“I speak for the heart that the world pretends not to hear,” says activist Samia Hamid, addressing around two hundred people gathered at Square Phillips in downtown Montréal on Sunday. “When we cry, the world whispers. And when we die, the world scrolls.”
Last weekend, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) took over the city of El Fasher after an 18 month siege. The past week has been merciless. Doctors say at least 1,500 people have been killed while the U.N. reports over 36,000 people have fled the city since Saturday, October 25.
Neither war fatigue from coming up on three years of conflict, nor the month-long public transit strike and municipal elections hot underway in Montréal, dampened demonstrators’ spirits. The year’s typically small demo attendance grew as the Sudanese Canadian Association of Québec was supported by a contingent protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza earlier in the day.
“Not for oil, not for gold,” the chant carries over booming drums, scuffed and taped over years of beating for Palestine. Now, they also beat for the proxy war decimating Sudan, where complicity is “not about the darkness of the skin, but about the darkness of the heart.”
Hamid’s own family is from El Fasher, her grandfather leading the city’s biggest mosque, she says, chilling the chatter in the public square. Her mother regularly relays back new deaths on the phone. Social media parades videos of the RSF’s slaughter of prisoners and civilians.
“My auntie doesn’t know where her son is,” Hamid says. “Every morning, there is a video that will be shared. She doesn’t know if it’s her son. She doesn’t know if he got killed, kidnapped, or just vanished.”
El Fasher was the last stronghold for the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), the siege consolidating the RSF’s territorial control in Sudan’s western province. Over 260,000 people remain trapped in El Fasher without food, safe drinking water or humanitarian aid.
“For a long time, this has been seen by people, or marketed I guess, as a war between generals,” Asil Rashid, a Sudanese-Canadian environmental consultant and artist, tells rabble.ca. A single mother calling Montréal home for the past five years, this was the first time she learned of Sudanese activism in the city.
“I was happy about that because I didn’t think there were a lot of Sudanese people in Québec,” she says. The protest brought her closer to community, but also spurred a desire to relay the “correct narrative”, as opposed to “telling a lie” of a civil war that lends legitimacy to the paramilitary.
The Darfur grapevine affirms that when the RSF enters a town, they routinely destroy mosques, “prevent the cult prayer” and kill prayer leaders—even as militiamen chant Allahu Akbar—God is great—in their viral videos. The Saudi Hospital was attacked five times over the past month, with nearly over 460 patients and visitors reported shot just on October 28. Women seeking shelter in a local university have been gang raped. Kidnappings and extortion are routine. As is pillaging. The senseless violence has only radicalized Sudanese people, Rashid adds, but it still doesn’t add up.
“Why would you ethnically cleanse the people you mean to rule over,” said Rashid.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) stands accused of arming and financing the RSF with blood gold in its bid to retain control over Red Sea trade, and Sudan’s critical sectors in oil, mining and agriculture—fiercely denied by the Emirates.
Having grown up in the UAE, Rashid said the Gulf country’s role came as a shock.
“For a long time, the UAE and Sudan had good diplomatic relations,” she said, referring to the Gulf states’ economic diplomacy of the 1970s.
Without a single mine of its own, Dubai’s gold souk still thrives, Rashid says, recalling the famed market for precious gems. Vehicles manufactured by Ontario-based Streit Group have also been identified in Sudan’s massacres, just as they were in South Sudan and Libya nearly a decade ago.
The El Fasher massacre has renewed calls by Canadian peace groups to end arms trade with the UAE, one of Canada’s favoured military clients and boasting $7 million CAD worth of weapons exports last year. Moreover, export law loopholes notoriously enable the diversion of arms through the United States. Demands for boycott have grown over the past year. But as Darfur’s horror unfolded, Canada merely expanded trade with the UAE this summer.
“Removing the supply removes the fuel from the vehicle that is killing everybody and committing all these atrocities,” says Concordia student and poet Hiba Babiker. “If we cut off the arms supply, then this war could be over without any need for Sudanese people losing their independence.”
Observers have dubbed El Fasher as Sudan’s “Srebrenica moment.” The African Union’s Peace and Security Council has repeatedly rejected the RSF’s parallel government and military solution to the crisis. Babiker also rejects foreign intervention, echoing the revolutionary calls for Sudanese sovereignty that mobilized the country’s youth in 2018.
“It would be detrimental to us. We would not have our own government,” she says, as nearly a quarter of Sudan’s banks are already under foreign ownership (largely by the Gulf states). “We are not allowed to develop as our own country, have our own infrastructure and become modern. We’re still stuck in the Stone Age and the war is preventing that unless we succumb to foreign interests.”
“I wanted to show up for my country and my community,” she explains as drumming winds down the demonstration.
Growing awareness about the extent of war profiteering in Sudan shows progress, with foreign meddling denounced at the UN Security Council. A new exposé by Middle East Eye indicates the RSF is now using Somalia’s Bosaso Airport as a logistics and transit hub, widening its range of influence.
But the fall of El Fasher weighs heavily on Babiker’s view of the SAF and allied militia resistance.
“Everything has gone to waste at this point,” she says.
In the past week, the neighbouring town of Tawila has sheltered over half a million people.
“I don’t think we can describe enough how horrifying this is,” said Duha Elmardi of the Sudan Solidarity Collective, an activist group supporting the few remaining community kitchens in Darfur.
Some aid workers managed to escape El Fasher days before the city fell.
“A lot of people are still missing,” Elmardi said. Survivors who made it to Tawila are reporting little humanitarian presence. “We know from them, there’s very little support. Thousands of people are coming with no shelter, barely any food.”
It took years for countries to take seriously an embargo on Israel as Gaza has been all but eradicated—how long will it take as Sudan bleeds?
“Unless there is action on a state level, the statements don’t mean much,” Elmardi said, stressing the need for a wider boycott targeting flights to the UAE and Emirate airlines, and property in Dubai. “We are not there yet,” she says.
The RSF has now intensified its siege on North Kordofan and re-captured the city of Bara last week. A troubling turn in control over Sudan’s key western regions has stirred new fears for Montréal’s community, watchful for updates from friends and family. Partition, a mere speculation earlier this year, looms closer.
“Tell me, why is compassion colour-coded? Why does justice have borders? Why is humanity selective?” Hamid’s words still hang over the crowd as people huddle for evening prayer, framed by the last blooming irises of the year. “We are very strong. We are not helpless. We are not voiceless. We are survivors of silence, and we are proof that even broken wings still know how to fight and still know how to fly.”
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