Why Filipinos Must Rise in Solidarity as Sudan Faces Genocide

Photo Credit: UNHCR/Colin Delfosse

As of writing, Sudan is living through a catastrophe that resonates painfully with Filipinos who know very well the costs of dictatorship, militarization, and resource exploitation. The struggle of the Sudanese people has become one of the world’s major humanitarian crises yet for many around the world, including Filipinos, it remains under-covered and misunderstood. 

Here we try to map the genocide and mass atrocities unfolding in Sudan, trace the intersections with Philippine liberation struggles both past and present, and present why Filipinos must stand in solidarity.

Why should Filipinos care?

As of mid-2025, Sudan’s genocide has forced nearly twelve million people from their homes. More than 7.7 million remain displaced inside the country (internally displaced persons/ IDPs), while over four million have crossed borders to seek refuge (1). 

Meanwhile, the death toll tells another story of erasure. By June 2024, at least 150,000 lives had been claimed not just by weapons of war, but also by disease and famine (1). Even humanitarian aid has been weaponized, with reports of looting and blocking of aid convoys, delays by endless bureaucracy, and civilians starved by deliberate blockades. Heavy weapons fall on crowded neighborhoods, hospitals are shelled, and displacement camps are attacked (2).

These are more than just statistics. These numbers tell a story and an unfortunate truth: whole families are living on the move, surviving under tarpaulins or in overcrowded shelters, waiting for aid that may never arrive. They are entire lives destroyed and even erased. This alone should resonate with Filipinos who have seen and heard of state violence, displacement, and relief efforts manipulated or withheld under colonial rule or neoliberal regimes in our very own land. 

Sudan’s Genocide in Context

Long Shadows of Empire

The current struggle in Sudan did not begin in 2023. It is rooted in a long history of colonial domination and repeated displacement. Sudan’s modern state was engineered under the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium in 1899, a joint colonial arrangement of the British Empire and Egypt, that gave way to unfair policies of using land and wealth that left whole regions poor and neglected up to this day. 

In the early 2000s, Darfur became the site of what many have called the first genocide of the 21st century. Government troops from Khartoum, together with the Janjaweed militias supported and carried out total destruction campaigns against non-Arab communities such as the Masalit, Fur, and Zaghawa. Entire villages were burned, thousands of civilians were killed, and millions were forced into displacement camps (3). The International Criminal Court later indicted Sudanese leaders, including then-president Omar al-Bashir, for crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide connected to these atrocities (4).

Today’s perpetrators and patterns

What makes the current crisis particularly disturbing is the way both sides have escalated their assaults. A UN fact-finding mission in 2025 described Sudan as a “grave human rights and protection emergency.” Hospitals, schools, and camps for displaced families have become battlefields. The mission reported that both the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) were not just fighting each other, but deliberately targeting the systems that keep civilians alive (2).

According to the Sudan Solidarity Collective, a single kilogram of rice in El Fasher now costs around $96, and two sacks of flour sell for $10,000. Even animal feed which is often used as a last resort for food is very expensive despite being spoiled and making people sick. Only 10 community kitchens remain operating in the entire city and around 70–80% of residents have fled, but those left behind are trapped, facing kidnapping or death if they attempt to escape. Basic medicines and medical supplies have also run out and civilian casualties continue to rise because of daily shelling. 

Displacement is no longer confined to Darfur or the borderlands. Families are scattering into urban peripheries and overcrowded camps that often find themselves under siege. Many are forced to move into already fragile refugee-hosting areas, creating a web of instability that stretches far beyond Sudan’s borders (1).

Parallels with Philippine liberation struggles

Militarization, Displacement, and Aid

The weaponisation of aid in Sudan strikes a painful chord for Filipinos. In times of disaster or conflict, relief here has often been politicized, with access determined not by need but by loyalty. Mismanagement or deliberate withholding has deepened suffering in storm-stricken and war-torn communities alike. We remember the issue of corruption during the rehabilitation of Marawi after the Marawi siege. Anomalies in the allocation of funds that were supposed to be used to create facilities and homes for displaced families were found repeatedly across several agencies (5).

The attacks on Sudanese schools, camps, and hospitals recall moments in our own history when supposedly safe spaces such as classrooms, clinics, and evacuation centers were violated under militarization and counterinsurgency campaigns. Red-tagging and military operations in Mindanao have, time and again, displaced families and left children without classrooms and homes to return to (6).

The loss of home is perhaps the sharpest parallel. Sudan’s millions of displaced mirror the evacuations forced by conflict and development aggression in the Philippines: Lumad schools closed by militarization, peasants driven off their land by plantations and land use conversion (7), and urban poor families evicted to make way for infrastructure projects (8), all in the guise of “development.” In both countries, children are among the hardest hit. In Sudan, they face famine, disease outbreaks, and denied education. In the Philippines, children also endure violence, interrupted education, and the uncertainty of futures stolen by the very government that is supposed to be protecting them.

Silenced voices

And then there is the silence. Rolling Stone Middle East warns us that Sudan’s genocide is not forgotten but deliberately ignored and silence, as if the absence of headlines could erase the cries of millions (9). 

Filipinos know this too well: how the abuses of dictatorship are sidelined, sanitized, or outright revised (10). And even now, the reactionary government, a government that works only to serve its own interests and not the interests of the people, tries to silence all those who try to speak up against violence. This is evidenced by the enforced disappearances of activists, black propaganda and red-tagging of the opposition, and attacks against press freedom (11). 

Both Sudanese and Filipinos have learned that silence is not neutral. It is yet another tool used to suppress, another form of violence. 

Lessons for International Solidarity

If there is one thing we learn from Sudan, it is that solidarity cannot be seasonal. The crisis worsens even as global attention to it fades, so remembering and amplifying Sudanese voices is an act of resistance in and of itself. As Rolling Stone MENA argues, the crime may not be forgetting, but the deliberate choice to ignore what is happening.

Solidarity also demands accountability.  The UN reports of systematic violations both by the SAF and RSF demonstrate that neither of the parties can plead innocence. Documentation, journalism, and international mechanisms are crucial for breaking impunity and protecting survivors (2).

It also includes protecting civic space. When the forces burn villages or bomb displacement camps, it is not just physical destruction, it is an attempt to erase their voices and stories. Filipinos, too, must defend our alternative media, our artists, our activists, because every silenced voice makes future violence easier.

Lastly, solidarity requires prioritizing the victims. Aid must adapt to the lived realities of refugees and IDPs whether they live in camps under siege or in precarious urban settlements. For the Philippines, a country where millions of citizens are migrants and diaspora, the responsibility to defend displaced peoples’ rights is both moral and deeply personal.

What Solidarity Can Look Like

Solidarity is not abstract. It starts by echoing Sudanese voices in our media, our organizations, and other personal spaces. It means listening to displaced Sudanese women and youth, inviting them to speak, and refusing to let their struggle vanish into silence.

It also means supporting humanitarian groups that continue to deliver aid impartially, even as warring parties manipulate supplies. In the Philippines, solidarity can take the form of campaigns calling on our government to pursue policies sanctioning war crimes and severing complicity in arms supply.

But perhaps most importantly, solidarity is about linking struggles. The systems that weaponize aid in Sudan are not so different from those that marginalize communities in the Philippines. When Indigenous peoples fight for their land, when activists resist red-tagging, when survivors of martial law demand justice, they are part of the same tapestry of international resistance.

From Sudan’s Margins to Our Solidarity

The genocide in Sudan is not distant. Every bomb that falls on a hospital in Khartoum, every child who dies of starvation in a displacement camp, every family forced to walk across deserts in search of safety carries reminders of our own struggles.

We share more than sympathy with the Sudanese people. We share histories of colonization, of elite rule, of dispossession, and of militarized repression. If their struggle is actively ignored, then our duty is to make our solidarity loud and unmistakable.

Liberation is not a relic of the past but it is a living, breathing struggle. And both in Sudan and the Philippines, it remains the only path to dignity, justice, and life.