No Debate, No Response: Genocide in Sudan goes largely ignored

As debate boils over allegations of genocide in the Gaza Strip, 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 UN 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, the US special envoy for Sudan until this year, said he believes the death toll has exceeded 4,00,000.

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 that it views the situation in Sudan as a genocide.

So there is bipartisan agreement in the US 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 to Sudan, increasing the number of children who will starve.

Whatever you think of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, 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 UN 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 said that in her village, an Arab militia lined up men and boys 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 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 UN secretary-general at the time, Kofi Annan, visited Darfur (and helped smuggle me in) and pushed to ease the crisis. The current 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 a result of a two-year struggle between two warring generals. One faction is the Sudanese armed forces, 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 UN World Food Program, which had three of its trucks carrying food aid destroyed this month by drone strikes.

While the Biden administration refused to hold the UAE accountable, and now the Trump administration is doing the same, Congress has provided more leadership. It would help if Trump called on the UAE to cut off the Rapid Support Forces or at least end the atrocities. He could appoint a special envoy for Sudan and ramp up American support for grassroots Sudanese assistance programs.

World leaders will gather at the UN 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. “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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