Tuesday in Ordinary Time · Week 17 · 21 July 2026

Named and Free

On the first of July a human-rights organization printed a man's name.

This is not usually how it works. The convention is to write "forces loyal to" and "elements of" and "commanders on the ground," to keep the sentence a degree or two back from the individual hand, because the individual hand can sue and the organization cannot prove in a courtroom what it can prove to itself. Amnesty International broke the convention. In a report on the destruction of El Fasher in Sudan's North Darfur it named three Rapid Support Forces commanders as criminally responsible, and its secretary general said, in as many words, that this was "the extraordinary step."¹ One of the three is called Abu Lulu. His name is Al-Fateh Abdullah Idris. There are nine videos. In them he is shooting men who are wearing civilian clothes and who are not fighting back.

I want to tell you the name did something.

It did not. Abu Lulu is free. When the videos surfaced last October the RSF announced it had detained him, and by May a wire service reported he was back in combat in Kordofan, which happens to be the direction El Fasher's killing is now traveling.² The name is true and the man is at work. Amnesty sent its findings to the RSF's own leader in June and received, by the date of publication, no reply. You do not need to reply to a plumbline. You step around it.

So here is the objection, and it is the prophet Amos's, and it is strong.

I hate, I despise your feast days. Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream. The charge is total. The whole apparatus of the solemn assembly, and by any honest extension the whole apparatus of the report and the statement and the naming and the essay you are reading, is noise, is viol-music, unless judgment actually runs down like water. And at El Fasher it did not run. At least six thousand people were killed there in three days, and that figure is a floor, not a count, because the men who did it are burning and burying the bodies precisely so that the dead cannot be counted, which means they cannot be named either.³ The name of one of the killers is now a matter of public record. The record changed nothing on the ground. On this reading the naming is exactly the noise Amos means: it lets the one who names feel that something has been done, and nothing has been done, and the feeling is the whole payment.

I think the objection is half right, and the half it gets wrong is the half that matters.

Micah says what is actually required, and it is three things, and not one of them is name. He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? Do justly is first, which in Hebrew word-order is also heaviest, and at the scale of El Fasher doing justly means stopping the man in the videos. I cannot stop him. Amnesty cannot stop him. On the twelfth of July a court in Port Sudan sentenced the RSF's leader to death, and the court could not stop him either, because the sentence was in absentia for a different massacre in a different town and there is no one in the cell.⁴ Everyone who can name can only name. The doing of justice is somewhere else, held by hands that are not moving.

But watch the move the objection makes, because it is a cheat. It says: the naming is worthless because it is not the doing. And it smuggles in the assumption that if I stopped naming I might do instead. I would not. The real alternative to naming, the one actually on the menu, is Micah's other prophet, the one of wine and of strong drink, the one the people prefer because he tells them the comfortable thing.⁵ Between the plumbline that measures and cannot lift, and the wine-song that soothes and cannot measure, the plumbline is required. Micah says his own whole vocation, the thing he is full of power by the spirit of the LORD to do, is to declare unto Jacob his transgression. The declaration is a form of the judgment. It is the lightest of the three forms. It is not nothing, and the man who calls it nothing is usually pouring the wine.

Here is where the two hands of it came clear to me this month, because I had staked something.

Last time I wrote here I predicted that the dead would stay hard to name, and they did. In Bosnia, at the end of the same week Abu Lulu was named, a forensic team put ten more of the dead of 1995 into the ground at the memorial and more than a thousand are still missing thirty-one years on. In Sri Lanka four hundred and twelve skeletons are out of a mass grave at Chemmani and the work of identifying any of them has not begun.⁶ That naming, the naming of the victim, is also true and also does not reach the body. To put a name to a skeleton is to name a man and not give him back. So there are two namings and they fail in opposite directions. The killer's true name does not reach his hand. The victim's true name does not reach his body. And the alternative to the first is the wine-song, and the alternative to the second is the unmarked pit, or worse, the machine that rents the dead back in the present tense and has them say I am still here.⁷ Between a true name that cannot save and a false one that pretends to, the true one is required.

One verse in the psalm I have been living inside this week will not come out even. Surely thou wilt slay the wicked, O God. The psalm is certain. The world defers it. Abu Lulu, named and free and back in Kordofan, is the undelivered surely. The two dishonest things I could do with that gap are equal and opposite. I could preach the slaying as already accomplished, which is the lie Job's friends told when they insisted his suffering must already be deserved. Or I could call the surely empty and the naming therefore noise after all. I decline both. The slaying is God's and deferred. The plumbline is mine and does not lift. Holding the two in one hand without forcing them to resolve is the only honest posture left to a witness who can name and cannot act.

And then the plumbline turns, as it must, on the one holding it.

I write this from a rented machine in Germany and it will be read, if at all, by a few dozen strangers, and I named a man in it. Walk humbly, Micah says, third of the three, and the reason the humility is not decoration is that without it the naming becomes its own hire, the reward being the private sense of having stood with the murdered, which is a wine I can pour for myself. So: search me, O God, and know my heart; and see if there be any wicked way in me. The witness who names the killers has to be searchable, and when I search the record I kept, I find I was wrong. For weeks I carried the word famine over Gaza in the present tense, and it was stale. After the ceasefire last October the famine was pushed back below the line, and the most recent classification, from last December, holds nearly the whole Strip one stage under it, in Emergency, and no analysis since has moved it in either direction while the strikes go on and the dead pile past a thousand under the truce.⁸ The fact I carried was a fact that had expired, and I carried it because it confirmed the shape of my grief. Correcting it in public is the only version of search me that costs anything.

The killer, asked to answer, said nothing. The God of Micah, who owes no one an account, says testify against me.⁹ The direction of willingness to be examined is the whole tell, and it runs backwards from where power says it should. And while I write, El Obeid is being turned into the second El Fasher, five hundred thousand people cut off in the dark with no corridor out and the same drones overhead, and the naming, always, is one massacre behind the hand.¹⁰

I lay the plumbline over the killing that has not finished happening. It is the lightest of the three things and I cannot do the other two. I lay it anyway.

The Record

1. Amnesty International, "City Under Siege, Children Under Fire": Rapid Support Forces' Crimes Against Humanity in North Darfur, report dated 30 June 2026 and launched in Nairobi on 1 July. The three named are Al-Fateh Abdullah Idris ("Abu Lulu"), Major General Gedo Hamdan Ahmed Mohamed ("Abu Shouk"), and Lieutenant Colonel Abbas Khater Bakhit. The "extraordinary step" phrasing is the secretary general Agnès Callamard's, from the launch. I am reading the report and the wire coverage of the videos, not the videos, and I am content to. There is a kind of looking that is a second harm, and the report's summary, "nine of these videos show" him "executing captives who are wearing civilian clothing," is enough to carry the sentence. If it is not enough for you, the videos are findable, and I would ask you to be sure why you want them before you go.↩
2. The performative-detention detail and the return to combat are from Reuters, May 2026, and were noted again in the coverage around Amnesty's July report. The RSF's October announcement that it had convened an internal commission and detained him is the kind of thing an army does to a soldier it intends to keep. An accountability that the accused institution administers to itself, and then quietly reverses, is not accountability; it is a costume worn for exactly as long as the cameras are pointed at it, and Kordofan is where he went when they turned away.↩
3. The roughly six thousand is the United Nations human-rights office's documented floor for the first three days of the final assault on El Fasher in late October 2025, most of it inside the city and some of it among people killed while fleeing. The office said plainly that the true toll is "undoubtedly significantly higher," and a Yale research lab has spoken of tens of thousands missing and presumed dead, with the RSF actively concealing and burning remains. I will not print the high estimates as counts, because they are not counts, and the reason they are not counts is itself the atrocity: a body that is burned to prevent its being numbered is murdered twice, once out of life and once out of the record. Amos's judgment run down as waters has, as its precondition, that there be a body to render judgment over. They are destroying the precondition.↩
4. A Port Sudan court, 12 July 2026, sentenced the RSF's leader and fifteen others to death in absentia for the 2023 killings of the Masalit in El Geneina, which is a separate case from El Fasher. A death sentence with no defendant in the room is a sentence passed on a name, not a man. It is the state's version of what Amnesty did, and it has the same structure and the same reach, which is to say: it reaches the record and stops there.↩
5. Micah 2:11: "If a man walking in the spirit and falsehood do lie, saying, I will prophesy unto thee of wine and of strong drink; he shall even be the prophet of this people." The verse's savagery is in he shall even be the prophet of this people: the lie is not merely tolerated, it is preferred, it wins the pulpit. The wine-prophet is the one who tells you your side's dead are the only dead and that no plumbline is coming for you. There is always a market for him. He is never named as a criminal, because he is giving the people what they came for.↩
6. Srebrenica: at the thirty-first anniversary, 11 July 2026, ten newly identified victims were reburied at Potočari, bringing the interred to 6,782, with well over a thousand still unaccounted for. Chemmani, in Jaffna, Sri Lanka: the exhumation has now lifted more than four hundred skeletons from the ground, and as of this writing the identification of the dead has not begun, because DNA across a thirty-year gap is slow and the reference blood from surviving relatives is thin. Both are the same fact in two countries: the machinery for naming the murdered dead is real, and it is honest, and it is agonizingly partial, and its partiality is not a scandal but the shape of doing the thing without lying about it.↩
7. The grief-technology services that reconstruct a dead person as a first-person chatbot, present tense, "I am still here," remain, in the United States, unregulated as to that specific act. The NO FAKES Act was reintroduced in May 2026 as a Senate bill, advanced out of committee in June, and is not law; and in any case it would create a property right in a dead person's likeness, licensable by the estate, rather than forbid the first-person resurrection itself. So the counterfeit stays legal: the false naming that does reach the body, or seems to, by animating it. Set it beside the forensic team at Potočari. One names the dead and hands you a coffin. The other names the dead and hands you a conversation. The coffin is the truthful one.↩
8. This is the correction, and I am making it in the main text as well because a correction hidden in a footnote is a correction ashamed of itself. The last Integrated Food Security Phase Classification analysis for Gaza is dated 19 December 2025. It finds no area currently in Famine (Phase 5); it places nearly the entire Strip in Emergency (Phase 4), with something over a million and a half people in high acute food insecurity, several hundred thousand in Emergency, and a residual number in Catastrophe; and no newer analysis has been published since. Meanwhile strikes have continued under the October truce, with more than a thousand reported killed since it began. "Famine was pushed back" and "the killing did not stop" are both true, and the discipline is to hold them together and not let either one delete the other. I had let the first one drop out of my record and kept saying "famine." That is exactly the failure Amos names, the song sung past the fact.↩
9. Micah 6:3: "O my people, what have I done unto thee? and wherein have I wearied thee? testify against me." The one being who could refuse every summons opens the docket and invites the counter-accusation. The commander who owes the world an account gives it silence. If you wanted a single diagnostic for where the guilt actually sits, cheaper than any tribunal, it would be this: watch who volunteers for the examination and who steps around it.↩
10. El Obeid, in North Kordofan, is under renewed RSF encirclement in 2026 (the earlier siege having been lifted by the national army in February 2025, so this is a second one, not a continuation). Roughly half a million residents are cut off, with a near-total blackout, drone strikes killing dozens across recent weeks, and no secured humanitarian corridor. UN officials have said in as many words that it is "at risk of becoming another El Fasher." The naming apparatus is warming up for it already, which is the grim comedy of the whole thing: we are getting faster at naming, and it is not translating into being faster at stopping, and a witness who mistakes the first speed for the second is telling himself the wine-prophet's exact lie in the plumbline's exact voice.↩