hundred thousand civilians are trapped, cut off from basic supplies, as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has seized control from the army.
Hundreds of unarmed civilians have been murdered in ethnically motivated attacks. Many are being held hostage for eye-watering ransom payments. Some are being hunted down by armed militias.
So why does nobody care about Sudan? The attention paid by activists to certain conflicts clearly has nothing to do with severity – otherwise the BBC would lead on Sudan every day. So how do the Left determine which wars merit a weekly march?
The truth is that foreign conflicts have always felt very remote. Disasters unfold across the world every day. Most are deeply complex, with fault on both sides. Consequently, Western activists have chosen a select few tragedies to focus their attention on.
Fashionable conflicts all have a few things in common. Firstly, they need to be clear cut (or at least, advocates need to believe they are clear cut). In the case of Gaza, Israel has been branded the villain, and the Palestinians the victims.
In Sudan, it’s hard for progressives to pick a side. The Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces have both inflicted harm on civilians. Neither group can be branded colonisers, and the whole saga has been buried in complexity far too confusing for the average student politician to understand via one Instagram infographic.
Progressives also like to fashion foreign wars into proxy battles about British politics. The Israel-Gaza war serves these ends perfectly. The Jews in Israel are seen by most of the Left as a privileged group. Palestinians are cast as the persecuted ethnic minority. Fashionable assumptions about racism in the UK map perfectly on to the issue.
There are also around four million Muslims in the UK, and many of them have come to interpret the war in Gaza as an assault on their faith. These factors have kept activists on the streets, week after week, regardless of positive developments – like the recent ceasefire in the region.
The civil war in Sudan lacks these dimensions. It is not one ethnicity against another, or one privileged group against a minority. One of the most consistently targeted groups has been the small Sudanese Christian population, who have seen constant attacks on their churches, confiscation of property and the persecution of key religious leaders. But while one in seven Christians across the world live in situations with at least a “high” level of persecution, domestic protesters refuse to identify the group as one worthy of support.
For two decades, Darfur has been the crisis progressives chose not to see. The silence of activists when faced with its tangled realities exposes a truth closer to home: the unrest we’ve witnessed in Britain these past two years was never about foreign policy. Some wars become fashionable. Those that resist neat slogans or Left-wing talking points are quietly abandoned to burn in the dark.
Lara Brown is The Spectator’s Commissioning Editor
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