Monday, September 23, 2024

Opinion Today: A tragedy is unfolding, and the world needs to pay attention

Nick Kristof on his latest reporting from the Chad-Sudan border.
Opinion Today

September 23, 2024

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By Nicholas Kristof

Opinion Columnist

Two decades ago I was seared by what I saw while covering the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan. Men and boys were slaughtered, women and girls raped, villages torched — but at least the world responded to these horrors.

Senators like Joe Biden and Barack Obama demanded that President George W. Bush act more firmly. College students held protests. The United Nations sent a peacekeeping force. All this worked: Hundreds of thousands of lives were saved.

Yet when I visited the area again this month, reporting near the Chad-Sudan border (the warring parties barred me from entering Darfur), what I found was shattering. Atrocities have resumed and famine is spreading. And this time, the world is largely silent, in ways that create impunity and aggravate the crisis.

In my column last week, I wrote about a woman named Maryam Suleiman who recounted how her five brothers were lined up and executed one by one. Women and girls were then confined to a corral to be raped.

And in my latest column over the weekend, I spoke with survivors whose stories showed how mass rape is driving famine in the region: When men go to the fields to plant or harvest, they are murdered. When women go, they are raped. So people cannot farm, and their children starve.

World leaders are gathering in New York this week for the United Nations General Assembly, and I'm hoping that President Biden and others will belatedly wake up and work harder to stop this cataclysm.

As leaders sit down at the U.N. to banquets celebrating their humanitarianism, may they understand that their passivity empowers perpetrators and at some point becomes complicity.

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