The West must stop providing safe havens for Sudan’s genocide advocates.
By Trayo Ahmed Ali
Genocide rarely begins with bullets. It begins with words: narratives that strip humans of their humanity, rumours that justify violence, and stories that make the unthinkable seem necessary. Nazi propagandists in Hitler’s Germany laid the groundwork for extermination long before gas chambers. In Rwanda, Radio Mille Collines turned hate speech into instructions for mass killings. Every genocide is fought on two fronts: the battlefield, where bodies suffer, and the propaganda front, where truth is distorted and hate is manufactured.
Today, that propaganda front is burning again in Sudan. Since the outbreak of war on 15 April 2023, atrocities have intensified under the Janjaweed militia, now the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Human Rights Watch describes Darfur as “an organised campaign of ethnic cleansing,” Amnesty International documents “mass killings, sexual violence, and forced displacement,” and the UN warns civilians are targeted “solely on the basis of their ethnicity.”
While survivors flee for safety, some RSF supporters living in Europe and America exploit democratic freedoms to glorify the militia and promote its crimes. The case of Sudanese-British activist Abdalmonim Alrabea in Sheffield is a stark example. In November 2025, The Guardian revealed he had produced hundreds of TikTok and Facebook videos praising the RSF, celebrating battlefield gains, and spreading narratives that justify atrocities. The report alarmed Sudanese communities and prompted a police investigation. Separately, a 142-page dossier documenting RSF atrocities—including racial targeting and systematic sexual violence—was submitted to the UK’s War Crimes Unit, highlighting crimes being whitewashed abroad.
Under UK law, as in many Western countries, incitement to racial hatred and glorification of violence are prosecutable offences. International law obliges states to prevent and punish all forms of complicity in genocide, including propaganda that sustains it. How can democratic societies allow residents to publicly defend forces accused of mass atrocities while survivors seek refuge in the same countries?
Across Europe and North America, RSF supporters have turned social media into an unofficial propaganda arm. They deny well-documented war crimes, recycle racist narratives about non-Arab communities (especially in Darfur and the Nuba Mountains), portray mass killings as “security operations,” harass survivors in the diaspora, and glorify commanders implicated in atrocities. This is not harmless opinion: it legitimises genocide, deepens divisions within Sudanese communities, and helps RSF evade accountability. Just as the West would never tolerate ISIS propaganda, it must not tolerate the glorification of forces accused of ethnic cleansing.
Western governments can not defend human rights while providing safe havens for those who glorify forces accused of genocide. They must act decisively: open criminal investigations into whether propaganda constitutes incitement or hate speech; treat RSF atrocities with counterterrorism seriousness; require social media companies to apply the same standards used for ISIS content; protect Sudanese diaspora communities from harassment; and support civil-society efforts to document war crimes for future tribunals.
What is at stake is not abstract. The ongoing violence is systematic in El Geneina, Zalenge, Al-Fasher, Kadugoli, Bara, Al-Nuhud….etc. Civilians have been slaughtered, dumped in mass graves, and displaced. Their persecutors’ supporters should not be allowed to celebrate these crimes from London, Paris, Berlin, New York, or Washington.
Sudan’s survivors have already lost homes, families, and communities. They should not also endure the psychological violence of seeing their tormentors praised in countries of refuge. Democracies can not condemn genocide in words while tolerating its propaganda.
Genocide begins with words. It is enabled by lies. It thrives on silence. Europe and America must now choose: remain passive bystanders, or actively defend the principles they claim to uphold.