Everyone suddenly cares about Sudan. A week ago, the same people didn’t know which side of the map it was on. That’s the thing about humanitarian outrage. It has a short attention span and a strong Wi-Fi connection.
It takes a viral clip, a trending hashtag, or the right influencer to make people remember that Sudan even exists. The rest of the time, 46 million people bleed in silence while world leaders rehearse empathy at press conferences. In Nigeria, the numbers don’t even trend anymore. Entire villages disappear, and the headlines get buried under the next imported scandal.
From Iuris Oculus perspective, the West acts shocked, as if these genocides appeared overnight. They didn’t. Sudan has been burning for over a year. Nigeria’s Middle Belt has turned into a graveyard of ethnic massacres. The UN’s briefings come and go, resolutions drafted, funds pledged, none of it reaching the ground. Aid evaporates between bureaucracy and corruption.
The legal language is familiar: “violations of international humanitarian law,” “gross human rights abuses,” “possible war crimes.” These are the phrases the system uses when it wants to sound serious without actually doing anything. But international law isn’t meant to be theatre. States that ignore genocide risk not just moral shame, but legal complicity. Silence, in some contexts, is a form of participation.
France, the U.S., and the EU call for peace in Sudan while maintaining military deals and training missions across the Sahel. The same troops accused of “peacekeeping” violations are quietly redeployed under new mandates. The hypocrisy is structural. When violence happens in a resource-rich zone, intervention becomes negotiation. When it happens somewhere less strategic, it becomes a “humanitarian concern.”
There’s a brutal hierarchy of suffering in global governance. Rwanda taught the world nothing. Darfur taught it less. Now Sudan and Nigeria join the list of forgotten crises waiting for the next round of performative outrage. Every decade brings a new slogan about “never again,” and every decade proves how elastic those words are.
What makes this unbearable isn’t just the killing. It’s the choreography of concern that follows. Politicians post condolences, journalists rush to “contextualize,” and within a week, the feed resets. Outrage burns out faster than it spreads.
The law says genocide is preventable. The truth is, it’s only preventable when prevention is profitable.
Jessisprudens says that, under the Genocide Convention, every state that signed it including France, the U.S., and every permanent member of the UN Security Council, has a legal duty to prevent and punish genocide. Not when it’s convenient. Not when it trends. The “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine was supposed to make that duty non-negotiable. Instead, it’s treated like a moral subscription: renewed when politics allows, ignored when profits interfere.
Sudan and Nigeria are not failures of Africa. They are failures of international law in practice. The treaties exist. The mechanisms exist. What’s missing is will.
Until the world stops treating Black death as background noise, ‘never again’ will keep echoing as a lie we tell ourselves.
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