Patrick Freyne: Returning home from Chad, I feel there's a glitch in western empathy

Irish Times

24-04-2025

Recently, I was in east
Chad
, where most of the people I met had seen loved ones murdered or had been raped or had been shot or saw bodies piled along the road from el-Geneina to Adre on the border with Sudan. I was travelling with Irish Times photographer Chris Maddaloni and we were visiting refugee camps for
Sudanese
refugees.
The week we flew into the capital, N'Djamena, Gen Yasir Al-Atta from the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) declared the airport 'a legitimate target'. Sudan might retaliate against its neighbour Chad, he said, for allowing the UAE smuggle weapons across its border to its enemy the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The SAF, in contrast, gets its funding from Russia, Iran and Egypt. This threat seemed worrying when we were flying, but it turned out nobody in Chad believed the SAF would risk a full-scale war. They have plenty of other things to worry about.
The Sudan war is the biggest humanitarian disaster in the world. 150,000 people have been killed. Twelve million people have been displaced. Some 760,000 of them have crossed the border into Chad, mainly Masalit people being targeted by the RSF. Most of them are women and children because the RSF stop young men from leaving the country and frequently murder them. There is a city of straw huts in the desert at the border town of Adre where 237,000 people live. I have said this elsewhere, but that's the population of Cork.
It's a hot, arid climate where poor Chadian farmers already struggle to get enough food and water. In 2024, funding for aid was at 30 per cent of what was needed to supply the basics. We met aid workers from the UN Refugee Agency UNHCR, UN World Food Programme (WFP), Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), Acted and Concern who are doing hard and important work in difficult circumstances but the international aid situation is just getting worse.
READ MORE
A local chief walks to the barren village of Sira in Chad. Photograph: Chris Maddaloni/The Irish Times
After returning home I can't help feeling like there's a glitch in western empathy. Because I have been in eastern Chad and spoken to people brutalised by the war – children, young women, old men, refugee aid workers helping their people – I feel deeply moved by their situation and I can't stop thinking about them. I am also troubled that it takes meeting these people to make me feel so strongly.
The eyes of the world should be on this war, but they're on other things. At best they're on the humanitarian disaster in Gaza where 51,000 people have been killed by the Israeli army and countless face deprivation. And they should be on that. But possibly due to the overstimulation of social media, I think we have an empathy crisis. We can only do a handful of news stories and one humanitarian disaster at a time. Many are capable of feeling deeply for that one crisis and are doing amazing things in support. In the US, people are risking their livelihoods and freedom to speak about what's happening. But there's something wrong if the West cannot extend that genuine compassion to other places where people are also suffering.
[
'A lot of children die': Patrick Freyne reports from inside Chad camps for Sudanese refugees
Opens in new window
]
Part of this is a narrative problem. Sudan is an underreported war. It's bureaucratically complicated and very expensive to travel there or to the countries around it. We managed to do so after a couple of false starts and a generous Simon Cumbers grant. It cost more than €8,000 for two journalists to travel there for 12 days to produce five articles that will, most likely, be less widely read than a column I might write about Room to Improve.
The nature of the story is also complex. With Gaza it's clear – at least to most people in Ireland – that there is one main aggressor and one group of people who are primarily suffering. In the Sudan war there are just, to paraphrase an American commentator, bad guys and worse guys. Both the SAF and the RSF have committed atrocities but the RSF is also trying to ethnically cleanse Darfur of the Masalit people (in January, the US accused the RSF of committing genocide). Neither side is fighting for any reason more noble than power. This doesn't prevent millions of innocent people getting caught in the crossfire but it's easier for people to care if they can couple their compassion with righteous anger.
A group of schoolgirls at a market in the old Farchana camp in eastern Chad. Photograph: Chris Maddaloni/The Irish Times
This is not whataboutery. The world's eyes
should
be on the murderous actions of the Israeli government in Gaza and they should be on the aggressive Russian invasion of Ukraine and they should be on the venality of the Trump government and the mundanity of Irish political bickering. But human empathy should be capable of stretching beyond the limits of the algorithm to other tragedies.
I know that this is preachy and I haven't exactly earned that right. I am as guilty of ignoring this tragedy as anybody. But right now, I don't really care. I can't stop thinking of the Sudanese people I met – the mother fanning her malnourished baby in an MSF hospital, the electrician bouncing a baby on his remaining knee, the human rights lawyer who was raped, the 16-year-old who saw his father murdered and asked could we get him a football. They are generous and dignified and kind and they once had a different future to look forward to. And I am now deeply troubled by my own inability to think beyond a handful of news stories at one time. When it happens to us, we will expect more people to care.
Supported by the Simon Cumbers Media Fund