Where There’s No Debate About Genocide — and No Response Either

By Nicholas Kristof
Opinion Columnist, The New York Times

While fierce debates rage over allegations of genocide in Gaza, there is another place where all sides in the United States agree that genocide is indeed underway — and yet it is being largely ignored.

That place is Sudan, which may well be home to the world’s worst humanitarian crisis today. Famine was formally declared there last year; United Nations reports indicate that around 25 million Sudanese face severe hunger, while at least 12 million have been forced from their homes by civil war. Tom Perriello, who served as U.S. special envoy for Sudan until earlier this year, believes the death toll has already surpassed 400,000.

In January, the Biden administration officially declared that the killings in Sudan constitute genocide. In April, the Trump administration also described the slaughter as genocide, and the State Department confirmed to me that it regards the situation as such.

So there is bipartisan agreement in the U.S. that Sudan is enduring genocide and famine — but also, apparently, bipartisan agreement to do little about it. The Biden administration dragged its feet, and now the Trump administration is following the same path. In fact, President Trump this year is cutting aid to Sudan, ensuring that more children will die of hunger.

Whatever one’s views of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza — and I have been outspoken in criticizing Israel’s actions and America’s complicity in the bombing and starvation there — we must also recognize our collective failure to confront this other catastrophe, which has produced an even higher death toll. Neither crisis should be treated as a distraction from the other; we have the moral capacity to be horrified by both the immense suffering in Sudan and in Gaza.

This failure is global. Arab and African nations have done more to worsen Sudan’s suffering than to relieve it. The United Nations proclaimed in 2005 a “responsibility to protect” civilians from atrocities, but those lofty words seem to have become a substitute for action rather than a spur to it.

Survivors recount unimaginably brutal campaigns of ethnic cleansing. On the Sudanese-Chadian border last year, a woman named Mariam Suleiman told me that Arab militias in her village lined up all the men and boys over the age of ten and executed them, before raping the women and girls. She said the lighter-skinned fighters targeted her Black African community, quoting one militia leader as saying: “We don’t want to see any Black people.”

These racist massacres echo the Darfur genocide two decades ago. But this time there is far less attention — and a complete collapse of political will to respond.

Anthony Lake, who served as national security adviser to President Bill Clinton and later led UNICEF, told me: “It’s Gaza — which is horrifying enough — writ larger. And most of it out of sight of cameras.”

Two decades ago, then–U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan visited Darfur (and helped smuggle me in) to push for relief through negotiations and peacekeepers. Today, Secretary-General António Guterres said in February that the world must not turn its back on Sudan — but I sometimes wonder if he himself has done just that.

The killing and starvation in Sudan stem from a two-year conflict between two rival generals. One faction is the Sudanese Armed Forces; the other is the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group. Both have behaved brutally, starving civilians and obstructing humanitarian relief.

“We are being denied access to the hungry — and attacked when we try,” said Cindy McCain, executive director of the U.N. World Food Programme, noting that three trucks carrying food aid were destroyed this month by drone strikes.

Aid workers say both sides commit war crimes, but the RSF is responsible for the worst atrocities, including burning villages, slaughtering civilians, and systematic sexual violence.

Foreign powers are fueling the conflict by arming both sides. The United Arab Emirates, despite its denials, appears to be the main backer of the RSF, financing its brutal campaign.

The Biden administration refused to hold the UAE accountable — and now the Trump administration is doing the same. Congress, however, has shown more leadership: some lawmakers are pushing to block arms transfers to the UAE so long as it continues enabling mass killings and rape. That represents useful leverage: the UAE is sensitive to its reputation, and public pressure once helped drive it to pull out of the disastrous war in Yemen.

What could Trump do? It would help enormously if he pressed the UAE to cut support for the RSF or at least to halt its atrocities. He could appoint a special envoy for Sudan. He could also expand U.S. support for Sudanese grassroots initiatives, such as the “emergency rooms” that run community kitchens.

In September, world leaders will gather at the U.N. to repeat familiar platitudes about making the world a better place. One test of their sincerity will be what they do for El-Fasher, Sudan’s largest city in Darfur, now besieged by the RSF and facing famine. Sudan watchers fear that if El-Fasher falls, the RSF will unleash massacres and mass rapes as it has elsewhere.

As one civilian in El-Fasher wrote in a message published by Avaaz Sudan Dispatch, which monitors the crisis: “Here in El-Fasher, we are starving. The responsibility does not rest only with those who hold the guns. It is also on the world. On Arab states. On the African Union. On Europe. On the so-called international community. All of them.”

He added: “We know they can help. We know they have the capacity to airdrop food. They have planes. They have supplies. But they choose not to.”