Sudan24 May, 20262 min read
Sudan Launches Campaign Against Racism and Hate Speech, Groups Warn of Growing Conflict
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Hate speech fuels Sudan's war and fragmentation. Inflammatory rhetoric dehumanizes displaced people, worsening tensions.
Sudan’s hate-speech fuel
A new campaign against racism and hate speech in Sudan was launched on Thursday evening, with political and civil society groups warning that inflammatory rhetoric is deepening the country’s conflict and accelerating fragmentation. The joint statement backed by the Radical Change Alliance and the Darfur Bar Association says hate speech is fuelling divisions, weakening national ties, and creating conditions in which separatist projects could gain wider acceptance amid polarisation and hostility.
“The campaign, launched on Thursday, evening is backed by a number of organisations, including the Radical Change Alliance and the Darfur Bar Association.”
The statement also pledges to challenge racist rhetoric through political and media campaigns while pursuing legal action inside and outside Sudan against individuals accused of spreading or inciting racial hatred. It argues that confronting racism requires more than moral condemnation, calling for recognition of abuses committed against different communities and for dismantling institutional structures that perpetuate discrimination, particularly in education, the media and the legal system.
War, polarisation, and legal action
The campaign’s memorandum accuses political and military actors of systematically deploying racist rhetoric as part of conflict strategies, and says such discourse is at times promoted by figures linked to the former regime as well as influential actors in the current political landscape. Organisers say the initiative aims to strengthen social cohesion and confront what they describe as a dangerous escalation in racist discourse linked to the ongoing war.
The statement says racist discourse in Sudan cannot be understood as isolated incidents or temporary consequences of war, but as part of a deeper historical structure dating back to the formation of the modern Sudanese state during the colonial era and after independence. It links the roots of racism to historical practices including the slave trade and colonial administrative policies that reshaped tribal and social structures along discriminatory lines, and says successive post-independence governments reproduced these structures through centralised rule, unequal distribution of wealth and power, and the use of ethnic narratives within state institutions.
Darfur and the fight for unity
The campaign says the current rise in hate speech is being exploited during the war to reshape political and economic power along ethnic and regional lines, with violence and abuses in several regions, particularly Darfur. It points to events in cities including El Geneina, El Fasher, and Nyala, alongside the rise in separatist rhetoric, as reflecting what it describes as the colonial structure of the Sudanese state.
“They also link the phenomenon to violence and abuses in several regions, particularly Darfur.”
In parallel, a video widely shared on social media in Sudan rekindled discussion about the active role of hate speech in the war, now in its third year, with the speaker rejecting the presence of internally displaced people in his area using harsh language described as hate and racism. The same account says hate speech succeeded in turning the neighbor into an 'enemy' and the citizen into a 'stranger' within his homeland, putting coexistence among the country’s diverse components to the test.