Amnesty International, with the tacit backing of the United Kingdom, has declared Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces guilty of crimes against humanity in el-Fasher. The report is damning: systematic murder, torture, rape, and ethnic cleansing. Yet, does this come as a surprise to anyone who has watched the slow-motion collapse of the Sudanese state? The RSF, a paramilitary force born from the Janjaweed militias of the Darfur genocide, has merely refined its methods. We are witnessing not a new tragedy but the relentless repetition of a familiar pattern: the descent into savagery when power is unchecked by law or conscience.
One cannot help but draw parallels to the fall of Rome’s western empire, where barbarian warlords carved up provinces with impunity. The RSF, like the Visigoths, operates without loyalty to any central authority, preying on civilians with a brutality that shocks even in a region inured to violence. The UK’s backing of the Amnesty report is a welcome moral stance, but it rings hollow when one considers the half-hearted interventions in Sudan over the past two decades. We fund peacekeeping missions, we issue sanctions, we condemn. And yet the killing continues.
The intellectual decadence of our age is partly to blame. We have become addicted to performative outrage, satisfied by a press release or a social media statement, while the machinery of death grinds on. The el-Fasher atrocities are not an aberration: they are the logical endpoint of a world order that prizes stability over justice. The UK, for all its posturing, has proven unwilling to escalate beyond words. Meanwhile, the RSF rampages, learning the same lesson that every tyrant from Nero to Bashar al-Assad has internalised: the world will watch, and it will tut-tut, and then it will look away.
This is a test of our civilisation. Will we remember the people of el-Fasher when the news cycle moves on? Or will we retreat into our comfortable myth of progress, convinced that such horrors belong to a pre-modern past? The evidence suggests the latter. We have become the Romans of late antiquity, fat and complacent, while the barbarians gather at the gates. The RSF are not the problem. The problem is us, and our refusal to confront the moral rot at the heart of our global order.
