There was a moment in 2023 when Sudan was all over the news.
Headlines screamed from front pages, stories led TV news bulletins, and prominent journalists posted about the country on their socials. There were even live blogs.
It was April, and war had just erupted between the Sudanese army and a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). People were fleeing the capital Khartoum as gun battles erupted and artillery shells flew. There was danger on every corner.
But that wasn’t what caught the western media’s attention. The focus of their rolling coverage was the foreigners – the mostly white foreigners – caught up in the sudden eruption of violence.
How would they get out of this war-torn country in Africa? What a story.
As France launched Operation Sagittaire and rescued hundreds of people, the US airlifted its embassy staff, and the UK sent in six Royal Air Force planes to pick up stranded Brits, breathless analysis dominated news channels.
When they arrived in their home countries, the evacuees were interviewed about their daring escapes for several days.
But as the rescued foreigners drifted back to their lives, the “international” media slowly lost interest. What was left? Africans killing Africans. Ho-hum, who cares?
Widespread killings
For the next two and a half years, the war continued. It spiralled. It got worse. Tens of thousands of people were killed, 12 million were forced to flee their homes, and people starved to death as aid agencies struggled to keep up with the extent of the hunger.
Sudan quickly became one of the worst humanitarian crises on the planet – not that your average news consumer or person in the street would have known.
Until now. Late last month, after laying siege to it for 18 long months, the RSF captured the city of el-Fasher, which had been the Sudanese army’s last stronghold in the Darfur region.
Then the bloodletting began. Though the numbers are hard to verify, ethnically motivated killings have been widespread, with blood visible from space. Survivors have told Middle East Eye that they witnessed RSF fighters raping, murdering and assaulting civilians.
RSF members themselves have openly admitted they are committing genocide.
As Sudanese journalists and activists began to raise the alarm, and criticism of the United Arab Emirates – widely reported as the RSF’s main backer – grew, the western media couldn’t ignore the situation any longer.
Suddenly, we saw reports, op-eds, analysis pieces, social posts, and handwringing. Detailed articles dug into the proxy war, and puzzled over why the UAE was involved.
There was some great coverage there. Here’s the problem: it was too late.
But it didn’t have to be. From the very outset of the conflict, a small band of journalists desperate for the world to pay attention documented the war’s every twist and turn.
Global indifference
First and foremost were the Sudanese journalists, working at great risk to themselves, bravely reporting events despite knowing they were faced with indifference.
Several Arab organisations were covering it too, with Sudanese correspondent Hiba Morgan doing incredible and courageous work for Al Jazeera English.
Even in the western media, the self-styled international organisations I am calling out for ignoring the slaughter, there were excellent correspondents.
Notably, Yousra Elbagir of Sky News, who is also Sudanese, never faltered, never looked away, and moved us all when she came across her uncle in a group of displaced people.
Lindsey Hilsum of Channel 4 News also deserves credit. But one or two dedicated journalists cannot make a din. And just because a story is covered, it doesn’t mean it will be noticed.
All too often, stories from Africa are buried deep in the websites of international media organisations, or given two minutes at the end of a bulletin. Maybe there will be a tweet or two. They don’t make the top headlines, and reporters are rarely taken live from the continent’s capitals.
African stories are an afterthought.
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, I worked as a correspondent for the Reuters news agency, based primarily in Ethiopia and Uganda. I vividly remember the frustration of reporting stories – important stories – that then sank without a trace.
In 2011, protests over soaring food and fuel prices broke out in Uganda, and were met with a merciless response from security forces.
In the capital Kampala, I watched as protesters set up burning barricades, and security forces opened fire with live ammunition, rubber-coated bullets and tear gas. A pro-government, stick-wielding militia known as the Kiboko Squad attacked people as police looked on. Hurrying from soldiers who had threatened to attack me if I didn’t leave the area, I rounded a corner, where I saw the body of a demonstrator who had been shot dead. Many more protesters were also killed.
It was dramatic. It was important. There were huge potential implications for Uganda and, perhaps, the region. In the evening, exhausted, I spoke to some friends in western countries. None of them had a clue that this was happening.
Mask slipped
That same year, our excellent correspondents in Somalia documented the suffering as their country was gripped by famine. I’ll never forget how the world shrugged.
Reuters and other news agencies, such as Agence France-Presse and the Associated Press, are wholesalers of news. To really make an impact, we often needed the consumer-facing retailers, such as major international newspapers and broadcasters, to get our reporting out to a wider audience.
Several agency journalists, such as Nafisa Eltahir of Reuters, stand out for their coverage of Sudan, which has included impressive in-depth investigations. The retailers, though, haven’t seemed particularly interested.
Why is it so difficult to get the decision-makers to care? Some journalists will tell you it’s because these places are difficult to access, or that the stories are too complicated.
Israel-Palestine gets coverage, they’ll say, because western powers are directly involved – because they are Israel’s key allies, because the genocide wouldn’t be possible without them. I have some sympathy for that. It’s partly true.
But there’s something else at play. Many white journalists recognise themselves in Israelis. The people of Israel are, essentially, seen as western. And that matters. It also helps that their “enemies”, the Palestinian people, have been thoroughly dehumanised by those same journalists and the organisations that employ them.
A mask slipped back in 2022 as Russia invaded Ukraine, and people began to flee Moscow’s advance. The language that white correspondents and anchors used was telling.
Ukraine was not “like Iraq or Afghanistan”. Ukrainians were “civilised”, they were “European”, they “watch Netflix and have Instagram”, they looked like “us”.
There we had it. It was out in the open. This was how western journalists, whether they would admit it or not, viewed the world. That racism, often hidden, informed which stories got covered and which ones got ignored.
And it still does.
It shouldn’t have taken the unleashing of ethnic slaughter for major media to wake up. If you claim to produce “international news”, if you purport to cover the globe, then you need to treat non-white lives the same as you do white ones.
Because they’re just as important.
