In 2006 on the National Mall, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel called Darfur “the capital of the world’s human suffering.”
“Darfur deserves to live. We are its only hope,” he urged.
Wiesel spoke those words before tens of thousands of people who turned out to demand more forceful action to stop the genocide in Darfur in Western Sudan. We were among them.
The words ring true again today.
On Aug. 1, famine was officially declared in Zamzam, Darfur’s largest internally displaced persons camp, with over half a million people. More than 100 people, primarily young children, are dying daily of hunger in Zamzam alone. Over 8 million Sudanese face emergency levels of hunger; famine may have already arrived at two other camps near Zamzam. The camps are near El-Fasher, North Darfur’s capital.
All told the famine could extinguish up to 2.5 million lives. It comes amid Sudan’s civil war, where the Sudanese military and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary organization it is battling both use food as a weapon of war.
The war has spawned a renewal of the genocide in Darfur. The RSF, direct descendants of the Janjaweed who joined the government in carrying out the genocide earlier this century, has already murdered many thousands of members of African ethnic groups in Darfur. The genocide threatens to accelerate as the RSF lays siege to El-Fasher, which it seeks to capture from the military.
That day on the National Mall, Elie Wiesel also said: “We are here because we refuse to be silent.”
How different now. There is no mass movement, no rally on the Mall. With few exceptions, newspapers’ front pages no longer contain headlines on Sudan. The genocide and famine — which we knew was coming at least since February — have not mobilized celebrities and political leaders.
The United Nations humanitarian appeal for Sudan is less than 40 percent funded. Access to Darfur has been severely impeded, due to insecurity, lack of guaranteed safe passage, attacks on humanitarian personnel and other obstacles.
Sudan’s military has been blocking a key humanitarian aid access point into Darfur, although on Aug. 15, it promised to open the vital Adre border crossing for three months. The RSF soon followed with its own pledge to cooperate with humanitarian aid deliveries and protect aid workers. The first U.N. aid convoy in months entered Darfur through the Adré crossing on Tuesday.
The U.N. secretary-general angrily decries the civilian deaths in Gaza, certainly a great human tragedy, but where is that same outrage for the mass death of the people of Sudan?
Where is the outcry from Arab countries against a genocide committed against Muslims by other Arabs in Sudan? And where are the funds necessary to allay the hunger and famines from wealthy Arab nations, whose governments have collectively provided not even 1 percent of the required funding?
It does not appear that President Biden discussed Sudan when he met with the leader of the United Arab Emirates, the RSF’s biggest supporter, on the sidelines of the G7 summit in June.
To its credit, the U.S. government is the largest contributor of humanitarian assistance and has passionate advocates for the people of Sudan in U.N. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield and special envoy for Sudan Tom Perriello.
Thomas-Greenfield favors U.N. Security Council action to enable the United Nations to bring food into Sudan without permission from the military, but it is expected that Russia, which supports the Sudanese government, would veto the resolution.
With a cease-fire seemingly distant, despite current peace talks in Geneva, four steps are urgently needed.
First, the U.S. should use all diplomatic tools and channels to end the flow of weapons into Sudan, and most importantly get the UAE and Egypt to stop providing weapons to the RSF and the military, respectively.
The Biden/Harris administration should be prepared to take forceful measures to press these countries to demand that the RSF and military follow through on their pledges of safe humanitarian access, commit to a cease-fire and, in the case of the UAE and RSF, stop their genocide. Measures could include sanctions and the threat of an extended, multi-year freeze on military aid, weapon sales and security cooperation.
Second, the Biden administration should increase its humanitarian assistance, including to countries hosting Sudanese refugees. The World Food Program recently had to cut rations for Sudanese refugees in Chad.
Third, the U.S. should propose a Security Council resolution to permit the UN to bring humanitarian assistance to Sudan without the military’s permission, and encourage African governments — which Putin has been courting following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine — to urge Putin to not block the resolution.
If Russia vetoes it anyway, the U.S. should have a Plan B — an agreement with the African Union to transfer the assistance into Sudan, with whatever U.S. military protection may be required. It remains to be seen whether and for how long the military and RSF will cooperate as it has pledged. These actions should ensure humanitarian access even if they do not.
Finally, President Biden should spearhead the development of a UN/African Union peacekeeping mission, with the dual mandate of ensuring humanitarian access and protecting civilians. The U.S. could pay for the force, equip it and provide logistical support.
What is most important is that governments act at the scale that this emergency requires. But we as individuals can also make an immediate difference by contributing to charities combating the famine, such as Team Zamzam. This is an indigenous NGO consisting of women in the Zamzam camp who counsel survivors of sexual trauma and now, with the hunger crisis, use much of their funding to purchase food on local markets to aid the camp’s most vulnerable residents.
The toll during the initial phase of the genocide in Darfur was perhaps 400,000 but might be more. Unless we act quickly, many more people will likely be dead from famine and genocide in only a few months.
We will have betrayed the people of Sudan as well as our own humanity.
Eric A. Friedman, the grandson of Holocaust survivors, is the global health justice scholar at Georgetown University Law School’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law and Policy and a former senior global health policy advisor at Physicians for Human Rights. John Heffernan is the president of the Foundation for Systemic Change and former senior investigator and lead author of “Darfur: Assault on Survival for Physicians for Human Rights,” which marked the first time an NGO had concluded that the atrocities in Darfur amounted to genocide.