“Call it civil war; call it ethnic cleansing; call it genocide; call it ‘none of the above.’ The reality is the same. There are people in Darfur who desperately need the help of the international community.” That was the message Secretary of State Colin Powell had for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on September 9, 2004.
Today, the people in Darfur—a region of western Sudan—desperately need the help of the international community once again. The military and militias that began a genocidal campaign against non-Arab Darfuris twenty years ago are engaging in the same tactics today: ethnically targeted killings, assassinations, forced displacement, and the burning of villages. It is being reported that thousands of civilians have already been killed in Darfur since April.
The first genocide of the twenty-first century began in Darfur in 2003. In response to a rebel uprising, Sudan’s former President Omar al-Bashir directed the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and allied Arab militias, known as Janjaweed, to launch a campaign of genocide against non-Arab populations in Darfur.
The SAF and Janjaweed militias targeted non-Arab populations with violence, murder, and rape. On the ground, the militias engaged in a scorched earth campaign, burning villages and destroying food and water supplies. From the skies above, the military dropped bombs indiscriminately on civilians. At the height of the violence, between 200,000 and 400,000 civilians were killed and millions more were forced to flee their homes. Many have never returned.
For his part in the violence, al-Bashir was indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) and charged with genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Despite being removed from power in 2019, al-Bashir has not been transferred to The Hague to face trial at the ICC.
The situation in Darfur is a good case study of what happens when there is impunity for mass atrocities and why justice and accountability are critical to establishing sustainable peace. There has never been any accountability for the crimes committed in Darfur. And now, the Rapid Support Forces, a rebranded version of the Janjaweed, are committing mass atrocities in Darfur again.
After the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, many scholars and politicians argued that a lack of political will was a key factor in the failure to effectively prevent and respond to genocide. As The Washington Post wrote in April of that year, the United States didn’t have any national interests in Rwanda, so why would the U.S. government get involved? There was also no massive public outcry.
Members of Congress were not hearing from their constituents, so they did not feel compelled to act. Some have hypothesized that if there was pressure from constituents then the political will to intervene would have been stronger. There just needed to be more public pressure.
The worsening situation in Darfur risks being completely overlooked.
In the early 2000s, activists were able to test this theory in response to the Darfur genocide. A grassroots campaign known as “Save Darfur” helped raise awareness of the mass atrocities being committed in Sudan and to put pressure on politicians to act. In 2006, a massive rally with prominent speakers and thousands of attendees was held on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Speakers included Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, then-Senator Barack Obama, Congressmember Nancy Pelosi, and actor George Clooney, among many others. Attendees gathered, refusing to stand idly by in the face of yet another genocide.
Ahead of the 2008 presidential election, Darfur was such a high-profile issue that the three main presidential candidates, Senators Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain, issued a rare joint and bipartisan pledge that stated, “If peace and security for the people of Sudan are not in place when one of us is inaugurated as President on January 20, 2009, we pledge that the next Administration will pursue these goals with unstinting resolve.”
Despite all of the awareness, the pressure, a United Nations-African Union hybrid peacekeeping mission, and the celebrity voices, the people of Darfur still suffered immensely. But without that attention, it might have been much worse. With so many crises around the globe today, and without the grassroots engagement or awareness, the worsening situation in Darfur risks being completely overlooked.
As Samantha Power wrote in her seminal book A Problem From Hell, “No U.S. president has ever made genocide prevention a priority, and no U.S. President has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence. It is thus no coincidence that genocide rages on.”
Since the book’s publication in 2002, genocide prevention has become more of a policy priority, at least in theory. Beginning with President Obama’s “Presidential Study Directive on Mass Atrocities,” which clearly stated, “Preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States.” In that directive, Obama called for the creation of an Atrocities Prevention Board to “coordinate a whole of government approach to preventing mass atrocities and genocide.”
Congress followed Obama’s lead with the Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act of 2018 which was signed into law by President Donald Trump in January 2019. This law also clearly stated that, “It shall be the policy of the United States to regard the prevention of atrocities as in its national interest” and prioritized enhancing “the capacity of the United States, to identify, prevent, and respond to the causes of atrocities.”
In 2022, the Biden Administration released the “United States Strategy to Anticipate, Prevent, and Respond to Atrocities.” In it, President Joe Biden wrote, “I recommit to the simple truth that preventing future genocides remains both our moral duty and a matter of national and global importance.”
If preventing and responding to genocide and mass atrocities is now the policy of the United States, why is the Biden Administration not taking stronger actions to protect the people of Darfur?
It would be naïve to suggest that the United States acting alone would be able to protect civilians in this conflict. There is, however, much more the nation can do to put pressure on Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to cut off funding and support for the perpetrators. More engagement is needed to ensure that the Rapid Support Forces and the Wagner Group, a Russian mercenary organization, are not able to profit from the violence in Darfur by cutting off their ability to smuggle gold out of the country.
The United States could also lead an effort at the United Nations to call for an independent mechanism, similar to those for Myanmar and Syria, to support investigations and eventual prosecutions of those responsible for committing mass atrocities in Sudan.
It is not too late to save lives in Darfur, but stronger actions are needed now. If President Biden believes that preventing genocide is our moral duty and a matter of national importance, then he should make protecting civilians in Darfur a top priority.