From the Platform
Yasser Al-Fadani
Here… Human Nature Has Been Corrupted!
In the time of the so-called “Age of Ignorance,” when there were no international charters, no human rights slogans, and no rights organizations, Zohair ibn Abi Umayyah stood tall, his voice echoing through Mecca:
“O people of Mecca, shall we eat food and wear clothes while the sons of Hashim perish, unable to buy or sell anything? By God, I will not sit until this cruel and unjust pact is torn apart!”
And so the pact was torn, the siege lifted, and the conscience triumphed over tribalism.
Today… in an era of glittering headlines, “international legitimacy,” and “human rights,” Al-Fashir—the city of steadfastness—is besieged with brutality by the Janjaweed and Colombian mercenaries, while the world stands on tiptoe and watches. International institutions chew on cold, empty statements, shutting their doors to the cries of the hungry and the thirsty, as if the charters they flaunt were written in the ink of hypocrisy.
Al-Fashir is not merely a Sudanese city—it is today the moral compass of the world. Whoever stands with her stands with the truth, and whoever remains silent in the face of her siege is complicit in the crime, even if cloaked in the garb of law and false neutrality.
For months, hordes of Janjaweed, backed by mercenaries from faraway lands—Colombians among them—have surrounded her, heavily armed, sowing death around her walls, cutting off food, medicine, and water, choking even the breath of children and the elderly.
In the Age of Ignorance, a man would rise against injustice, even if the victim were the enemy of his own tribe, because human nature was still uncorrupted. But in the “civilized” twenty-first century, conscience has drowned in the swamp of self-interest, and the lives of entire peoples are traded at political bargaining tables, sold in public auctions behind closed doors.
O world, do not speak of “values” while you let Al-Fashir be slaughtered in the open. Do not raise the banners of “humanity” while you turn away from children who sleep on empty stomachs, from women who face death by thirst, from men who meet death with bare chests.
Today, Al-Fashir cries out—not only against her killers, but against an entire civilization that has sold its soul to the devil.
And history records… just as it once recorded the stance of Zohair ibn Abi Umayyah centuries ago. But this time it will write that the Age of Ignorance was nobler, and that the “civilization” of our time has known nothing of civilization but its name.
From my platform I declare: Al-Fashir will endure, for cities built on steadfastness cannot be defeated by siege. Those who think that hunger and thirst can break her people’s will have not read history well. The siege will be broken, just as the unjust pacts of the past were torn apart. And the shame will remain etched on the foreheads of all who stayed silent, all who stood watching, and all who sold the blood of the innocent for a paltry price.
