Sudan, where the debate about genocide is ignored

As debate boils over allegations of genocide in the Gaza Strip, there’s another place where all sides in the United States seem to agree a genocide is underway — yet largely ignore it.

- Nicholas D Kristof

That's Sudan, probably the site of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis today. Famine was officially declared there last year; the United Nations reports that some 25 million Sudanese face extreme hunger and at least 12 million have had to flee their homes because of civil war. Tom Perriello, who was the US special envoy for Sudan until this year, said he believes that the death toll by now has exceeded 400,000.

In January, the Biden administration officially declared the killing in Sudan to be a genocide. In April, the Trump administration also characterised the slaughter as a genocide, and the State Department confirmed that it views the situation in Sudan as a genocide.

So there is bipartisan agreement in the United States that Sudan is suffering both genocide and famine — and also, apparently, a bipartisan consensus to do little about it. The Biden administration was too passive, and now so too is the Trump administration. President Donald Trump is actually slashing assistance this year to Sudan, increasing the number of children who will starve.

Whatever you think of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza — and I've been unsparing in my criticism of Israel's actions and America’s complicity in the bombing and starvation there — we should recognise our collective failure to address this other crisis with an even higher death toll. Neither should be seen as a distraction from the other; we have the moral bandwidth to be appalled by the enormous suffering in Sudan and in Gaza alike.