ADRÉ, Chad — My heart bleeds on this reporting trip as I see skeletal Sudanese children and interview survivors of massacres and mass rape targeting Black African ethnic groups. I keep thinking: It can’t get worse than this.
Then I realize: Oh, yes, it can.
The most brutal militia in Sudan (a high bar) is the Rapid Support Forces, which is now bombarding the city of El Fasher and gaining ground. El Fasher and the nearby Zamzam camp could fall at any time, with more than 1 million civilians vulnerable to the kind of atrocities that the militiamen have committed many times before.
President Joe Biden this past week met the leader of the United Arab Emirates, the prime backer of the Rapid Support Forces as they commit atrocities. Biden praised the United Arab Emirates as a nation “always looking to the future” without offering a peep of public reproach for enabling a well-documented ethnic cleansing that at least one watchdog group has called a genocide.
The passivity of world leaders, even as they gathered at the United Nations to celebrate their commitment to peace and justice, contrasts with the deep sense of moral responsibility of a Sudanese refugee child whom I met on the Chad-Sudan border. So let me share that girl’s story.
This girl, Safaa Khatir, was orphaned like so many others by the Sudanese civil war that began last year between the Rapid Support Forces and another odious military group, the Sudanese Armed Forces. The Rapid Support Forces burned down her village, including her home, she said, and killed the men and boys.
“Boys who were just 10, 11 or 12 — they killed them all in front of me,” Safaa told me. “I saw them die.”
Safaa’s escape
The militiamen, who are Arabs, were shouting racist epithets against Black people like her, she said. “Black people stink,” she quoted them as saying, adding that the gunmen said: “You’re slaves. We will kill you.”
The militia then rounded up the beautiful young girls, Safaa said. “They said they would rape them and make them their wives,” she added.
Several older women rescued Safaa: They gave her an abaya shawl to cover herself and helped her lift her younger sister onto her back so it would seem as if Safaa was a mother. It worked: The gunmen ignored her and instead seized a group of teenage girls and left.
Now homeless and penniless, the 16-year-old Safaa — whose father was murdered by the militia and whose mother had died earlier — was in charge of the family.
Safaa knew her only hope was to escape to Chad, but she didn’t have the $25 she would need to pay for a ride. So she did the only thing she could: She took a job in the city of Geneina, near her village, as a server in a tea shop, surrounded by the men who had murdered and raped her friends, scrimping on food for herself and saving every penny she could.
After a month, she had saved enough. She then led her sister and brother on the perilous journey to Chad and set up a hut in a refugee camp there.
Biden has backed peace talks in Sudan, which offer a ray of hope for the best outcome: a deal that would end the civil war and restore civilian government. That’s important but a long shot. We may instead be twiddling our thumbs on a path toward a fragmented, failed state suffering one of the worst famines of modern times.
Biden’s moral failure
So why is Biden unwilling to criticize the United Arab Emirates or apply leverage? Is it that he thinks the United Arab Emirates is too important in the Middle East? Is it that he believes quiet pressure is most effective? I’m not sure, but his approach has failed, and the upshot has been atrocities and worsening famine.
Rap star Macklemore recently canceled a show in Dubai over the Emirates’ role in Sudan. It’s striking when a rap musician provides greater geopolitical and moral leadership than the president of the United States.
While Safaa is still a child, she does take her responsibilities very seriously. To earn money to buy food for the family, she leaves at 4:30 each morning to work in a teahouse in her Chad refugee camp, returning at about 9 each evening, seven days a week. She earns the equivalent of about 50 cents a day.
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Her 10-year-old brother, Musaab, works as well, taking whatever odd jobs he can find, and her 12-year-old sister, Maqa, fetches water, washes clothes, cooks and organizes the home. It’s lonely and overwhelming: Maqa cried for a time as we spoke, and at another time in our conversation tears tricked down Safaa’s cheek. But the girls consoled each other and never broke down at the same time.
Safaa tries to play the role of substitute mother, guiding and disciplining Maqa when she misbehaves. “Sometimes I beat her, and sometimes I advise her that this was wrong and you shouldn’t do it,” she explained. “Mostly, I advise.” She is a child raising children, struggling to do her best. When Maqa has nightmares or cries in frustration or grief at lost parents or friends, Safaa comforts her. “I hug her,” she said. “And I explain, ‘This is life. Don’t cry.’”
But this doesn’t have to be her life. It’s not inevitable that Sudanese endure massacres, mass rape and famine. May this exhausted teenager, hugging her sister and telling her not to cry, remind global leaders that they too can show some responsibility.
Nicholas Kristof is a New York Times columnist.
