Biden and Trump Called It a Genocide and Then Turned Away

Nicholas Kristof / The New York Times
Biden and Trump Called It a Genocide and Then Turned Away "What does the crisis look like on the ground?" (photo: NYT)

When world leaders gather in New York this month for the United Nations General Assembly, I expect them to studiously ignore the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, the horror in Sudan that both the Biden and Trump administrations termed a genocide. President Trump has set the tone by cutting aid there.

What does the crisis look like on the ground? Let me tell you about a very bright 13-year-old girl who asked not to be named, because then she might be killed along with her parents. She has smooth skin, an oval face with a high forehead, and a red head scarf to cover her hair.

Last year she was near the top of her fifth-grade class of 60 students in the city of El Fasher, in the Darfur region of Sudan. She dreamed of being a doctor when she grew up. “I wanted to support people and give first aid,” she told me.

But a brutal militia called the Rapid Support Forces besieged the city and cut off most food supplies. Aid workers and policy experts pleaded with world leaders — including first President Joe Biden and then Trump — to try to block the R.S.F. from massacring the city’s people. Neither did much, so last October, as long predicted, the R.S.F. overran El Fasher and massacred perhaps 60,000 people.

The girl’s family tried to flee but was stopped at an R.S.F. checkpoint, according to accounts of the girl and four other family members I interviewed by Zoom with the help of an aid worker I know. The men and boys were separated at gunpoint, and then the women and girls were held for four days in a kind of rape camp, they said.

The girl, then 12, told me that her ordeal started when two men stripped her and assaulted her.

“Every day they came to rape me,” she said in the smallest of voices, looking down at her lap. “Sometimes one at a time, sometimes two, sometimes three of them. I was crying.” Her sister and mother were also gang-raped each day, they said, and an older aunt told me she tried to intervene and was beaten.

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