The Unfolding Genocide in Sudan

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Your news feed is undoubtedly filled with the crises in Los Angeles and Washington. From abroad, it's likely filled with stories from the Middle East and Ukraine. But the civil war in Sudan, which the State Department has called a genocide,

receives relatively little attention. Recently, The New Yorker published a brilliant report from Sudan by a longtime contributor, Nicholas Nyarkos. The Civil War pits the Sudanese army against a militia group... controlled by a billionaire general. The groups were formerly allies, but now they occupy different parts of the country, destroying infrastructure in the opposing group's territory and committing atrocities against civilians. Atrocities.

that are directed in particular against members of Sudan's black ethnic groups. At least 9,000 civilians have been killed in the last two years. Over 5 million people have been displaced. That's all according to Human Rights Watch. And I want to mention that our story today addresses widespread sexual violence carried out by soldiers. It may not be appropriate for some listeners. Our writer Nicholas Nyarkos did his reporting.

from a refugee camp deep in Sudan's Nuba Mountains. Nick, the war in Sudan is something that has not been covered nearly enough, and you did a remarkable piece in The New Yorker, and you were recently there. How did you get there? And what did you see? I joined up with a Human Rights Watch team and flew to South Sudan. And then we took trucks for five days.

through rebel territory crossing the border into the Nuba Mountains. This was a very, very muddy part of the rainy season, and many of the roads were flooded. And they had this sort of remarkable way of attaching tractors to trucks and then sort of dragging them out of the mud. And you had this sort of metal bar that had been welded together in the market.

and then you'd always have a tractor with you, and they would basically rev the tractor until it just jerked you out of the mud. And it was incredibly unpleasant, but actually quite effective, if fairly slow. Essentially, yeah, we went, we were traveling for days and days in this way. We arrived at the Al-Hilu camp in an area that, you know, on first... Impressions looks incredibly beautiful. You see these mountains. It's essentially sort of dry grassland with these peaks looming above you.

And they're peaks that are very significant to the Nuba people because they're peaks that have sheltered them for generations. And they feel safe being there because... They have managed to resist genocide before by hiding in these mountains.

And then you start seeing the children with their distended bellies, and you start hearing the stories of the people who fled, and you start... seeing the fear in the faces of young mothers who have brought their babies in suitcases, essentially, and had their babies sitting outside in...

Cribs that have been improvised out of suitcases. Let's start with the basics. This is a very complicated conflict. And tell me what's at stake? Who's fighting whom? And what are the perils? So the conflict in Sudan started in April of 2023 in earnest.

when a paramilitary faction called the Rapid Support Forces started to try and take power in Khartoum through coup d'etat. And they... uh attacked the presidential palace and the airport and then began this very very violent campaign in the countryside and the army fought back against the rsf And this has basically led to a fragmentation of the country and a whole bunch of local militias have essentially become empowered and...

have been given weapons by different actors and the conflict has devolved into what the state department has called genocide but what led up to the rsf attack that began this conflict in the first place the war started really as a clash of personalities. The dictator Omar al-Bashir had been deposed in 2019. There had been this transitional government, this moment of great hope for Sudan, which is a country that has been through.

three civil wars, it's been through dictatorship after dictatorship, and the army decided that they were going to take power, and they concentrated their power. in the figure of Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, a former military intelligence officer who had worked in Darfur, West Darfur, during some of the worst days of the genocide. um but also another very very popular general um one news report called him a star of the new militarism was um

was Muhammad de Gallo. He is known as Hemeti, which means little Muhammad. And he essentially started life as a camel herder and then took part in... the war in Darfur and took part in some of the most shocking examples of the genocide, and he rose through the ranks of the Sudanese army and was sort of used as a tool during the 2010s by both the UAE and the Sudanese army.

to quell dissent at home and to fight the war in Yemen. And he, at the same time as doing this, solidified his own wealth. He basically used his militia to take over. gold mining areas, he used his militia to seize control of important supply routes, and he became a billionaire. So the leaders of the warring parties are both from Sudan's dominant Arab ethnic group. They actually worked together to take down the former dictator. What made them turn on each other?

This was a situation in which you had this one very powerful, very rich person coming to Khartoum, and you had the army taking power. And you could see that sort of developing into a situation in which... They both decide to share power or they both decide to rule together. But of course, that's not what happens. There's this...

great animosity that develops between both Burhan, the general of the head of the army, and Hemeti, who's the general of the head of the RSF. And as one official who... has been involved in peace talks in Sudan, told me it was basically as if Hameti, despite his wealth, despite his power, he was not allowed into the country club.

And there was this sort of deep resentment that built up. And he thought, look, I'm better than you, and decided to try and seize power. But how is Sudan divided up ethnically and in terms of...

language, in terms of race, and in terms of politics. So Sudan is an Arabic-speaking country. It is a country that has a majority of Arabs, but you have... this Black population in the South and in the West, in a region called Darfur and in a region called Khodofan, those populations are sort of treated as second-class citizens or worse. by the supremacist Arab populations. Nicholas Nyarkos reported recently from Sudan for The New Yorker. We'll continue in a moment.

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In your piece in The New Yorker, Nick, you focused on a couple whom you met by the name of Wanus and Intisar, as well as their children. The family made an extremely dangerous journey through the war zone to the Nuba Mountains, where you met them. Wanis had actually been a courier and a baggage handler at the airport in Khartoum. He was a sort of simple guy, but also a kind of pillar of his community.

and was known as somebody who would help out in this very, very poor community of Nuba African, and these are black-skinned African populations who live in... in various parts of Sudan, but they're originally from this area called the Nuba Mountains. So these people were... living in a suburb of Khartoum, which was taken by the RSF, by this paramilitary group. They saw people that they knew, their neighbors.

people who looked like them, a lot of Nuba people being targeted specifically for their race. They saw, for example, people being shot in the market. They heard stories. about rapes that had taken place and when he decided to get his family out of Khartoum. And on the other side as well, the Sudanese armed forces fighting back against the paramilitary group would often indiscriminately shell their neighborhood or fire mortar rounds into their street and so on.

I mean, in a sense, their story is one of the oldest stories in war anywhere, is the displacement. You see this in Gaza, you see this in Ukraine, and you're obviously seeing it... at extraordinary levels in Sudan. At one point, the RSF has stopped them over and over again. And in one instance, Wanus is threatened after telling the RSF soldiers where they're headed. Let's listen to him here. And he told me, why are you going there?

Most people migrate to Egypt, other countries, and why are you going there? And I told him, this is my land. If I die, I can die in my land. He told him that if you go to Nuba mountains... We'll reach you there. You, Nubia, we're supposed to kill you like dogs.

If they go to the Nuba Mountains, they'll be killed like dogs. How many people are in that kind of circumstance in Sudan today? So there are about a million people who fled to the Nuba Mountains, and there are... tens of millions of more people who are desperately malnourished. But the Nuba Mountains is particularly complicated because you just have this huge influx of refugees, especially...

Black Southern Sudanese refugees who had come to Khartoum to make a better life and then were targeted for their ethnicity by these invading forces. One of the things that you were hearing a lot about... was stories of sexual violence. Why does the RSF, the militias, abuse the civilian population in that way and what's being done about it? Yeah, so I actually spoke to a Sudanese civil society activist. She said that essentially rape was used as a way of rewarding troops. And then this...

supremacist ideology, which has existed in Sudan for a long time, sort of comes into play as well. There's this kind of sense that these people are almost subhuman. I think that there's this very, very toxic mix of both supremacist ideology and a culture of giving... spoils to troops in lieu of paying them because these militias are often very poor themselves. I mean, everybody had a story about either they were raped or that...

They knew people who had been raped or they had seen people raped in front of them. I spoke to a man from Darfur named John who had seen his mother raped by multiple men from the RSF in front of him.

They brought me and they asked me, are you a soldier? I told them no. they told me whom do you have here they told them i have my mother here They brought my mother in front of me and they raped her because they want to see how I react if I'm a soldier so maybe I'll bring guns or something like that. I just kept quiet and they were rapping her. My mother advised me, told me, my son be patient.

As these things happen to us or to me, you need to be patient because if you are not patient, so they will kill you too. God, be patient because they'll kill you too. It's appalling to hear.

And there doesn't seem to be anyone to defend them from these atrocities. Have any other countries attempted to step in and try to stop the killing? You know, the US has tried to... especially under the Biden administration, has tried to support a peace process. And the State Department continues to try and do so. But it has been fairly futile because...

The Sudanese armed forces don't really want to negotiate, neither do the RSF. What about something like sanctions on the countries that are bankrolling the RSF? Well, the day that the US put sanctions on the UAE or on Saudi Arabia is the way that this conflict will probably change, but I don't see that coming.

We know what's happened to U.S. foreign aid under the Trump administration, and there have been doge cuts that have nearly obliterated USAID. What's been the impact of that on the people in Sudan? At the beginning, there was a lot of chaos and the ambassadors to Sudan had to reaffirm that because of the gravity of the situation in the US.

USAID to Sudan would not be cut. However, there are many organizations, local organizations, which were sponsored through grants and those organizations which are often, you know, frontline soup kitchens and things like this. did have their funding cut and so therefore there's a great deal of effect on the situation and people are not getting food in the way that they used to.

you know, the way they used to was not particularly sufficient either. What would it take to end this conflict? Do you see any sign of a resolution in Sudan? I was speaking to a U.S. official. in Washington the other day, and he was saying that he thinks it's a fight to the death, basically. It's this rivalry, they hate each other, and... you know, that is going to be the end to the conflict. One of them is going to die. So I think that Sudan is really, really on its own.

So it sounds like we're going to see a great deal more bloodshed and suffering misery and hunger in Sudan for some time to come. Unfortunately, I think that's what we're going to see, yeah. I think that there's, you know...

There has been this idea of, and this was something that the Human Rights Watch team that I went with was very pro, this idea of putting in a UN peacekeeping mission. UN peacekeeping missions have a mixed history, but they're certainly not liked by the Trump administration. And the idea of a peacekeeping mission would be to keep the warring parties away from one another. But the question is,

would that just freeze the conflict and put it off to another day? Or would that seriously resolve some of the deep differences between the different warring groups? History shows that it tends to do the former, not the latter. That is true. But if it staves off the genocidal violence, perhaps there might be a more pressing short-term need for it.

Nicholas Nyarkos, thanks for your reporting. It's always good to see you. Thank you very much, David. Nicholas Nyarkos has been reporting from Sudan, and you can read Escape from Khartoum. which is focused on Wanus and Intisar's journey to the Nuba Mountains at newyorker.com. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for listening. I hope you'll join us next time.

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