Why No One Will Save Sudan
A humanitarian catastrophe goes unnoticed.
History is repeating itself in Sudan. Tensions between rival security factions, which spilled out last April into open conflict, have rapidly created the world’s largest displacement crisis and food security crisis. Nearly half of the country’s 50 million people are in desperate need of food aid that is not reaching them, either because of access constraints or because it is simply not available.
For those tracking events in the country, a seemingly endless thread of headlines and editorials lament this “forgotten conflict.” But this is the wrong framing. The crisis in Sudan is neither forgotten nor ignored. It is de-prioritized. And that is worse.
The fact is that we know far more about the unfolding crisis today than we did 20 years ago when the Darfur region first became a household name. Long before Starlink brought internet to the furthest corners of the country, pricey Thuraya satellite phones were the only communications lifeline any Darfuri had to tell their stories to Western human rights activists, researchers, and UN officials. Intrepid war correspondents occasionally crossed, illegally, into Darfur’s war zone to report on the blatant atrocities being committed. Later on, the first commercially available satellite imagery, then a novelty, was used to document the full scale of destruction.
Today so much has changed. Anyone in Sudan with a smartphone is now documenting the abuses against them. Images and video, geo-located to within meters, flood social media accounts and news sites in real time. But, perversely, this abundance of open-source intelligence has done little to motivate officials to take the kind of robust policy action necessary to stave off the one-two punch of famine and mass killing.
The most straightforward explanation is that there are too many crises in the world today for Sudan to pierce our consciousness. The war in Ukraine and the crisis in Gaza, where Western governments have far greater strategic interests at stake, are absorbing so much of the media’s attention, donor dollars, and policymaker time, that little is left to devote to Sudan. Officials euphemistically complain about a lack of “bandwidth.”
But that’s a facile excuse that doesn’t hold up to historical comparison. At the height of the last genocide in Darfur, from 2003 to 2008, the Bush administration was fully immersed in two ground wars, deploying more than 250,000 U.S. combat troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and was fighting a “global war on terror.” Today, U.S. forces are not in harm’s way in either Ukraine or Gaza. And, yet, the Bush administration still chose to dedicate substantial time, attention, and resources to alleviating the suffering in Darfur. Then, Darfur was prioritized. Today, Sudan simply is not.
But why isn’t it? Maybe the most critical point is that the genocides that marked the start of the post-Cold War period of the 1990s are no longer as proximate or as resonant to policymakers as they were 20 years ago. At the time, the killing in Darfur coincided with the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide and came only five years after NATO’s intervention in Kosovo to avoid genocide. For many Western decision-makers of that era, a widespread consensus had emerged that more could have and should have been done to avoid the widespread suffering in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Upon coming to office in 2001, President Bush famously scribbled “not on my watch” in the margins of a briefing paper on the Rwandan genocide. By 2005, the UN member states, including the United States to the surprise of some, had adopted the “responsibility to protect” doctrine, asserting a nation’s fundamental responsibility to protect its citizens from the crime of genocide and transferring that responsibility to international actors when and if national governments failed to act or were themselves the perpetrators of these crimes.
That sensibility was crystallized in Samantha Power’s A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 and immediately became required reading for college students around the United States. It became the intellectual backbone to what emerged as the Save Darfur movement, a grassroots campaign calling for Washington to lead a robust global effort to end the killing in Darfur. Spreading like a moralistic wildfire, its take was clear: Genocide could and indeed must be prevented in our time. This message was plastered across bus stops and churches and featured in page advertisements in major news dailies.
For its part, the Bush administration saw the expanding fight in Darfur as a direct threat to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement the administration had supported to end Sudan’s devastating civil conflict. In many respects, Bush’s efforts to forge peace between Sudan‘s Arab leaders and the breakaway African tribes in what is today an independent South Sudan were motivated by his own Christian faith and the pleas of those church leaders he remained close to. He brought that same moral fervor to Darfur. The result was an energetic, albeit imperfect, effort through the end of his administration to bring peace to the region.
Flashing forward 20 years, we have the same college protesters and church activists as we did in the mid-2000s. Only today, they are calling for Gaza to be free and not Darfur to be saved. And the lessons of Rwanda and Srebrenica have been replaced by more recent examples of America’s overreach, which includes two decades of terror-fighting deployments. But the most impactful lesson for contemporary policymakers is America’s action in Libya in 2011 when, prompted by a group of “liberal hawks” close to the president, including Samantha Power, the Obama administration sought and obtained a UN Security Council resolution to oust Muhammar Gaddafi and prevent what was framed at the time as an imminent genocide against the people of Benghazi. As NATO’s intervention quickly succeeded, and Gaddafi’s state began to crumble, Washington came face-to-face with the unpleasant realities of the full application of a responsibility to protect doctrine. The most vigorous opponent of the “liberal hawks” was then-Vice President Joe Biden who recalled asking, “OK, tell me what happens? He’s gone. What happens? Doesn’t the country disintegrate? What happens then? Doesn’t it become a place where it becomes a—Petri dish for the growth of extremism? Tell me what we’re gonna do.” Today, Biden is likely asking the same questions about Sudan, but he is no longer a dissenting voice in an administration. He’s the president.
Over the past several weeks, a new Benghazi-like slaughter has been taking shape in the North Darfur city of El Fasher. With nearly one million internally displaced already taking refuge there and more than one million more awaiting a coming onslaught by the Rapid Support Forces militia, which has promised to take the city and complete their takeover of all of Darfur, the specter of genocide once again hangs over the region. Egress out of the city has been cut off, as have aid flows into the city, leading analysts to refer to the city as a “kill box.”
Except today, there is no serious discussion about peacekeepers or an intervention force, as was deployed by the African Union and the United Nations during earlier atrocities. And the responsibility to protect doctrine has been shelved, now seen as a roadmap toward “regime change” rather than stability.
Instead, we are forced to watch in real-time as the noose tightens around millions of civilians begging to be saved. Unfortunately for them, if our generals are always fighting the last war then it’s the folly of Libya we are struggling against repeating and not the stain of Rwanda. But make no mistake, Sudan is not being ignored. The reality is much more craven. It’s just de-prioritized.
Cameron Hudson is a senior fellow in the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). He was previously a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center, has served at the State Department, on the staff of the National Security Council at the White House, and as an intelligence analyst in the Africa Directorate at the Central Intelligence Agency.
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This is easy to understand. The media is dominated by PC (Political Correctness). Israel is not PC. Hence the Gaza war is massively covered. Russia is not PC. Hence the invasion of the Ukraine is massively covered. Since the killers in Darfur are PC, they are ignored. Does the media really want to draw attention to militias that are apparently Arab? Of course, not. You may argue that the victims are black. However, as we all know black lives don’t matter unless white people can be blamed. Since the killers in Darfur aren’t white, the dominant PC crowd is just uninterested.
Darfur simply does not fit the American elite's stereotypical vision of good and evil. It is harder to determine exactly who are the "bad guys" in the curated minds of progressive Americans where whiteness is the predominant evil. Jews are a much easier target to hate. We are generally considered white, and Palestinians are generally considered non-white. Israel is economically successful, Palestine is impoverished. We are also a small distinct group which makes us a much clearer target. In the Sudan race is not entirely relevant to the real genocide; there is no simple target for the rigid minded progressive. So for the "Harvardians" et. al. both sides are the good guys in some way and until they can turn one side or the other into white colonizers, it is best just to pretend this genuinely real genocide is not real at all.