If you want to help Sudan, amplify the voices of those suffering its horrors

It has been two weeks since the Janjaweed, Sudan’s infamous militia, embarked on a brutal campaign to disperse and suppress a popular uprising against deposed president Omar al-Bashir’s military government. The country is still in shock. In its capital city, Khartoum, the atmosphere is that of a wake as the dead, raped and beaten are counted. The faces of the missing and presumed dead haunt social media, their families braced for the possibility of seeing their loved ones bloated and washed up on the banks of the Nile, where the Janjaweed’s victims are still surfacing.

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The full extent of this horror is still to unfold. As graphic videos of the violence began to circulate, the government shut down the internet, plunging the country into darkness, in which it still remains as the Janjaweed continues its campaign of state capture. The swaggering members of the militia prowl Khartoum’s traumatised streets, stabbing, shooting, mugging and harassing at will. The contrast to the heady days, not so long ago, when the city was the site of a colossal sit-in that became a cultural hub and a site of national reconciliation is almost too painful to note. That is my insurmountable torment, the fact that it happened so quickly, that Sudan’s cry of revolution was choked in its throat. The paint on the impromptu street murals mixed with the blood of the protesters who had made the sit-in a giant collage of hope.

But the speed with which protests are being extinguished might be the saving grace of the Sudanese revolution. There was no time, no interregnum, no transitional period during which people could feel that some real change had taken place and thus be lulled into a false sense of security. There were no compromises made that would have given the military/paramilitary complex a chance to embed itself once again but this time – as in Sisi’s Egypt – with no intention of allowing any of the security lapses that enabled the protests to gain so much momentum in the first place. The regime missed a whole chapter of the counter-revolution playbook – that which successfully smears the liberation movement.

The military and Janjaweed’s impatience, and lack of tactical planning, rushed them to the only political tool they knew: massacre. There was no effort dedicated to slowly foment discord among the protesters and breed factionalism; no time to wage a convincing agitprop campaign to frame the revolution as a foreign agent-backed coup; no chance given to any civilian leaders to assume power and make mistakes, sending the people back into the arms of the military. The result is that even though hundreds have been killed and it looks like the Janjaweed’s leader, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, is rapidly ascending to the throne, the powder keg of anger is still there, more potent than ever. A sloppy attempt to blame the protesters for the violent response because of alleged “immoral” behaviour landed nowhere. It may seem as if the purge worked, but the revolution has not been quashed. It is regrouping even as the government attempts to force the country back to normalcy,

For the enemy of revolutions is normalisation, something the government and its allies are frantically attempting. That is why it is vital that the attention, finally focused on Sudan, does not fall into the same pitfalls as the last time there was a global campaign to bring attention to human rights abuses and ethnic cleansing in Darfur. It is already clear how different the world is now. The early 00s were a time when the United States was heavily interventionist and preoccupied with the “war on terror”. Institutions such as the international criminal court and the UN had not been exposed in all their toothlessness by the Iraq war and the double standards applied to war crimes or human rights abuses. The Gulf monarchies were largely docile subordinate partners to the US, embroiled in few regional skirmishes, and there was no social media to project the voices and experiences of the Sudanese other than through an advocacy network.

That human rights infrastructure, backed up by a muscular west, is now diminished. The US is led by a protean leader who I would wager could not pinpoint Sudan on the map. Britain is embroiled in its own Brexit wars, while Europe is so gripped by its own fears of a refugee crisis that it has forged an agreement with the violent Sudanese leaders in charge today, offering them funds to stem refugee passage through Sudan. Even if the human rights moral machine were still going strong, it might prove ineffective – its punishment of Sudan’s government back then, via economic sanctions, did little but harm to its people, and empowered a dictator.

No, in today’s world the powers of the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, rule the roost, smothering democracies in their cradles under the half-watchful eye of the US. There is no cavalry coming to the rescue out of concern for human rights.

Related: The military crackdown in Sudan lays bare the dark heart of Bashir’s regime | Nesrine Malik

But it’s not all bleak. Shaming still works – Sudan’s government would not kill the internet if it did not. So shame the world into applying pressure on the regime and restraining the Gulf powers that support it. For those who ask how to help Sudan, the answer is by preventing the normalisation project and aiding the Sudanese people in getting their message out during the blackout. A message that makes it clear that the deaths and rapes have not worked, that although they are still happening, people will not suffer in vain. Find people on the ground and amplify their voices. Fund verified medical support campaigns. Circulate accounts from journalists who are covering the trauma.

We must dispense with the global institutional network of censure that has failed Sudan for far too long. The Sudanese people came this far on their own; help them by bearing witness and raising their voices so that they can drown out the propaganda of the regime, and the disinformation campaign of its Arab allies.

• Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist