‘The world, as a whole, has dropped the ball’ on Sudan

Heartbreaking. That’s how Nicholas Kristof, an award-winning journalist and author, described his last trip to Sudan. From the country’s border with Chad, Kristof met a young mother who had been raped. A teenager raising her siblings in a refugee camp. And a woman who had witnessed a mass execution in her village — with every male above the age of 10 shot dead in front of her. “Things are desperate,” said Kristof, who has been documenting what he saw through a series of harrowing op-eds in The New York Times. “And they may well get quite a bit worse.” It’s something Sudan — and its people — cannot afford. For 18 months, the country’s civil war has forced 10 million from their homes, making Sudan the fastest-growing displacement crisis on earth. Half of the country’s population is nearing starvation, and famine has been declared in Sudan’s largest refugee camp. By all accounts, the country is crumbling. But according to Kristof, the world has failed to respond. “The world, as a whole, has dropped the ball on this,” said Kristof, speaking from the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly last week. “I think that’s true of just about everybody. It’s true of journalism. It’s true of celebrities. It’s true of G7 leaders. It’s true of the [United Nations] secretary-general. I think it’s been true of African leaders. And it’s certainly true of Sudanese government and … the two main factions.” The same day Kristof spoke with Devex, a meeting on Sudan was held at the U.N. General Assembly. For two hours, diplomats pressed those around them to surge humanitarian funding and to do everything they could to get aid where it needed to be. The warring parties must come to the negotiating table, the diplomats said; the warring parties must comply with international human rights law. There was more attention on Sudan at UNGA this year than the one before, said Cameron Hudson, a senior fellow and Africa expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, or CSIS, in Washington, D.C. — in large part because the crisis has reached a crescendo the world can no longer ignore. But while the United States committed $424 million in new humanitarian support, the meeting didn’t result in what Kristof has been calling for: Real, sustained pressure from the countries that can actually make a difference. “This is not inevitable,” Kristof said. “If there were political will, I think there could be better outcomes.” It’s what the journalist saw two decades ago when he was covering the genocide spilling across Darfur. In the early 2000s, the atrocities in Sudan were met with public outcry, Kristof said. But today, the crisis in the country is unraveling in an entirely different way. “If you think about 20 years ago, there was a real effort to name and shame the parties that were supplying weapons to fuel the conflict,” he said. “There was first an African Union and then a U.N. peacekeeping force sent in. There’s not even serious talk about that now.” Kristof was referring to the United Arab Emirates, a country that has been repeatedly accused of supplying one of the warring parties, the Rapid Support Forces, with weapons throughout the war. The UAE has dismissed those allegations, but right before the United Nations General Assembly, another New York Times investigation exposed how the country was concealing arms to RSF under the guise of humanitarian aid — again. “If there were enough reputational costs to the UAE today, I think that they would back off from their support of the RSF,” Kristof told Devex. “I think we do have levers, I just don’t think we’ve pushed them hard enough.” Three days later, U.S. President Joe Biden told those in New York that “the world needs to stop arming the generals, to speak with one voice and tell them: Stop tearing your country apart.” But there was no mention of the UAE — the leader of which Biden hosted at the White House one day before he appeared at the U.N. “This visit that Biden had with the Emiratis, it has cut off our policy at the knees,” CSIS’s Hudson told Devex. “The United States now has really zero credibility in the eyes of the Sudanese people, most importantly, because the Biden administration has completely whitewashed the Emirati role in fueling this conflict.” The U.S. has pushed for peace in other ways, with the U.S. special envoy for Sudan, Tom Perriello, leading a months-long attempt to bring the warring parties to the table. Though a new border crossing opened between Chad and Sudan earlier this month, most aid groups still cannot get their supplies where they need to be. Trucks are stuck, explained Médecins Sans Frontières U.S. chief executive officer, Avril Benoît — both by RSF and the weather. “There’s been a lot of diplomatic effort, but it’s just not showing much in the way of results,” said Benoît, who spoke with Devex last week. “And so, the stalemate continues.” All of that has come at a cost. While covering the genocide in Darfur 20 years earlier, Kristof saw the way genocide ramped up when the world lost attention: After a tsunami roared across Indonesia, Thailand, and Sri Lanka, Kristof said, atrocities in Sudan skyrocketed. “When we don’t pay attention to crises, then they fester and get worse,” said Kristof. “I do think that when the president, when the G7, when the U.N. [secretary-general], when others just speak out about these [issues], when they release photos — to some degree, it raises the cost of murder, of rape, of pillage.” But the crisis in Sudan doesn’t exist in a vacuum — it’s competing for attention with wars in Ukraine and Gaza. For nearly a year, the world’s attention has been turned toward the Middle East, a singularity that Kristof said has “sucked the oxygen out of coverage for every other crisis.” That has grown even more acute in the last few days, as Israel has opened fire on Lebanon, and Iran has shot back at Israel. But as Gaza has fallen to rubble, so too has Sudan. “These are all human lives at stake, and we’ve got to summon the bandwidth to care about all of these [issues],” Kristof said. “Unfortunately, I think we’re largely failing at that.” Now, the U.N. appeal for the crisis is just halfway funded, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or UNOCHA. And with many international groups barred from entering the worst-affected areas, local responders have been forced to the frontlines. “There have been some heroes here, and those are Sudanese civil society,” Kristof said. “Doctors working without pay, refugees looking out after each other, teenagers who are orphaned, who are trying to help each other.” “So there has been some heroism, but it’s all upside down,” he added. “It’s the people at the very bottom — who have no power — who are being utterly heroic, and those with power have been awful.”