In April 2023, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group descended into a civil war. Since then, both groups have executed large-scale massacres and targeted ethnic cleansing against Black, non-Arab ethnic groups, such as the Masalit, Fur, and Zaghawa peoples. This genocide—enabled by a complicit international community and funded by the investment portfolios of Western institutions—has killed over 150,000 people, with approximately 9 million displaced internally and 1.8 million fleeing Sudan as refugees.

The ongoing genocide in Sudan reflects the international community’s racist neglect of Black lives and selective disregard for humanitarian crises in Africa. This apathy is clearly mirrored in institutions like McGill, whose refusal to divest from arms manufacturers signals a shameless willingness to profit from global violence against Black communities. 

This pattern of international inaction is not new. Beginning in 2003, General Omar al-Bashir’s regime carried out a genocidal campaign in Darfur that killed an estimated 300,000 people and displaced roughly 2.7 million individuals. Al-Bashir, in collaboration with the Janjaweed militia, conducted mass killings of Black Darfurians, destroying villages, poisoning wells, and systematically raping women and children. 

Yet the international community egregiously refused to multilaterally recognize al-Bashir’s campaign in Darfur as a genocide. The UN Security Council issued repeated resolutions calling for the cessation of human rights violations and hostilities, but offered no meaningful enforcement mechanisms, declining to authorize major interventions or impose punitive measures. 

Although al-Bashir was overthrown in 2019, today’s civil war stems from many of the same perpetrators of past atrocities in Darfur. Current RSF commander General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo was a Janjaweed leader, and many RSF fighters also fought for the militia group during the Darfur genocide. In failing to intervene meaningfully during the previous civil war, international institutions have effectively enabled the next generation of genocidaires. As such, the same power structures continue to carry out genocidal acts against Sudanese Black ethnic groups today.

Although the RSF and SAF’s military actions today each amount to acts of genocide, the international community has again faltered, refusing to take action beyond symbolic recognition and passive investigation. 

In fact, the very abuses that define Sudan’s ongoing genocide as such—the targeted destruction of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group—have been reframed by global powers to justify their own neglect and complicity. Overtly racist framings of the genocide by officials and media as ‘tribal conflict’ minimize the responsibility of Western actors to intervene, and reinforce the devaluation of Black lives in Sudan. 

Canada itself, whose Family Reunification Program has served to reunite refugees who have been torn from their families by crisis and war, has largely excluded Sudanese applicants, substantiating the country’s apathy towards the suffering in Sudan. Canada has pledged to admit merely 4,000 refugees from Sudan, while Quebec has refused to admit Sudanese refugees for residence entirely. 

Canada’s institutional response to the genocide in Sudan reveals a glaringly racist double standard. In 2023, the Canadian government did not place a limit on the number of Ukrainians who could apply for refugee status, empowering over 300,000 Ukrainian refugees to enter Canada, an incredible testament to what is possible through effective, welcoming refugee policies. Yet when it comes to the suffering of Black Africans, Canada’s program to address the refugee crisis in Sudan is capped at a low number, reflecting the country’s discriminatory conceptions of whose suffering is urgent and whose is not.

McGill’s own investments in Lockheed Martin and other weapons manufacturers—which directly provide arms to the SAF and RSF—reveal the same selective morality that governs how Canada and the international community allocate humanitarian support. McGill must immediately cease its funding of the genocide in Sudan, as it did in 2006 when it divested from companies doing business in Myanmar (then Burma), and adopt an anti-genocidal framework that values Black lives with the same urgency as other groups facing genocide and mass atrocity.

For the sake of the over 9.5 million people currently internally displaced in Sudan, the over 21 million trapped in famine, and the millions killed throughout generations of civil war. 

Divestment blocks weapons manufacturing at its source. Even with the recently implemented UN arms embargo, the United Arab Emirates continues to arm and finance the RSF. Unless institutions divest, weapons companies will simply find new backers—sustaining the perpetrators of genocide.

When institutions fail to condemn genocide and choose complicity over conviction, the cycle of suffering, neglect, and violence only deepens. McGill’s investments sustain global violence; divestment from Sudan’s genocide is long overdue.