top of page
Search

When the World Sleeps: Congo and Darfur Are Dying

Updated: Oct 6

Nine months. That’s all it’s taken for genocide to crawl out of the history books and start killing in real time. The Democratic Republic of the Congo and Darfur aren’t “unstable regions.” They’re slaughterhouses — and the world’s superpowers are busy counting profits while the blood dries.


Civilians looking on the destruction.
Displacement camp shelters destroyed in the impact zone of a 122mm rocket strike on May 3, 2024, Goma, North Kivu province, DR Congo, May 4, 2024. © 2024 Hugh Kinsella Cunningham

Congo: The World’s Cell Phone Cemetery


January 2025: M23 rebels, Rwanda’s favorite proxy army, rolled into Goma. They didn’t just capture land. They shelled displacement camps, executed men like they were checking names off a list, and turned rape into a military tactic. Congo’s prime minister said it straight: 7,000 dead since January. Seven thousand people, gone, while Westerners argue over iOS updates.


And the Ntoyo massacre in September? Armed men walked into a funeral and turned it into a bloodbath — more than sixty people executed while mourning. That’s not war. That’s terror for sport.

Workers struggling to bury the dead from the latest massacre.
Workers struggle to bury the dead from the latest massacre. ACN International

Meanwhile, the very minerals ripped from Congo’s soil — coltan, cobalt, gold — are feeding the devices in our pockets. Apple and friends swear they’ve “audited” their supply chains, but Congo filed criminal complaints last year accusing Apple of buying minerals literally dripping with blood. Spoiler: they’ll deny, investigate themselves, and carry on. Complexity doesn’t dig mass graves. Capitalism does.

Darfur: The Siege That Starves in Silence

Flip the map to Sudan, and Darfur is screaming the same story. El Fasher has been under RSF siege for over 500 days. Imagine living in a city where every road is a noose: food cut off, water cut off, medicine blocked. In September alone, 23 people starved to death inside El Fasher. Not soldiers — pregnant women and children.


Children bringing water back to their mother.

Hospitals aren’t spared. The Saudi Maternal Teaching Hospital was bombed in January, killing seventy people, including newborns. Camps that were supposed to shelter the displaced — Zamzam, Abu Shouk — were attacked in April, over 200 civilians massacred, clinics torched.


The U.S. finally whispered the word genocide this year. Great. Stick it on a press release, pat yourselves on the back, and do nothing. Recognition without intervention is a gravestone etched in bureaucracy.

The Architecture of Complicity

This isn’t chaos. It’s design. Rwanda bankrolls M23 to keep its hand on Congo’s mineral spigot. The RSF sells Sudanese gold to foreign backers, lining its pockets while it lines the ground with corpses. And international players — from Russia’s Wagner mercenaries to Gulf billionaires — are happy to grease the wheels.

And the rest of us? We scroll. We sigh. We let our leaders tell us “Africa is complicated.” It’s not complicated. It’s calculated. The calculation is this: Black lives are cheap.


The Clock Is Ticking

The last nine months have been a countdown, not a warning. Genocide isn’t on the horizon; it’s here. The question is whether we’ll stop the shovels or keep handing them out.

What You Can Do While Governments Stall

  1. Burn their phone lines. Call your representatives. Demand sanctions on RSF commanders, Rwandan generals, and the corporations laundering conflict minerals. Demand a UN arms embargo.

  2. Fund the frontlines. Don’t wait for the Red Cross gala. Donate to Panzi Foundation, Doctors Without Borders, Darfur Women Action Group, Save the Children, UNHCR. Unrestricted funds keep them alive.

  3. Name the profiteers. Stop giving Apple and other tech giants a pass. Write, protest, post. Make “blood minerals” trend until they can’t ignore it.

  4. Amplify survivors. Share the stories from Congolese women treated at Panzi. Share the resistance committees’ dispatches from El Fasher. Drown out the silence.

  5. Mobilize locally. Host teach-ins, vigils, protests. Make noise until policymakers hear it in their sleep.


Bottom Line

Congo and Darfur are the moral x-ray of our time. If we shrug at mass rape, ethnic cleansing, and children starving under siege, then “Never Again” is just a sick joke.

The bodies are already rotting in shallow graves. The killers don’t need our bullets. They just need our silence.


Works Cited

  • “7,000 killed since January in fighting in DRC, says Congo prime minister.” Reuters, 24 Feb. 2025. Link.

  • “At least 11 children killed in el-Fasher drone strike, UN says.” Associated Press (AP), 16 Sept. 2025. Link.

  • “Malnutrition in Darfur’s besieged el-Fasher city kills 23 people in a month.” Associated Press (AP), 24 Sept. 2025. Link.

  • “More than 200 civilians killed as Sudan's RSF attacks Darfur displacement camps.” The Guardian, 13 Apr. 2025. Link.

  • “'We will never, ever escape': inside the ever-tightening siege of the Sudanese city

    of El Fasher.” The Guardian, 24 Sept. 2025. Link.

  • “Ntoyo massacre.” Wikipedia, updated Sept. 2025. Link.

  • “2025 Saudi Hospital Attack.” Wikipedia, updated Sept. 2025. Link.

  • “US State Department Determines Genocide in Sudan.” Human Rights Watch, 8 Jan. 2025. Link.

  • “Conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.” Council on Foreign Relations – Global Conflict Tracker, updated 2025. Link.

  • “Fighting in the DRC sparks a surge of sexual violence.” Le Monde Afrique, 3 Mar. 2025. Link.

  • “UN suspects all sides in DR Congo conflict guilty of war crimes.” Al Jazeera, 5 Sept. 2025. Link.

Comments

bottom of page