As debate boils over allegations of genocide in Gaza, there’s another place where all sides in the United States seem to agree a genocide is underway — yet largely ignore it.
That’s Sudan, probably the site of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis today. Famine was officially declared there last year; the United Nations reports that some 25 million Sudanese face extreme hunger and at least 12 million have had to flee their homes because of civil war. Tom Perriello, who was the U.S. special envoy for Sudan until this year, tells me that he believes that the death toll by now has exceeded 400,000.
In January, the Biden administration officially declared the killing in Sudan to be a genocide. In April, the Trump administration also characterized the slaughter as a genocide, and the State Department confirmed to me that it views the situation in Sudan as a genocide.
So there is bipartisan agreement in the United States that Sudan is suffering both genocide and famine — and also, apparently, a bipartisan consensus to do little about it. The Biden administration was too passive, and now so too is the Trump administration. President Trump is actually slashing assistance this year to Sudan, increasing the number of children who will starve.
Whatever you think of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza — and I’ve been unsparing in my criticism of Israel’s actions and America’s complicity in the bombing and starvation there — we should recognize our collective failure to address this other crisis with an even higher death toll. Neither should be seen as a distraction from the other; we have the moral bandwidth to be appalled by the enormous suffering in Sudan and in Gaza alike.
This failure is global. Arab and African countries have done more to aggravate the suffering in Sudan than to ease it. The U.N. in 2005 declared a “responsibility to protect” civilians suffering atrocities, but that lofty language seems a substitute for action rather than a spur to it.
Survivors describe ethnic cleansing of almost unimaginable savagery. On the Sudan-Chad border last year, a woman named Maryam Suleiman told me that in her village an Arab militia lined up all the men and boys over the age of 10 and massacred them, and then raped the women and girls. The lighter-skinned gunmen targeted her Black African ethnic group, she said, quoting a militia leader as saying, “We don’t want to see any Black people.”
The racist massacres are an echo of the Darfur genocide of two decades ago in western Sudan. One difference is that this time there is far less interest, and a complete failure of political will to respond.
It is “a Gaza — which is horrible enough — writ still larger,” said Anthony Lake, who was national security adviser to President Bill Clinton and later led UNICEF. “And largely off camera.”
Two decades ago, the U.N. secretary general at the time, Kofi Annan, visited Darfur (and helped smuggle me in) and pushed to ease the crisis with negotiations and peacekeepers. The current U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, said in February that the world must not turn its back on Sudan, but I sometimes think that’s what he himself has done.
The killing and starvation in Sudan are results of a two-year struggle between two warring generals. One faction is the Sudanese Armed Forces and the other is a militia called the Rapid Support Forces. Both have behaved brutally, starving civilians and impeding humanitarian efforts to aid the hungry.
“We’re being blocked from reaching the hungry — and attacked for trying,” said Cindy McCain, the executive director of the U.N. World Food Program, which had three of its trucks carrying food aid destroyed this month by drone strikes.
Aid workers say that while both sides have committed war crimes, the Rapid Support Forces are responsible for the worst atrocities, such as the burning of entire villages and the slaughter and rape of civilians.
Outsiders perpetuate the war by arming both sides. The United Arab Emirates in particular, despite denials, appears to be the main supporter of the Rapid Support Forces, underwriting its campaign of atrocities.
While the Biden administration refused to hold the Emirates accountable, and now the Trump administration is doing the same, Congress has provided more leadership. Some members are pushing for a ban on arms transfers to the Emirates while it continues to enable mass murder and rape. That’s a useful pressure point: The Emirates is a remarkable nation that cares about its reputation, and public pressure previously led it to pull out of the disastrous war in Yemen.
What could Trump do? It would help if he called on the Emirates to cut off the Rapid Support Forces or at least end the atrocities. He could appoint a special envoy for Sudan. And he could ramp up American support for grass-roots Sudanese assistance programs, such as the emergency response rooms that run communal kitchens.
World leaders will gather at the U.N. in September to repeat platitudes about making the world a better place. One test of their sincerity is what they will do for the major Sudanese city of El Fasher, besieged by the Rapid Support Forces and facing starvation. Sudan watchers fear that if El Fasher falls, the Rapid Support Forces will engage in mass killings and rapes, as they have elsewhere.
“Here in El Fasher, we are starving,” Avaaz Sudan Dispatch, a newsletter that follows Sudan, quoted a civilian in the city as saying. “The responsibility is not just on those holding the guns. It’s on the world. The Arab countries. The African Union. Europe. The so-called international community. All of them.”
“We know they can help,” the civilian continued. “We know they have the power to airdrop food. They have planes. They have supplies. But they are choosing not to.”
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Nicholas Kristof became a columnist for The Times Opinion desk in 2001 and has won two Pulitzer Prizes. His new memoir is “Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life.” @NickKristof
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